BBC Current Affairs Coverage of the 1981 Hunger Strike

Abstract

This chapter examines, with extensive quotation from BBC Current Affairs programmes, the statement by Liz Curtis, in her book Ireland: The Propaganda War, that the media ‘treated the Hunger Strike as if it had been concocted out of thin air by the IRA: as if there was no real feeling behind either the prisoners’ action or the support given them by the nationalist community’; and that the media’s analysis was ‘based not on an examination of actual developments, but rather conditioned by government policy’.¹ It suggests that — as far as BBC current affairs programmes are concerned — this criticism is both inaccurate and misleading. It also, incidentally, shows how the BBC resisted strong right-wing pressures which started from the assumption that it was the BBC’s job to help the Government defeat the PIRA, and that any statement of the reasons for the widespread support for the hunger strike or any visible demonstration of such support, let alone any statements from members of Sinn Féin, was wrong.