by Georgina Mumford, spiked
The mainstream media are still demonising a man who was killed for his beliefs.
Mr Kirk built a huge and devoted following for his far-right views’, said the BBC’s North America editor Sarah Smith on Sunday. The statement came during the BBC’s coverage of Charlie Kirk’s memorial in Arizona, which was attended by tens of thousands of mourners and was addressed by US president Donald Trump.
Smith’s statement is nothing short of astonishing. It would be one thing for blue-haired keyboard warriors on Bluesky to be referring to dead conservatives as fascists. But it is quite another for the UK’s state broadcaster to toe that same line. The BBC pays Smith more than £200,000 a year to report impartially on American affairs. We would hope someone in her esteemed position might pause for thought before smearing a man who was killed for his beliefs.
The BBC isn’t alone in painting Kirk as ‘far right’. In the days following his murder, mainstream media rushed to portray him and his views as beyond the pale. The Guardian, like the BBC, described Kirk as ‘far right’, as well as a man who ‘stood for the darker themes of… US nativism’. The New York Times accused Kirk of leading a ‘hard-right youth movement’. It was also forced to make a correction after falsely attributing an anti-Semitic quote to him.