Thursday, March 31, 2005
Zoe’s got the blues again…
POOR Zoe Salmon can’t win. First she gets accused of using loyalist symbols on children’s TV show ‘Blue Peter’, now she’s at the centre of a discrimination controversy because she’s someone “of a Celtic origin”!
Retired teacher Dorian Wood has complained to the Commission for Racial Equality that the BBC was guilty of racial discrimination because it advertised for a presenter (although Blue Peter wasn’t mentioned in the advertising) only in Scottish and Northern Ireland newspapers.
“They specifically set out to recruit from Ulster and Scotland to find people of a Celtic origin, and in my view, that amounts ot racial discrimination.
“Somebody clearly said they wanted someone with an Irish or Scottish accent. What about the other people with regional and rural accents?
“I am irritated by the hypocrisy of the BBC because they overtly state their equal opportunities credentials, yet they clearly have a covert ethnic and cultural agenda for the programme.”
The BBC said it advertised in the nationally-distributed magazine ‘The Stage’. A spokesman for the BBC rejected claims of racial discrimination and said the recruitment search was the “widest ever undertaken by Children’s BBC”.
Here’s how you reacted to the previous Salmon controversy.
