Opinion

Among all the coverage of this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, perhaps the biggest media furore was around the athlete Caster Semenya.

Caster Semenya is a South African runner who won the women’s 800 metres. The mainstream media is divided. Many reports have speculated on whether she is “really a woman” or questioned whether it is “fair” for her to compete alongside other women.

The victims of the mass shooting at Pulse were overwhelmingly young, LGBT+ and Latino.

That the assailant, Omar Mateen, claimed to support Isis in a phone call to the police has allowed politicians and the mainstream media to produce a narrative that scapegoats Muslims for this tragedy.

The performance of the radical left during the 2016 Scottish election is worthy of detailed consideration. RISE and Solidarity stood on all the regional lists, with Solidarity gaining an average 0.64 percent of the votes. RISE, which was given a great deal of positive media coverage, achieved only a 0.45 percent share of the vote.

Both sides in the official EU referendum debate were excelling themselves in their hideousness as Socialist Review went to press.

In late May, Vote Leave launched a racist poster with the headline “Turkey (population 76 million) is Joining the EU” and a picture of a British passport. The Stay campaign hit back with another dodgy dossier from the UK Treasury predicting a year-long recession if we leave — this from the geniuses who forecast 2.5 to 3 percent growth in the recession year of 2008.