BBC Fires Danny Baker Over Racist Royal Baby Tweet
LONDON — A BBC radio personality was fired on Thursday after tweeting an image of a couple holding hands with a suited chimpanzee alongside the caption: “Royal Baby leaves hospital.”
Mr. Baker deleted his tweet within hours, but it circulated widely online and drew outrage for its racist imagery. British social media users called for the BBC to fire him. The newest addition to the British royal family — Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor — is also the monarchy’s first multiracial baby in recent history. He is half-American through his mother, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and some of his ancestors were born into slavery.
Earlier, Mr. Baker had attempted an apology, tweeting first: “Sorry my gag pic of the little fella in the posh outfit has whipped some up. Never occurred to me because, well, mind not diseased,” and then: “Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier. Was supposed to be joke about royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted.”
Charlene White, a newscaster for Britain’s ITV network:
“To post a pic picturing a 3-day-old baby of mixed heritage as a monkey, then claim it was a joke?” she wrote in tweet. “That’s old-school prejudice and racism at its peak. It’s unacceptable.”
CNN also faced criticism earlier this week for a publishing a piece touching on racial issues and stereotypes surrounding Archie’s birth that included the subhead, “How black will the royal baby be?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/world/europe/danny-baker-tweet-royal-baby.html
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