The BBC Has Fallen

A slow motion implosion.

If we’re going to spend the next five, ten, or 20 years investigating the radicalization of young men and women, we may as well also study the radicalization of the news media, because whatever happened to the BBC demands a thorough review.

For years now, the state-funded outlet has drifted further to the fringe left (“left” by U.K. standards; by U.S. standards, it’s Pravda with its pinkie out).

But last week the BBC outdid itself, publishing a feature that, through unrelenting emotional manipulation, tried to cast the Afghan men who sell their preadolescent daughters into slavery and child marriage as sympathetic characters, while portraying austerity-minded U.S. legislators as villains.

If that’s not a radicalized way of looking at the world — choosing, out of sincere reverence for the church of multiculturalism, to blame Western conservatives for the matter of child brides rather than those arranging the marriages for profit — I don’t know what is.

“Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices,” the report’s original headline read.

The story opens with local color, painting a familiar tableau of poverty and desperation. “My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row,” one Afghan man told the BBC. “My wife was crying, so were my children. . . . I live in fear that my children will die of hunger.” The report cites United Nations figures showing that three in four Afghans cannot meet their basic needs and that 4.7 million are one step from famine. The story then swings back to on-the-ground accounts, quoting a choked-up father: “I got a call saying my children hadn’t eaten for two days. I felt like I should kill myself.”

For more than 500 words, readers are immersed in anecdotes about fights over food, desperation, tears, threats of self-harm, pity, and grief, all clearly designed to generate sympathy for these Afghan fathers.

It’s only after all this — roughly a third of the way through the 2,000-plus-word article — that the authors finally address the headline’s shocking claim. Only now do we learn that the men the BBC has spent more than 500 words asking us to grieve with are, in objective terms, evil. We learn that these men are not just “selling children,” but specifically selling their preadolescent daughters as domestic slaves and child brides.

If you feel contempt for the BBC for stringing you along, just wait. It gets worse.

The report continues:

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children — seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making these unbearable choices.

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.”

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread.’ But what can I give? Where is the work?”

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

He hugs Rohila, kissing her as he cries. “It breaks my heart, but it’s the only way.”

The BBC then tries to soften the horror of what the reader has just absorbed — the complete commodification of female children by their own fathers — by chalking it up to a mere difference in cultures:

The choice to sell daughters over sons is because, culturally, sons are widely seen as future breadwinners. In Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, this is even more pronounced.

Additionally, there is a tradition in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage.

In the universe of evil euphemisms, saying “marital gift” in place for “cash for little girls” has got to be right up there with “gender-affirming care” instead of “mutilation of prepubescent bodies”

Still, there is more.

One subject, Saeed Ahmad, self-pityingly recounts how he hawked his five-year-old daughter because he couldn’t pay her medical bills (she had appendicitis and a cyst in her liver). The little girl is sold to a relative and expected to marry one of his sons when she turns ten. The BBC none-too-subtly emphasizes that the buyer is a relative, as if to reassure readers: “It’s not as if she was sold to a total stranger.”

In reality, the fact that the buyer is a relative makes it even more grotesque. On top of being the type of people who buy and sell children — relatives, at that — the men profiled in the report are evidently also the type who refuse to help family members during a time of famine and destitution. How are we supposed to feel reassured about the child’s purchase when the buyer chose to bid on her rather than help cover her medical costs?

The obvious conclusion this information forces the reader to draw — that these are bad men making evil choices — is likely why the story pivots suddenly to its “real” villain: the Trump administration, which cut as much as $500 million in aid to Afghanistan in 2025.

It’s only later in the report, after all that setup, all that emotional manipulation, and all that criticism of the White House, that the BBC half-heartedly and begrudgingly concedes that the Taliban also bear some responsibility for the suffering of the Afghan people.

What happened to the BBC?

The story of Afghan suffering deserves telling, but it requires uncompromising journalism. It requires the kind in which the BBC refuses to engage—either for fear of blaspheming “diversity” at home or for a fervent belief in the righteousness of multiethnic “inclusivity. A journalist unencumbered by a devotion to either would have included every voice in his reporting, not just the self-pitying Afghan fathers. And, boy, do we hear plenty from the fathers. We hear their thoughts; we read about their tears and their woes. We also hear a great deal from the BBC itself.

Yet, we hear nothing from the mothers. We hear nothing from the buyers. We certainly don’t hear anything from the tiny human beings who are being traded from man to man like cattle. Better journalists would have spoken not only with the fathers but with those who suffer the consequences of their choices. Better journalists would’ve also asked at least a few questions of the men who buy five-year-old girls, even if those people refused to comment.

There was a time when Englishmen such as General Charles Napier, William Sleeman, and Winston Churchill called evil by its name, with no thought of cowering behind the soft pillow of moral relativism or an all-consuming fetish for the ethnic. The English once possessed the will and moral clarity to force an end to barbaric foreign practices, such as sati, and to meet third-world thuggery with overwhelming force.

Now, British state-sponsored media cannot even bring itself to criticize the Afghan men who buy and sell preadolescent girls as slaves and brides.

The sun must set on everything, including an empire that at one time knew nothing but light. The BBC isn’t unique in its decay, it’s just a symptom of England’s overall rot.

It’s all profoundly sad. Then again, should we really be surprised that the organization that protected Jimmy Savile for so many years would also shed tears for the men who sell their children into bondage?

A version of this article appeared originally in National Review on May 24, 2026.