Every Friday for more than two years, The Root has responded to reader emails and comments. Last week, it only replied to one.

In a powerful piece of writing, Michael Harriot responds to a teacher who feels that “the rhetoric has grown increasingly anti-white, especially from the black community.” The email is long, but here’s the gist:

I think you should be careful to make a distinction between racist white people and the rest like most people know the difference between a good black person and a bad black person.

Harriot’s response is almost certainly the best thing you’ll read today.

This is Maria, who you may recognise from the 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis. I met her at the weekend, and if you pop along to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh you can meet her too. She’s one of the attractions in the museum’s robots exhibition, which is great fun – there’s a Terminator! – and features some more practical, modern bots too. £10 for grown-ups, kids go free.

It’s International Women’s Day today. As someone who’s played for both teams, transitioning has been a major eye-opener: when you’re living life in the body of a straight, white, middle-class man you don’t realise how privileged you are.

Privilege doesn’t necessarily mean you have an easy life. But it means that your life is not made more difficult because of a particular group you belong to. For example, if you’re straight and cisgender you don’t have to deal with the abuse and discrimination LGBTQ people experience. If you’re white, you don’t encounter structural racism. And if you’re a man, you don’t experience the world in the same way women do.

IWD isn’t about picking on men. It’s about recognising that the world is still an unfair place. From reproductive rights to the justice system, in education and employment, in the public sphere and on social media, in healthcare and in the home, the world is a different and often worse place for many women. IWD is about raising awareness of that, and of inspiring people to change it.

Today, some men on the internet will be shouting “Yeah, but when is international men’s day?” The answer, of course, is 19 November. But the real answer is that every day is international men’s day.

The Guyliner’s Justin Myers has written a good piece about sex and relationship education for British GQ:

Trust me: children deal with far more puzzling concepts than the existence of same-sex couples, gender-queer people or trans men and women. Think of the mindblowing fact we’re a rock revolving around a huge ball of fire and that, before us, huge lizards – either with or without feathers depending on which textbook you’re using – roamed the muck below the very streets we live.

There’s a lovely, sad piece in The New Yorker by Jennifer Finney Boylan about the famous cartoon strip Peanuts.

My favorite strip was “Peanuts,” which, if I’d been paying attention, contained some lessons for me about the world that lay ahead. “Peanuts” was just one broken heart after another. Charlie Brown loves the Little Red Haired Girl, whom we never see. Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally is in love with Linus (“Isn’t he just the cutest thing?”), whose affections, in turn, are reserved for his blanket. Lucy is in love with Schroeder, but Schroeder is in love with Beethoven. Marcie is in love with Charlie Brown, and with Peppermint Patty, but Peppermint Patty loves only Charlie Brown. And so on.

Boylan is a superb writer, both in fiction and non-fiction: her warm, wise and witty memoir, She’s Not There, is one of the best books ever written about transitioning.

You’re probably familiar with the “if you’ve been affected by the issues raised in this programme…” warning at the end of gritty BBC dramas, which tells you about the Action Line information service. But it was conspicuous by its absence from last week’s episode of Call The Midwife, in which a character died from a backstreet abortion.

It’s an odd omission, because the Action Line that’s normally mentioned at the end of programmes is for exactly this kind of subject.

So why no announcement?

According to the BBC, abortion is a “contentious issue”. Allowing people to access information might “imply the BBC supported one side or another.”

It isn’t possible for the BBC Action Line to offer support for abortion and similarly contentious issues without referring people either to campaigning organisations which take a particular stance on an issue or to organisations which provide it.

Abortion has been legal in mainland Britain since the late 1960s and is provided by the NHS. There’s nothing remotely contentious about letting women know what evidence-based medical treatment is available to them any more than it’s contentious to tell people about chemotherapy or vaccinations.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Brook, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Family Planning Association (FPA), Marie Stopes UK, the Royal College of Midwives, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have written a letter to the BBC:

Abortion has been legal, in certain circumstances, in Great Britain for over 50 years, and 98% of terminations are funded by the NHS. Abortion is the most common gynaecological procedure in the UK, and one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Polling demonstrates that the vast majority of the public support a woman’s right to choose, including those with a religious belief. Abortion is not a “contentious issue”– it is a routine part of NHS-funded healthcare, provided by doctors, nurses, and midwives every day in hospitals and clinics across the country.

“The BBC Action Line response states that including links to information about abortion could imply the BBC “supported one side or another.” However, in barring information the BBC is in effect “supporting one side” by treating abortion as different to all the other medical procedures and conditions the BBC choses to include. This is highly stigmatising for the healthcare professionals we represent and the women we care for.

It’s a good example of the BBC getting its desire for “balance” terribly wrong. The abortion “debate” isn’t balanced; it’s a handful of extremists who want to deny legal, evidence-based healthcare to women and who are quite willing to see women suffer and even die because of those extremists’ religious beliefs. In the US, they bomb medical centres and attempt to kidnap and murder doctors.

Pandering to religious extremists isn’t cultural sensitivity, let alone balance. It’s censorship.

Update, 18 Feb: The BBC now says it was “mistaken” and has now amended its website to provide appropriate information.

What is journalism actually for? According to the late humorist Finley Peter Dunne:

Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.

More recently, the American Press Institute explained:

The purpose of journalism is… to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.

Journalism’s job is to tell the truth when other people try to obscure it. As George Orwell didn’t write (it’s widely attributed to him, but there’s no evidence that he ever wrote it):

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.

So what should we make of the Shropshire Star’s coverage of the MP, Daniel Kawczynski, and his online comments about the Marshall Plan?

If you aren’t familiar with the story, Kawczynski is an anti-EU backbencher. He posted to Twitter:

Britain helped to liberate half of Europe. She mortgaged herself up to eye balls in process. No Marshall Plan for us only for Germany.

That is untrue. The largest recipient of funds from the Marshall Plan was, er, Great Britain. We got 26% of the aid compared to 11% for Germany.

The internet was quick to correct the MP, but his local paper chose to describe the story as a “row” where “critics” were “questioning the MP’s apparent claim.” Here’s how it sold the story on Twitter.

Daniel Kawczynski hit back at critics saying: “Those affiliated to Europe in this country hate any challenge to their point of view.”

That’s not the story. This is the story:

Daniel Kawczynski lied.

The linked article, by the paper’s senior reporter, gave the MP the opportunity to double down on his nonsense. It has since been edited after a “row” where “critics” pointed out that the paper was missing a fairly obvious point: the MP lied. It wasn’t an opinion. It wasn’t a different interpretation. It was a bare-faced, flat-out, easily checkable lie. Rather than say that, the paper went with a diversionary quote from the lying liar who lied, presenting the patently untrue claim as if it were just one side of a debate.

This matters, as FT contributor David Allen Green explains.

Politics in the UK – and USA and no doubt elsewhere – is in a poor shape.

And one reason for this is the casual dishonesty of politicians and their supporters, and the unwillingness or inability of the media to check the falsehoods of politicians and their supporters.

…A politician lies, people shrug, the political caravan moves on.

The political lie serves its quick and cynical purpose, and is soon just forgotten.

This particular example is over Brexit, of course, but the issue is endemic. It’s in the columnists who don’t declare conflicts of interest when they write about particular groups and who repeatedly lie in the service of a personal agenda. It’s in the churnalism that regurgitates press releases, prizing “truthiness” over actual truth. It’s in the collapse of fact checking and the “clicks first, check later” culture that makes so much modern journalism worthless. It’s the repositioning of news media as a branch of showbusiness.

We’re regularly told of a crisis in journalism, the ongoing difficulty in getting people to pay for news. But the sad truth is that some news simply isn’t worth paying for. As I’ve written before, bullshit is not a precious and rare commodity.

Journalism’s job is to ask questions; as the viral quote puts it, to “look out the fucking window” when somebody claims its raining. Journalism that doesn’t check facts, that enables liars to double down on falsehoods, is journalism that fails its readers. Journalism that doesn’t do its job is journalism that isn’t worth saving.

As ever, the Daily Mash does a great job of skewering a news story: this time, the ridiculous outrage over a Gillette ad.

A RAZOR blade company has expressed surprise that its latest advert has pissed off a lot of dickheads.

In a stunning development, the company’s latest campaign – which calls on the #MeToo movement to tell men to be ‘the best they can be’ by not being dreadful – resulted in a totally unexpected backlash from spluttering idiots.

The most spluttering of the idiots are so-called men’s rights activists, who continually campaign for men’s right to suffer disproportionately from mental health issues and to die younger than women. They don’t quite put it that way, of course, but that’s ultimately what resisting change to ideas of masculinity means.

The point that’s being spectacularly missed in angry rants kicking back against the idea of toxic masculinity is that the concerns are about the “toxic” bit, not the “masculinity” bit. It’s like responding furiously to an article about acid rain by saying #notallrain and suggesting that snowflakes want to ban all precipitation.

Gaby Hinsliff, writing in the Guardian, sums it up very well:

Feminism has endlessly opened up horizons for girls, giving them permission to be anything they want to be. They are bombarded with messages about how it’s fine to be both smart and pretty, encouraged to visualise themselves in male-dominated careers and to push the boundaries of behaviour considered “acceptable” for women. That paves the way for girls who never fitted the pink princess stereotype to be far more comfortable in their skins.

But expectations of boys have remained more rigid, to the detriment both of those who don’t fit the macho stereotype and of those who will grow up to be the victims of insecure male rage. “Let boys be boys” is an excellent principle. But only if we recognise the full range of things boys are capable of being, when we let them.

I’m reading The Guilty Feminist just now. It’s a great example of pop-feminism publishing: affirming, angry in places and often very funny. The message is a simple one: don’t let other people limit who you are and who you can be.

The male equivalent of that isn’t men’s rights activists bleating about how liberals and feminists and LGBTQ people have ruined their world and demanding we stay in 1953 forever. It’s accepting that masculinity is just as broad a church as femininity. It’s making room for all kinds of men, and all kinds of expression. It’s about freeing men from suffocating stereotypes that tell them who they are and who they have to be, or have to pretend to be.

It’s about ensuring our sons and our brothers get to be the best possible versions of themselves.

A new study from Oxford University has been making waves today: it apparently demonstrates that despite much publicity over the dangers of screen use for children, screens are no more dangerous than eating potatoes.

Inevitably, that’s not what the study actually says. In one of the few sensible reports, Techcrunch explains:

the study does not conclude that technology has no negative or positive effect; such a broad conclusion would be untenable on its face. The data it rounds up are (as some experts point out with no ill will toward the paper) simply inadequate to the task and technology use is too variable to reduce to a single factor. Its conclusion is that studies so far have in fact been inconclusive and we need to go back to the drawing board.

“The nuanced picture provided by these results is in line with previous psychological and epidemiological research suggesting that the associations between digital screen-time and child outcomes are not as simple as many might think,” the researchers write.

The confusion is partly due to the university overselling the study, and largely due to crap reporting by people who just regurgitate the press release instead of actually reading the report. It’s quite impressive to see “study shows that knee-jerk articles about screens are based on shit science” reported as “screens are safe, says science!”