BBC Blurs Out Kenyan Social Media Star’s Cleavage in Documentary

The British Broadcasting Corporation is defending a seemingly bizarre censorship decision in which t chose to blur out the cleavage of an otherwise fully clothed interview subject in a new documentary about social media personalities, according to a report by The Independent newspaper.  The documentary entitled Fake Me: Living for Likes aired on BBC Africa and featured interviews with “Glamor Pam,” a social media star from Nairobi, Kenya, as she instructs a young female protege in the finer points of succeeding as an Instagram influencer. During the segment, Glamor Pam wears a somewhat low-cut bright orange dress—and that’s what caused the problem. “BBC producers decided that it might offend audiences in some conservative African countries as it exposed too much flesh, so they decided to blur out her chest,” The Independent reported. The blurring effect, seen above, occurs every time that the woman faces the camera. According to a report by The Guardian, producers attempted to get around the cleavage issue by zooming in tight on Glamor Pam’s face, avoiding her chest altogether, but “in some shots, particularly the wide shots, we were unable to do this and so had to blur,” the film’s producer explained to colleagues, according to the Guardian investigation. The documentary, part of a BBC series titled The She Word, aired in several African countries including Kenya, Nigeria and Malawi, but some of those countries maintain struct censorship rules, which the BBC said was the reason for the cleavage censorship. But critics of the move were unimpressed with the publicly-owned broadcaster’s explanation, with Guardian columnist Chitra Ramaswamyi  noting that Glamor Pam “is interviewed by another woman, whose cleavage is uncensored, presumably because her breasts are smaller and her top less low-cut,” causing Ramaswamyi to wonder, “Is this how the logic goes? Cleavage needs to be above a certain cup size to commit an offense?” “What does this censorship achieve? It invites you to compare cleavages, to look at breasts as though they exist independently. It makes you objectify women’s bodies,” the columnist concluded. “But neither the cleavage nor the woman baring it is offensive. What is deeply offensive is some media outlets censoring breasts while hate speech repeatedly slips through the net.” Photo by BBC Screen Capture