Great thread. Some key points for me:
I'm commenting on the way the media worked very hard to create that link and therefore push down the issue, in much the same way they did with the documentaries referenced by OP. It all acts to muddy the waters and make people not want to look too closely.
If you read one article about Asian grooming gangs and ten articles about how the moral panic around Asian grooming gangs is problematic, with a side helping of several stories about rape gang liars...
"It's hard work, important, and we always need to keep our wits about us."
my experience is that each time a lot of people put sorting wheat from chaff in the "too hard" box. A different lot of people effectively say, "Ooh, this one works for me, I could join the exploiters' gravy train in this round."
I haven't followed the Asian grooming/rape gangs story closely enough over the years to have an opinion on coverage but what I'm seeing here is something that I only became aware of recently: if you implicitly trust the BBC and Guardian (which I did for many years, as do the majority of my family now) to give you the news, you'll end up with a skewed view of what happened, while feeling that you were informed. I'm basing this purely on my experience of how they have both covered the current medical scandal related to gender identity. Every now and again, both the BBC and Guardian will produce a great/adequate piece of journalism that cuts through to the detail. They'll be able to point back to these in years to come, to highlight their "balance". Almost more importantly, so will their supporters. This cloak of protection from supporters means they are unlikely to be held accountable for biased reporting.
On this thread, I'm seeing Perking and others saying pretty much the same thing but from different viewpoints.
What I worry about more is that my Guardian/BBC reading family (I mean fully extended family... uncles, aunties, cousins as well as my Dad and brother) and closest friends are representative of many other decent left/liberal people in society. I don't think any of them would ever want to believe that they could be let down by obfuscating, deflecting journalism on difficult subjects. I don't think any of them will assume I've gone "far right" - I'd like to hope they know me too well for that - but I reckon they'd all think me a bit of a mad conspiracy theorist if I cling on to the idea that we're being gaslit by the media on important subjects. I guess the BBC's involvement in the Savile scandal leaves a small possibility that they might not. I love my family and friends dearly but I want to thank the wonderful posters of MN for helping me prise my eyes open to other media, realise that I wasn't deflecting to the right by finding some Daily Mail articles to be very well written and learning how to feel more comfortable navigating difficult subjects. More importantly on the theme of this thread, for realising that there can be awful bias in my "trusted" sources.
It's so frustrating watching the Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages of this world getting to "own" the "sensible" narrative. Thank goodness for the presence of liberal voices like JKR. In the years to come, I think many people are going to wonder why they thought she was so "evil" and "unfair". Sadly, I don't think many of these same people will wonder too hard on that point - we'll no doubt see the same patterns repeating again and again.
Lastly, on the theme of the gangs themselves, I think many decent, everyday people find it far too emotionally painful to contemplate what has been happening at scale in the UK to these vulnerable girls, especially so when combined with the cultural/religious/racial aspect of it. JKR was spot on to say that they are rape gangs, not grooming gangs. If we focus on protecting ourselves from the difficult truth, we're more susceptible to being gaslit by this kind of media coverage.
Edited for typos