The journalists appear to have lost their enthusiasm for exposing police brutality, if their attitude toward Henry Nowak is any indication. As of June 1, left-wing cable (CNN, MSNBC) and broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS) networks have completely ignored the gruesome murder and alleged police abuse of White British teenager Henry Nowak.
MRC analysts looked through Nexis and SnapStream transcripts going back to December 4, 2025 for any mention of Nowak on any of the left-leaning cable or broadcast network. As of Monday, June 1, not a single word has been breathed about his plight.
On the evening of December 3, 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old British college student in Southampton, England was violently murdered while walking home. He was stabbed five times by 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa, the British-born son of Sikh Indian nationals.
When the police arrived on the scene they handcuffed Nowak, not Digwa, after Digwa lied to officers that Nowak had “racially abused” him. As Nowak was handcuffed and dragged by officers, he pleaded with them repeatedly for help, insisting he couldn’t breathe, and he’d been stabbed. One officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.” He died just minutes after being cuffed.
The case earned renewed attention in late May of 2026 thanks to widespread posts about Nowak story on X (formerly Twitter). Late on June 1, The Southampton Police released body cam footage of the arrest. The footage doesn’t do the officers any favors, to say the least.
The Southampton police arrested a White British teenager for being stabbed by a Sikh. It sounds hyperbolic, but those are the facts of the case.
So, where are all the journalists?
It almost doesn’t bear repeating that for the news media, the death of George Floyd during a police encounter back in 2020 was treated as one of the most important stories imaginable. For months on end, American audiences heard emotional diatribes about about the dangers of police brutality and supposed systemic racism in the police system.
None of those journalists have spared even a moment’s thought for Henry Nowak.
There are numerous reasons why, of course. But chief among them is Nowak’s ethnicity. White people, in the eyes of the news media, are only ever perpetrators of police brutality and racially-motivated killings, never the victims.
MRC’s Free Speech America division found that while the “Big Four” news apps (Apple, Google, MSN, and Yahoo) included a handful of news stories from UK news outlets on June 2, none of them mentioned Nowak or Digwa. In fact, of the 80 UK news articles that have appeared since December, 2025 on the Big Four apps, not a single one had anything to do with Nowak’s murder.
Just as the American news media are spitting on Nowak’s plight because of his race, the British media are protecting his killer due to his.
Contrast that whitewash with the standard media reaction whenever a non-White person is the victim of an interracial killing. Within hours, journalists are digging up everything they can about the perpetrator, in an effort to prove the attack was racially motivated. In this case, though, the corporate journalists are more likely to go digging into Nowak’s past for some excuse to dismiss him as a victim.
If the media cared enough even to acknowledge Nowak, there would likely be some CNN journalist writing an article at this very moment about some off-color comment he make online when he was in middle school.
Thanks to to the massive groundswell of interest on the right, Henry Nowak’s plight may yet receive some begrudging attention from the news media. But even if the story does abruptly start to look newsworthy, it’s likely to be relegated to a news brief on one or two of the broadcast networks’ evening newscasts this evening.
And on CNN and MS Now, if Nowak’s murder is ever mentioned at all, it will almost certainly be framed as, this dumb thing that a bunch of right-wing people are talking about online.
