Wednesday, August 12, 2009

BBC, Where Are You?

The homepage on my computer is BBC News. It's been my homepage for many years because the depth of their international coverage is much greater than the American news sites which tend to be extremely domestic oriented, or when they do cover international news, they tend to only cover areas such as Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Much to my dismay, the BBC's coverage of the crisis in Honduras has been extremely biased in favor of Comandante Cowboy and his followers. They have tended to report on every small protest involving Zelayalistas and portray them as brave victims while ignoring the tens of thousands of peaceful pro-government supporters.

So it comes as a great surprise that BBC didn't have a report on yesterday's demonstrations showing the random attack and burning of a bus (with people on board scrambling to get off) and the burning of a restaurant as well as other random destruction of property. Well, actually, it wasn't a demonstration or protest; it was riot. And, to make matters worse, many of the rioters were reportedly paid to participate, so it wasn't out of conviction. They are kinda like football (soccer) hooligans.

So what happened to your reporting BBC? Did your reporter just forget to file his report for the day or was it his day off? Or maybe, just maybe, the Zelayalistas didn't appear as sympathetic as you wanted (or needed)? Maybe their burning and violence didn't serve as good propaganda or garner support for the cause? Mr. BBC editor, please feel free to leave your comments in my comment section.

1 comment:

Pete said...

Don Godo,

I totally agree. The BBC website is also my homepage as, although I live in Honduras and am married to a lovely Honduran woman, I am English and spent the first 50 years of my life in "Blighty".

I have been complaining to the BBC since June 28th about their biased and distorted coverage.

Primarily, they had no reporter in Honduras and used AP feeds (really unbiased, I think not!)

Then they situated a BBC reporter in Tegus and the coverage was a lot better - not so biased and more accurate.

Unfortunately, they then moved that reporter to Mexico City and didn't replace him - so we're back to the same old rubbish again (or nothing at all).

I used to think the BBC was the best news service in the world - after this, I'm afraid I can't trust it at all.