Many people have expressed their dismay at the inadequate media coverage of last Saturday’s demonstration against the Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Gaza. While it is nice to know that some bloggers are doing a very good job of covering the event, it is the duty of news outlets, particularly the BBC, to cover such events properly. Once again the BBC has failed in its duty and so I have decided to complain. Here is the letter I wrote.
Dear BBC,
I wish to complain about the appalling coverage you gave to last Saturday's (August 5th) demonstration in London. You gave this huge demonstration with its unprecedented rally in Parliament Square very scant coverage. You quoted the police estimate of the numbers (20,000) as if the police was a reliable source. The police always revise down the numbers. True, you did also quote the Stop The War Coalition estimate (80,000 - 100,000) but in such a way as to imply that their figures were less reliable. You made no effort to come up with a figure for yourselves. What kind of journalism is that? Suspiciously, you did not show any aerial shots of the march that would have helped viewers get a better idea of the size of the protest.
Nor did you broadcast any of the speeches even though at least four of the speakers were MPs, three of them from the governing party. You interviewed only one of the speakers, but only about the news of the draft UN resolution, and that was after the demonstration against the backdrop of a now empty Parliament Square. You showed no reaction from the Government about this huge demonstration, and it really was huge as the many photographs show.
People do want an accurate report of the events of last Saturday and in order to find out what happened they have had to resort to the numerous blogs which gave this protest the coverage it deserved albeit with their own particular slants. The blog coverage includes photographs, video clips and quotes from the speakers. If people without access to the huge resources that the BBC has can do such a good job of reporting an event, why can't you? Even if you don't have the time on your news bulletins to fully cover the event, you still have an extensive website and the coverage on that was only marginally better than what you broadcast.
My criticism isn't just reserved for the BBC. None of the other major news outlets did justice to this protest and I shall be writing to some of them too. However, the BBC is funded uniquely by the obligatory license fee; therefore it has a special duty to report fully and fairly in as unbiased a way as possible. I think you have failed in that duty. And nor is it the first time your coverage of major protests has been unbalanced or just inept. The difference here is that this protest is about events that are happening in the world that we are seeing on our TV screens every day. In other words, it is a part of the current events that you are already covering and deserves more than the few minutes you allocated to it.
The scant coverage you and the other news outlets gave to this protest amounts to a media blackout. If that is the case then you should at least tell us that a media blackout has been imposed so that people know that they should find other methods to find out what is happening in our country. The fact that so many people turned up last Saturday without there having been any posters, or articles in the news (except for one in The Independent on the day of the protest) shows that many people are losing faith in news outlets such as yours and are relying on word-of-mouth and, of course the blogs and other internet sites. If I worked for the BBC, that would worry me.
I have listed below just a few of the blogs that have done the journalism that the BBC on this occasion has failed to do. The amount of hits that these blogs are getting reflect the interest there is about last Saturday's protest, and the comments I have been receiving over the report I posted on my blog on the event and the comments that I have read on other blog posts illustrate that there is a huge disappointment in the lack of media coverage.
I sincerely hope you do a better job of covering these protests in the future because there will be a lot more of them.
Yours truly
Davide Simonetti
http://nether-world.blogspot.com
Some of the blog coverage:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/08/at-least-100000-march-against-us.html
http://ernest.turro.cat/blog/2006/08/06/on-the-august-5th-demonstration/
http://www.septicisle.info/2006/08/uh-yeah-there-was-sort-of.html
http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2006/08/massive-protest-against-blair-media.html
http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/1271
http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/1272
http://nether-world.blogspot.com/2006/08/august-5-demonstration-in-london.html
If anyone else feels the urge to complain to the BBC over its rubbish coverage of the August 5 demonstration, this is the link to the complaints department. I’ll let you know what the BBC’s response is if I get a reply.
Tags: BBC, Media, London Demonstration, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel
2 Comments:
If you get a reply, I'm sure they'll have a good reason why, as they always do. Probably preparing yet another fucking reality show, gotta cut news budgets to keep the entertainment ratings up, don't you know?
It seems a common thing in eurpean medias, to ignore all the demos against the war in lebanon. french media barely mentioned the protest (saying thousands of people gathered in london, with hardly any pic) and the day of the qana massacre LCI (the equivalent of BBC in france) mentioned 600 persons gathering in Trocadero square while it was 6000, it must have been a typo!!!!!! what a silly biased media we have!
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