17th
Dear BBC…
Sent this to the Beeb. Not sure it adequately expresses my concerns or gives enough evidence for them, and I’m pretty sure it will be completely ignored but I’m putting it out there anyway. Let me know if anyone agrees/disagrees/cares:
I have been worried for a year or so now about the reporting on China by the BBC. In the interests of being unbiased, I understand that the BBC has an obligation to show both sides of the coin, and so presenting both positive and negative stories is, in theory, absolutely appropriate. However there is such an obvious structure to the way China stories are presented that the BBC’s bias towards wrongly portraying China in a resolutely negative way is all too apparent. Every positive story is followed by a negative. Straight away. Even if the negative is completely unrelated to the context of the piece. Even if the negative story has to be blown up in scale in order to eclipse the positive before it.
What’s more is your correspondants don’t seem to do much looking around. The article I’ve linked to below crowbars in a reference to a recent story about the release of the iPhone 4S in Beijing. Although this was news likely to have been spread on weibo and does involve hand-held internet devices, it doesn’t really have much of a baring on the main thrust of the story, which is about the increase in Weibo users. It seems to be there just to promote the fact that some people were unhappy enough to start a small scuffle somewhere in China. Nevermind that they were unhappy with Apple and not the Government. And nevermind that the vast majority of these people, who had indeed waited overnight for their iPhones, were in fact organised squads employed by scalpers, out to make sure they bought up the store’s stock of iPhones so that they could then resell them at a huge mark up. If your correspondent had spoken to any of the many ex-pats living in the area they would have told them as much. Even if the BBC had no direct evidence of this, it would have been nice to mention the rumour, as it might explain the reasons for Police prescence at the event (beyond the size of the crowd, which would have been easy to illustrate with a photo) and why some of the crowd were unruly.
Instead, by linking it in with a story featuring Government censorship, the BBC has used it to help maintain the presence of the words “uprising”, “riot”, and “unrest” in the social conscious around China.
I have heard recently that International news agencies remove correspondants from countries after 4-5 years just in case they become “too local”. On this evidence I would suggest your current correspondant is not anywhere near local enough - are they even learning the language? Or is it the editor back in England that is making sure the BBC bias is maintained? Either way I am disapointed.
ADDED LINKS: Beijinger Pre-Release Article and Post Release Article
