Tuesday 6th May.
Today I am listening to the BBC trying to make the best of not knowing a lot about what is going on in the tempest-hit part of Burma.
Like the insistent reporting of Zimbabwe from Johannesburg (‘because; as you know BBC is not allowed into Zimbabwe’) and even worse during and after the Kenya elections where the reporter was actually (we were led to believe) in Nairobi, but appeared to know nothing at all about what everyone else was frantically texting around the country, this is yet another example of the smug self-satisfaction and inverted pride at having been banned from Burma triumphing over the need to get real news.
Just as from Nairobi BBC floundered while we all in the region received detailed texts and blogs from friends about what was going on and Al Jazeera had a live reporter reporting directly from the clash sites, the BBC seems obsessed (as so often) by body counts and the assumed incompetence of the authorities it doesn’t like. Often when we do have something reasonable from a reporter his or her words are cut off in mid-sentence (doesn’t anyone know we can tell from the intonation that there was more to be said. (Often followed by the injunction to read more on the website … in my car? In bed? In the shower? In the refugee camps and villages without electricity where I work and many live?
I have just listened, in one top of the hour bulletin to (shock, horror!) the figure for the dead being revised up from 10,000 to 15,000! Doesn’t anyone realise that these round figures mean absolutely nothing? That a lot of other things go on besides dying in a disaster?
Well, maybe: the reporter (in Bangkok) interviewed a remarkably lucid American tourist who said, yes, what I could see in Rangoon as I walked around was quite bad but the people rallied around. It took the reporter only three sentences to finally get out the question: did you see any dead bodies? Well, no, actually, but I did see ordinary people coping with the mess.
Then there is the loss of the sense of time and date to conceal a lack of information. The tourist said he saw people reading newspapers which had a weather diagram showing a storm coming. If this was before then it showed that there was awareness of what might be coming (and then why didn’t ‘the world’ know about it?).
If it was after, this means at least that newspapers were being produced. He then made his way to the airport, but disappointingly didn’t see any bodies? (I listen on steam radio, my TV isn’t working. maybe on TV there were maps, but on the radio the whole of Burma, then later South Burma was mushily merged into one – hence the BBC’s surprise that the referendum would go ahead in untouched parts of the country.
It took all morning before I discovered it was an area of islands, bays and swamps that was affected.
Then the UNICEF man interviewed in New York said that UNICEF had five teams out … shortly after a snippet on whether the international community could get into the country. This discombobulated your correspondent … it took him some time to realise that these were Burmese, not foreigners, in the teams.
Oh, and the famed ‘outside world’. I admired one expert you interviewed who had just said that China and India were helping out and the correspondent said something like, but what about the outside world … She sharply reminded us that India and China make up a third of the world.
As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, the waffle continues. Worse, second hand and clearly biased opinion is being reported. A Burmese in Bangkok has had contact with his family in Rangoon (presumably by some means unavailable to the BBC) who conveniently remarked that the troops who had been everywhere when it was a matter of monks being beaten up, were nowhere to be seen. It may well be true, but it is just a little too convenient that this was what was said.
Meanwhile, all day we seem to have been hearing about girls learning golf in Nairobi. Not just girls, sorry, but girls from Nairobi’s convenient slum (mispronounced Kibiiira or kaibeera all day though it is pronounced correctly in the recording), the one you can get to just a short drive from the studios. Actually we have a clue to that, since the interview is being conducted at Nairobi race Course where only the elite ever go. So what is your correspondent actually doing there?
Oh and I forgot the important news also repeated all day that American scientists believe that tropical insects will fare badly with global warming. (Unless they adapt). Well, a lot of us welcome that news, since we spend a lot of time trying to eradicate the pests. Still ‘whimsical science item, on a serious issue’ box duly ticked, I suppose, though I couldn’t actually detect that it was said tongue in cheek.
Still, it reminds me of a CNN weather correspondent as we suffered from a drought in East Africa, sorrowfully announcing that regrettably there would unfortunately be a lot of rain in our area,. Or when CNN just after the Nairobi embassy bombing solemnly asking the only white person they could get hold of on the phone whether Nairobi had any hospitals, while we stood horror struck watching the usually reviled taxi boys shuttling the injured to the main hospitals!
Keep it up! Try collecting a few more phone numbers, cultivate the art of telling listeners on the radio what the geography of the place is like. After all, sometimes we know the place, or may have a loved one in the area. Try using correspondents and interviewers who have a little knowledge and can assume that things might just be different from what you expect.
Learn a little UN and NGO speak so you can tell when they are waffling and above all stop the obsession with body counts and try to pronounce the words Is there any good news in this disaster? Are there any real facts?
Then you try: We now nothing for the moment and we will not speculate.
Come on, it’s not too hard!
Barry Sesnan
Entebbe
