Posted on June 23, 2008 - by Venik

BBC’s Obsession with Zimbabwe

For the past several months almost every edition of the daily BBC World News opened with a lengthy report on the situation in Zimbabwe. It is really amazing how BBC manages to fill nearly ten minutes of its broadcast with information about a country where it doesn’t have a single journalist.

BBC’s questionable journalistic standards led to the expulsion of its staff from Zimbabwe and so now BBC reporters are farting thunderbolts in Harare’s general direction all the way from Johannesburg nearly 1200 kilometers away. What kind of “scoop” on Zimbabwe’s internal politics can you get sitting in South Africa? Exactly.

Simply put, every Zimbabwe report that BBC produces (from Johannesburg) on a daily basis boils down to two simple points: 1) Mugabe is bad; 2) the other guy is good. BBC’s “Zimbabwe’s reporting” is nothing more than a crude attempt to meddle in the country’s election process. I guess that’s why BBC got kicked out of there.

Every week BBC is recycling the same footage of the “victims” of Mugabe’s supporters. Usually its the same video of a guy with many small circular wounds on his back that look a lot like old, poorly-treated pox nodules. Since 1998, according to the WHO,  there have been more than fifty outbreaks of pox in Zimbabwe, so this kind of skin condition is probably not unusual.

And of course every time BBC shows the poor guy’s back, there is talk of some hundreds of dead, thousands of wounded, tens of thousands of displaced and some other thousands of something. Where BBC gets these numbers must be a trade secret because no sources of this information are ever mentioned and no other news agencies – including those with journalists actually in Zimbabwe – are reporting similar numbers.

This whole feeding frenzy around Zimbabwe is reminiscent of the months of active BBC reporting that culminated in the 1999 NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. The same song and dance about thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of displaced. Over and over again the BBC recycled the same dubious video footage of poor Albanian “refugees” driving Benzes and “mass graves” that looked more like building construction sites; the same interviews where every “refugee” seems to speak excellent English and repeats the same story nearly word-for-word. This almost makes you wonder if there is a reason why BBC World News is financed exclusively by the Foreign Office.

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