The tension between China and the U.K. increased last week after Beijing barred BBC World News from televisions across the country in response to British media regulator Ofcom’s decision earlier this month to revoke the license of the China Global Television Network (CGTN) to broadcast in Britain.
The BBC said it was “disappointed” by Beijing’s decision. The BBC noted Radio Television Hong Kong also said it would cease replaying BBC World Service programming. Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, said Beijing’s decision is “unacceptable” and curtails “media freedom.”
Jamie Angus, the director of BBC World Service Group, told CNN on Sunday that “China is taking its place on a very short list of countries alongside North Korea and Iran that explicitly and totally blocked BBC News coverage.”
Ned Price, a spokesman from the U.S. State Department, criticized the decision by China and said its government routinely “restricts outlets and platforms from operating freely” and continues to use the media to promote misinformation overseas.
Other Side
Different countries take different sides. This is the way China Daily reported the BBC ban this past Saturday:
“In BBC, doing China news is like writing novels or shooting films. For its producers and field reporters, facts do not matter while their pre-set opinions do reign their storylines.
To prop up their presumptions, they tend to give interviewees misleading questions, twist answers, and apply special video-editing or shooting techniques. None of those moves are qualified for producing facts-based news products per real journalistic standards.
Still, BBC refuses to apologize for producing fake news on China and insists on branding itself as unbiased. What a shame!
BBC’s rumor-mongering against China is a clear demonstration of both arrogance and ideological prejudice deeply rooted in the minds of some Western-centrists.
In their eyes, the Western world holds the monopoly on truth and is entitled to judge what is right and wrong in the world. It is not that those BBC reporters did not know what is truly happening in China, but that they felt utterly uncomfortable with those facts, so that they decided to remold them according to their imagination.”
TRENDPOST: Payback’s a bitch. Again, the BBC ban by China and Hong Kong follow Ofcom’s revoking of the CGTN license. We note this occurrence not only to exemplify the importance of research – to find more than one source of what happened, why, and when – but to emphasize the continuing strength of China and its unwillingness to submit to other powers.
