By Estifanos Marko,
Here is this comical corporate media taking it over 26hours before it finally decides to write the biggest story at the Olympic Marathon where Silver Medalist, Feyisaa Lilesa show a sign of protest at the finish line.
Despite the fact that the BBC was televising the Olympic Marathon Live and knew exactly what that X-armed protest meant, it is certain that it had made a conscious decision to muffle it up.
The BBC commentator Brendon Rogers, who, as the official promoter of Ethiopian athletics, is personally very familiar with the athletes themselves let alone with Lelisa’s protest sign against brutal human right abuse in Ethiopia.
As soon as Lelisa raised his hands in “X” form above his head when crossing the finish line, the screen switched back to the studio and never did anyone in it say anything about Lelisa let alone his protest. Even all the UK print media as well as their online sites had written the stories quite extensively. The Independent, the Guardian, the Evening Standard and even the NY-Time as well as NBC had written quite extensively.
It’s no more strange to the public that the state affiliated media, the BBC, deciding to finally join the bandwagon than its initial decision to muffle up the protest. But it had already spread like wildfire through the most powerful social networking sites.
One thing the BBC might draw a lesson from this saga is that the BBC is a spent force with little or no credibility. Few take it seriously and even fewer depend on it as source of news. The most influential media was indeed the SNS (Social Networking) and the thousands of citizen journalists that pulled the string as far as the currency of the story was concerned. The BBC is only following the trend. Besides, the crowd funding for Lelisa Feyisaa wouldn’t have been possible without the SNS.
Once again, the BBC was irrelevant because until a couple hours ago this afternoon and more than 24 hours after the incident, the only news of significance that one could have found searching through the BBC’s own search engine on Feyisaa Lelisa was only his 2009 marathon victory at the Dublin Marathon.
Now that it seemed to dawn on the BBC that it ain’t as influential as it thought of itself, it finally decided to join the bandwagon so that they won’t look irrelevant as far as such a big story is concerned.
Better late than never, but again even after 26 hours behind in reporting it, the BBC can’t help trying to spin the story. The BBC might have felt it was helping relieve the pressure on their favourite murderous puppet regime in Ethiopia when it tried to spin the story by downplaying the cross-armed protest sign in a caption under the picture below as……..” “X” symbol is used by in protests against the Ethiopian government attempts to reallocate land”.
At least, for BBC’s standard in the usage of English language, even the English used in its caption was as terrible as their political motives. Perhaps the editor was so nervously busy juggles through words that could be best to use in order to spin the story that it totally forgot to pay attention to its grammar. Haha!!
The BBC has the reputation of changing their content quite quietly without many fanfare or apology. For that reason, it’s advisable to take a screenshot of the original “news” for the record before it inevitably decides to change it again in order to stay relevant and not exposed. One way or another, the technology is in everybody’s hands today that the BBC is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. It stays more irrelevant by the day, if not by the hour.
Last Olympics in London, it didn’t take the BBC half an hour to go on a full gas trumpeting on a story when the flop Weynay Ghebreselassie decided to go on a self defeating senseless propaganda campaign against his home country Eritrea on the BBC.
It was remembered the whole drama went topsy-turvy when Weynay, as a flag bearer on the opening day, went on a rampage against his own dignity, it also severely damaged the credibility of that of the BBC by indulging only to one side of the story and denying its viewers a fair and balanced story on its state media.
Whatever happened to Weynay now is history but right now, as far as the BBC and the establishment that it serves is concerned, what is happening to the minority TPLF regime in Ethiopia seems to be worrying it to death.
I feel sorry for those who pay the license fee that is financing such a lie-machine constantly doing a massive disservice to the public.
