Deaf to hate-filled speeches

The Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust has issued its final report regarding a collective complaint against the standard of news coverage during the red-shirt protests from March to May 2010. We hear that “The committee agreed that the appeal [and therefore presumably the entire complaint] did not raise a matter of substance”.

Several times a day we hear from Zeinab Badawi on BBC World that the BBC has some of the finest correspondents reporting from all over the world. Really? What a shame they didn’t manage to send one of them to Thailand during the red-shirt disturbances in April/May 2010. We may have been told then what was really going on. The senior correspondent they posted in Bangkok at the time pretended that they were unable (unwilling?) to provide translators so that the world would get a gist of the shocking content of all the hate speeches the red barons threw at their gullible audience throughout the eight-week occupation of Ratchaprasong intersection. Instead we were fed a diet of sanitised English versions of the red leaders’ media briefings, willingly soaked up by the BBC, telling us how peace-loving the whole protests were. Even without employing translators, the BBC must have been aware of facts shown on YouTube with English subtitles, for example under the title “Bangkok ablaze”, weblink: http:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vBDm-jA3N80. After listening to this, does anyone still believe that the complaint did not raise “a matter of substance”? I leave this to your readers’ judgement.

Horst Bullinger

Bangkok