Appalling BBC coverage of TUC protest
I was appalled yesterday by the TV coverage of the TUC demonstration in London against government cuts. Whilst up to 500,000 people from all over the UK came to voice their opposition to government cutbacks, the BBC chose instead to concentrate its BBC 24 hour news channel to events taking place in Trafalgar Square between a few hundred protesters and riot police.
Viewers were treated to continuous reporting from reports inside the square, interspersed with phone interviews with protesters or journalists inside the square. The anchor woman was bending over backwards to get the interviewees to agree that the demonstration had been "hijacked" by criminal elements, even though the square itself was quiet and with the police in total control.
Video clips of events earlier in the day were broadcast continuously between 11pm and 1am. These clips were used by the BBC to make it look like the violent events were much more serious than they really were. A few burning rubbish bins, does not in my mind equate with full blown anarchy and breakdown of law and order. In actual fact, it was purely a symbolic burning yet the BBC chose to re-show such clips almost continuously and it wasn't made clear to the viewer that these events (i.e. the burning of rubbish bins) had already stopped severl hours previously.
The BBC in more than one and a half hours of non-stop coveage of these events, did not focus on the far more serious events of the day - the 500,000 people marching from all over the country against government policy - and this was a travesty.
The BBC was trying to portray the events of a few hundred anarchists as far more important that the actions of 500,000 demonstrators. The BBC should be ashamed of itself.