Thursday, September 15, 2005
Bah Humbug!
It is a very good week for news about Afghanistan. Because of the parliamentary elections on Sunday, agencies like IWPR and HRW who regularly report on Afghanistan are pulling out all the stops, and the others which only give fleeting attention to Afghanistan are drawing their focus closer, even with all the excitement of Hurricanes and the UN summit and elections in Japan and Germany to draw their attention away. Even the egregiously shallow gaze of the BBC World TV, to which all expats are inescapable informational martyrs, has flitted and fluttered round the country a little, with its ‘Day in Afghanistan’ yesterday. What I saw of the coverage was pretty terrible.
Thus we were promised by someone called Jeremy Cook, or something like that, that he would ‘track Afghanistan’s progress’ by ‘visiting some of the remotest areas of the country.’ As my Young Bride pointed out, it is not normally the strategy for tracking a countries progress to purposely seek out those areas which have been most cut off from progress. But dirt sells, I guess. It’s a patronising attitude though. You cannot imagine BBC World reporting from Japan and coming up with
‘Here I am in deepest rural Hokkaido, and from what we see around me, the technological revolution in Japan has not really happened – many of the houses around me do not even have central heating. In fact we can see that Japan has a long way to go to catch up with the sophistication of cities like London or New York.’
But somehow with Afghanistan they get away with this.
The bit I did see was also very bad journalism. That BBC anchorwoman with the weird Newfoundland accent was talking to the Governor of Parwan province, and for some reason they had decided to walk along a dusty street, an activity that seemed to be taking up all the attention of the journalist who was not listening to what the governor was saying (not particularly surprising as he was not very interesting – just making a list of the things that he needed – money for hospitals, roads, schools and all the rest of it). Instead she was gazing anxiously off camera in the direction she was walking. Was she afraid of something? Was she planning on doing something when she reached her unknown destination? Meanwhile the Governor rabbitted on without being noticeably interviewed. Eventually they reached the end of their walk… and the climax of the interview was to reach a shop, where it was pointed out that there was no electricity, but the shop had to use a generator.
Bah humbug!
Thus we were promised by someone called Jeremy Cook, or something like that, that he would ‘track Afghanistan’s progress’ by ‘visiting some of the remotest areas of the country.’ As my Young Bride pointed out, it is not normally the strategy for tracking a countries progress to purposely seek out those areas which have been most cut off from progress. But dirt sells, I guess. It’s a patronising attitude though. You cannot imagine BBC World reporting from Japan and coming up with
‘Here I am in deepest rural Hokkaido, and from what we see around me, the technological revolution in Japan has not really happened – many of the houses around me do not even have central heating. In fact we can see that Japan has a long way to go to catch up with the sophistication of cities like London or New York.’
But somehow with Afghanistan they get away with this.
The bit I did see was also very bad journalism. That BBC anchorwoman with the weird Newfoundland accent was talking to the Governor of Parwan province, and for some reason they had decided to walk along a dusty street, an activity that seemed to be taking up all the attention of the journalist who was not listening to what the governor was saying (not particularly surprising as he was not very interesting – just making a list of the things that he needed – money for hospitals, roads, schools and all the rest of it). Instead she was gazing anxiously off camera in the direction she was walking. Was she afraid of something? Was she planning on doing something when she reached her unknown destination? Meanwhile the Governor rabbitted on without being noticeably interviewed. Eventually they reached the end of their walk… and the climax of the interview was to reach a shop, where it was pointed out that there was no electricity, but the shop had to use a generator.
Bah humbug!
# posted by Ed @ 7:06 pm 
