Guy Down The Street

18 months after the Mumbai seige, it is time to review how badly 2 news media reported it.

• BBC: Mumbai attacks will be go down in history as one of the worst reporting achievements of Biased Broadcasting Corporation.  It lead to some unbelievably crass reporting by BBC, where in it chose to report the terrorists as gunmen, and chose to entirely deny the fact that the Jewish center had been chosen by design.  Starting from the very first report, it chose to represent India as a country in general chaos with a “history of unrest”, which should somehow justify the attacks there, so that the rest of us living in the “civilized west” can go on with our lives undeterred by this “local Indian problem”, which at least as BBC chose to believe, is not related to “terrorism”.  British parliamentarian Stephen Pound referred to the BBC’s whitewashing of the terror attacks as “the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone.”
• New York Times: As the Wall Street Journal puts it:

“Meanwhile — perhaps even more disgracefully — a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: ‘It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.’  Has the New York Times learned anything since the Holocaust, when, even after the war ended in the spring of 1945, the paper infamously refused to report that the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and so on killed in the camps had been Jews, and killed as Jews?”