The BBC’s “Opposing Obama” Series
Normally, all I have to do is so much as breathe the word Obama in a status update via some other social media medium and people start coming out of the woodwork to comment and wade in with their own thoughts. Personally I love it, which is why I try to lob a social grenade once in awhile just to get people talking and discussing. I keep a very wide variety of friends, love them all dearly and encourage free speech so long as it doesn’t turn profane or overtly childish with asinine name calling and the like. I freely admit that I do love a good, well-reasoned argument and being forced to think about how to best defend mine. In my opinion, it’s part of how we learn and grow our worldviews.
I expect nothing less here although there is far more material to respond to than normal. While I often get falsely charged with only getting my information from Fox News because of my generally conservative social and economic viewpoints, this is hardly the case. In fact, I was sitting in a class just this morning that addressed (in an entirely different context) the very issue of only getting news from one or two places, advocating that especially when it comes to world news, hearing the reporting of several global media outlets is a far better strategy for those really wishing to be informed about a topic worthy of being covered world wide. The same is true for national or even local news. Only by hearing multiple viewpoints and perspectives can you really try to glean out the points that make up an entire story, not just one side from one outlet controlled by a board with their own agenda and thus, slant.
That said, I submit the below article about Barack Obama from a foreign press body, London’s BBC World Service desk who created a documentary titled “Opposing Obama” by Gary Younge who has covered the US for the UK based Guardian for quite some time and is occasionally used by the BBC. Apparently, this audio documentary brought on a firestorm of comments and complaints and the BBC, as generally good journalists, additionally answered these criticisms earlier today with their “Over to you” program dedicated solely to responding to what people think of their reporting.
While I could not find an embed code to paste the latter portion directly to this post like I did for the audio documentary itself, I did include this link that will pop out a BBC iPlayer window in your browser so that you can hear it. The first 12 minutes are dedicated to addressing critiques on this series. I can certainly see why a the discussion board was a little more lively than normal, but if you listen to this entire report, make sure you listen to Gary Younge’s defense of why he reported the way he did. I will be most interested to hear how the second part of the series gets reported. Of course, then I’ll have to search out the key comments with other media outlets…
Give a listen, then let’s discuss. I have much to say about a few of the points. Some I was glad to hear someone actually say, some I was a little alarmed at (the mark of a good documentary, I say). Where possible when making arguments that address specific point mentioned in the documentary, try ro give the time that the comment you are taking issue with was made.
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