If there's one issue foreign media like to report about the Philippines, it is abject poverty. We're newsworthy only if it's about poverty. Just saw a short feature on BBC showing poor people frying chicken found in garbage dumps! I mean these British reporters come here with preconceived notions about the country and scour around depressed areas for a couple of days to take videos and pictures that would essentially confirm their biased assessment of the social conditions here-- the same conclusions they have already convinced themselves from the beginning-- making it appear as if we live in the stone age and climb trees for food.
Why single us out? Go to India, Africa, even the US and the Queen's own freaking backyard, and you'd find similar conditions. Poverty is a global condition, not just the Philippines'. OK some people forage food from garbage, and BBC reporters can take pictures and videos of them, especially if they wait long enough and do a stakeout in squalid areas and garbage dumps, much like the Nat Geo photographers hoping to get good shots of a rare Siberian tiger in the wild. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Hello, we don't do that.
Perhaps the BBC ran short of newsworthy features to air, so it trained its sights on the Philippines to do a report on "recycling," as in recycling food found in garbage dumps. I'm pretty sure it's going to shelve this "material" for future "recycling" when they run short of features again, and maybe transfer the locale to some African or Caribbean country. That's the kind of journalism BBC engages in. Pathetic.
Why single us out? Go to India, Africa, even the US and the Queen's own freaking backyard, and you'd find similar conditions. Poverty is a global condition, not just the Philippines'. OK some people forage food from garbage, and BBC reporters can take pictures and videos of them, especially if they wait long enough and do a stakeout in squalid areas and garbage dumps, much like the Nat Geo photographers hoping to get good shots of a rare Siberian tiger in the wild. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Hello, we don't do that.
Perhaps the BBC ran short of newsworthy features to air, so it trained its sights on the Philippines to do a report on "recycling," as in recycling food found in garbage dumps. I'm pretty sure it's going to shelve this "material" for future "recycling" when they run short of features again, and maybe transfer the locale to some African or Caribbean country. That's the kind of journalism BBC engages in. Pathetic.
I remember a Filipina newscaster in Bloomberg many years ago who was asked by her colleagues if her family back home were OK, because of reports about a huge garbage pile in Payatas that caved in and buried some people. Amazing. That's what happens when news media get too irresponsible by sensationalizing poverty.
To the BBC, OK we're poor, now get over it.
1 comment:
Great post! Confirms what i think of the BBC exactly! It has now come to a stage where the first images of the Philippines conjured up by a westerner is almost always going to be those of squatters and abject poverty (believe me, I live in the UK and have to deal with overturning these negative assumptions all the time). There is hardly anyone aware that the poverty rate in the Philippines has nearly halved in the last 10 years to over 25% in 2003, and many western news agencies (The UK's BBC is particularly guilty of this) still use the outdated estimates of more than 40% living below the poverty line (which were released just AFTER the Marcos era.. do they stop to wonder how many years have past since then?). The fact that the Philippines had been termed a Newly Industriasing Country (NIC), along with Malaysia, China, India and Turkey, is always unreported by foreign news agencies. Instead they consider the country to be in the same league as Afghanistan, Zimbabwe or Congo DRC, suffering from high mortality rates, 0% foreign investment and no social mobility whatsoever, which is far from the truth for the Philippines! Developing country or not, this gross misrepresentation of facts and cropping of statistics is simply callous in my opinion.
Unfortunately, it seems as if the BBC has already done the damage it sought out to do to the Philippines: with a highly negative image, there is less chance of tourism levels rising far enough to help the economy, as its doing in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Even now Filipinos tend to now believe foreign sources like the BBC due to its "worldwide status", instead of seeing the slow but sure changes for the better happening in the country for themselves. Plus the reasons for the OFW phenomenon would almost always be linked to the images shown on their reports, even if the actual situation of most OFWs families at home doesn't resemble those of the poorest in the country.
All that can happen now is for the Philippines to shut the negative-blowholes of the BBC up by continuing on its economic progress. Steadily, as Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia had done in the 90s, the country will indeed reach a higher developed status in our lifetimes, as its already moving in that direction.
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