Compassion. “TV reporters are not showing the Taliban’s humanity, says BBC presenter,” from the Daily Mail, August 25 (thanks to Anne Crockett):
A BBC presenter has attacked coverage of Afghanistan’s ongoing war, claiming TV reporters are not covering the ‘humanity of the Taliban’.
Lyse Doucet, a presenter and correspondent on BBC World News, was speaking at a discussion of TV reporting of the war in the country.
Doucet, who has been at the BBC since 1983, also spoke out against the nature of the reports on Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan.
The veteran correspondent and presenter, who played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, told the Edinburgh International Television Conference: ‘What’s lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans.
‘In the Prince Harry coverage for example, there were all these people out there but you never really saw them.
‘You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.’
Asked what was missing in British coverage, she added: ‘It may sound odd but the humanity of the Taliban, because the Taliban are a wide, very diverse group of people.
Like the Nazis! Wonderfully diverse folks, Adolf and the gang, doncha know!
‘Some of them would like to talk to the British Government. Some of them don’t want to be fighting British troops. Some of them would. This is the ideological Taliban.
‘We never have the ability or sometimes the desire to present this in a different way, so that people would be interested… it’s a regret.’…