At exactly 12 am on Friday, the first day of the Year of the Ox on the Chinese lunar calendar, the National Radio and Television Administration announced on its official website BBC World News was barred from airing in China.
It also said that any application from BBC for renewing its license will not be accepted for one year.
Good penalty. Browsing BBC's records for the past year shows its "reports" about China are full of lies based on ideological biases.
On July 17, the BBC program Newsnightquoted a Uygur female as saying she was "forced to be sterilized" in an education and training center in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Later, it was found that the female never entered any education and training center; her other tales also were proved wrong by her relatives.
On Dec 14, the BBC released a video about "forced labor" in Xinjiang. Yet China Daily reporters visited the factory where the BBC claimed this was happening and later, it was found to be a total lie. When asked why she came to work in the factory, a female worker said, "We come because we want to come. My husband is ill and so is my mother-in-law, so I work here to make money."
The BBC has continued lying into this year. On Jan 19, it released another video, The Road Back to Wuhan. They made mistakes everywhere in this video. They not only habitually missed placing Taiwan and part of the Tibet autonomous region on the Chinese map, but also marked Central China's Hubei province in the wrong place on it.
Anybody asking a Grade 5 pupil in China will get the correct answer, not this mistake.
More importantly, the BBC published a video clip claiming to show police violence against people. However, in the video there were clear signs, shown in both Chinese and English, that what was being shown was an anti-terrorism exercise.
In one word, the BBC not only lacks professionalism in its reports about China, but also lacks the most basic ethics in journalism. These deeds won't be tolerated in any modern country with rule of law, and the BBC is making itself a political tool to badmouth China and not behaving as a media outlet.
The BBC has aroused anger even in its own homeland. According to a report from the UK-based Daily Express, in a poll of 1,700 people by Redfield &Wilton Strategies, 47 percent said the BBC had failed to be impartial in its news coverage in recent years, while fewer than 28 percent thought it had succeeded.
About 33 percent agreed with the statement, "The BBC is not impartial and balanced, and there is need for another news channel to offer a different perspective."
That report carries the headline, "BBC failures". The BBC should learn a lesson from its failure, not only from that in China, but also from that of the world.
