by British Broadcaster Realizes All India Coverage Requires Historical Caveat
The BBC faced an internal crisis this week when a recently published article about India somehow failed to mention British colonialism, the Raj, or Victoria’s jewel in the crown, leaving editors scrambling to determine whether the piece was legitimate journalism or represented a catastrophic editorial oversight.
“We have a strict policy that every BBC article about India must contain at least one reference to our two-hundred-year occupation,” explained fictional BBC Editorial Director Sir Reginald Worthington-Bottomley. “Otherwise, Indian readers might forget that we’re the reason their country looks the way it does, and British readers might forget that we used to own the place.”
The article, which focused on contemporary Indian business developments, made it through three rounds of editorial review without anyone inserting the mandatory paragraph about how the British built India’s railway system while strategically neglecting to mention they built it primarily to extract resources and suppress independence movements.
According to sources within the BBC, the oversight was discovered when a senior editor reading the piece experienced what witnesses described as “colonial nostalgia withdrawal” after finishing the article without encountering a single mention of the East India Company.
Dr. Priya Sharma, Professor of Post-Colonial Media Studies at Oxford, explained the BBC’s dilemma. “British news organizations face a constant tension between covering modern India as a rising global power and their institutional need to remind everyone that Britain was there first and did some really memorable things, both good and terrible but mostly terrible.”
The BBC quickly issued an internal memo mandating that all India-related content include what they’re calling “appropriate historical context,” though critics note this context tends to emphasize British engineering achievements while minimizing details about famines, massacres, and systematic economic exploitation.
Indian readers responded to the corrected article with a collective eye-roll, noting that the BBC’s compulsive need to mention colonialism in every India article is itself a form of colonialism, just in editorial form.
At press time, the BBC was considering a new policy requiring all India articles to begin with “The United Kingdom, which once ruled India…” regardless of relevance to the story.
SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8j4m45yx2o
SOURCE: Bohiney.com (Radhika Vaz)
