By Susan Ampers
- (General Dispatch) — Due to content violation and being biased, China banned Britain’s BBC World News, the international television news network of British Broadcasting Corporation, from airing across the Chinese territory.
- China condemned BBC for its report about the persecution of ethnic minority Uighurs and its report on Chinese coronavirus causing the global pandemic.
- Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other minorities who had survived the communist-run concentration camps communicated with BBC that women had been tortured, gang-raped and sometimes sexually battered with electric batons, electrocuting the women from the inside. Roughly two million people are imprisoned in Xinjiang’s concentration camp system, a decrease from around three million after reports the regime sold the prisoners into slave labor.
- Since this had damaged China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity, Chinese state-owned English language news channel CGTN declared that the BBC had been found to seriously violate broadcasting guidelines including the requirement that the news must truthful, fair and not harming China’s national interests.
- The National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) claimed that BBC World News had violated broadcasting regulations connected to impartiality.
- NRTA stated: “As the channel fails to meet the requirements to broadcast in China as an overseas channel, BBC World News is not allowed to continue its service within Chinese territory.”
- The NRTA will not accept the channel’s broadcast application for the new year and the punishment for the said broadcasting corporation took place immediately as the channel had gone blank quickly.
- “We are disappointed that the Chinese authorities have decided to take this course of action. The BBC is the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster and reports on stories from around the world fairly, impartially and without fear or favor.” BBC said in a statement.
- British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab named the move as an “unacceptable curtailing of media freedom.”
- Currently, BBC World News TV channel broadcasts globally in English and it is only restricted in China. The channel only appears in international hotels and some diplomatic compounds so that most Chinese people cannot view it.
Additional Info:
Breitbart: BBC World News Banned from Airing in China (breitbart.com)
BBC News: China bans BBC World News from broadcasting – BBC News
