One Day in Iraq

Omar at Iraq the Model is none too impressed with the Beeb and its One Day in Iraq feature:

Ten days ago I was contacted by someone called Sarah Brown from the BBC; she had explained to me their team’s desire to interview me via phone and e mail as part of a program they were producing. The program was named “One Day in Iraq” which I thought would really represent a day in Iraq.

So, after several e mails were exchanged to confirm a date and time for the interview, they asked me to do another interview for a side program about Iraqi blogs.

On the 7th of June I received a phone call from them and we started doing the interview. The line was bad so we had to try several times before we were able to get a good line.
I was asked about what was my day like and I told them the story of that day from the time I woke up at 7am till the moment I picked up the phone. As a matter of fact, my day wasn’t a special one; I took the bus to central Baghdad then changed buses to get to the clinic where I work at in a southern suburb of Baghdad then after doing the usual daily work at the clinic I went with 2 of my friends and Mohammed to have drinks and lunch in one of our favorite restaurants. […]

Obviously the BBC found my day too boring to be reported especially when it comes from an Iraqi in Baghdad so they chose to turn 180 degrees and report a comment from someone stationed 10,000 miles away from Baghdad to get the a good view about “One Day in Iraq”!

No offense to the bloggers who participated in the show as they have the right to say whatever they like and to speak to whomever they like but I feel very disappointed by what the involved BBC staff did.

Moreover, I sent the BBC person who contacted me an e mail at an earlier time asking them to send me the links that lead to the story where my interview was supposed to be found but guess what? I got no response from them at all and they didn’t even send a message to say “sorry but we couldn’t use your story and here is why”.

And this is so impolite especially after I was answering 4 or 5 e mails a day to them when they were preparing for their show.
Maybe they were expecting me to lie to them and make my day less boring and more appealing to them by talking about a car bomb or adding some whining to have my comments posted on their website but you know what? I don’t care because I told the truth which they apparently don’t like to hear and that’s their problem now.
I guess that I was too hopeful to have expected much from networks like the BBC that are so drowned in their bias.