Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Hotel Rwanda, PBS and BBC's New Killing Fields in Darfur

American blogger Bill, aka Black River Eagle, writes a great piece highlighting Jim Moore's post re PBS Frontline World Show.

For further reading on the BBC documentary that Bill also writes about, see my post at Passion of the Present titled "The New Killing Fields in Darfur."

Also, please note Jim's review of Hotel Rwanda, a must-see film experience, and list of cinemas showing Hotel Rwanda, effective January 9, 2005 at 23 cities in the US and Canada. I must check if the film is available on DVD so I can view it on my PowerBook.

3 comments:

BRE said...

Thanks for the compliment, Ingrid. I'll make sure that I update my posting to include that very good article you wrote on the BBC Panorama feature "The New Killing Fields". I see that you are really gettin' the word out on various views and news re: Sudan and Darfur this week. Good job.

The German media moguls (it used to be the State) who are in charge of the cable TV programming and distribution for the majority of the country have recently decided to "cutback" BBC World TV airtime by about 5 hours a day, right in the middle of the evening prime time viewing slot. It has been replaced with a disgusting "Travel Shop" program hawking cheap beach holidays to "faraway exotic locations" like Tenerife. A real bummer but typical for the Germans.

Most people here (in Germany) who don't understand the English language or don't have access to TV programming via satellite or cable cannot enjoy the excellent reporting by journalists i.e. the BBC's Hilary Andersson. Programming from the award-winning U.S. public TV service "PBS" is rare and/or non-existent.

It is very strange and suspicious how the German government and the traditional media companies here seem to be very keen to present the "right images and information" to the public re: Sudan, Darfur, and Africa as a whole. It deserves some investigation.

Ingrid J. Jones said...

Hello Bill, thank you for your interesting comments and kind words. Sorry I am not always able to reply as quickly and in-depth as I'd like. Writing comments sometimes involves as much time and thought as writing and publishing a post. I am still working on catching up on your posts.

Thank you for giving the BBC documentary more publicity. As I've said in my New Killing Fields post, Hilary Andersson deserves an award. It would have been good to see the documentary repeated in Britain around Christmas time when people had more leisure time for watching TV.

It's interesting what you say about Germany. If you put the word Germany into the search bar at the Passion, Sudan Watch and my personal blog - you should find posts that I have written re Germany.

German politicians had meetings with Khartoum and the rebels. Seems the rebels have bases in Europe. Germany won a massive contract to build the Sudan-Kenya railway. Whether it will come off, I am not sure. High level German officials attended meetings with the regime in Khartoum as part of the international community's efforts to put pressure on Khartoum to rein in the militias and provide unimpeded access for aid.

I follow news at Deutsche Welle, Spiegel and a few other places but have yet to come across any in-depth news out of Germany. Articles are rather short. It's a pity documentaries such as those by the BBC and PBS are not translated into different languages and shown around the world.

German troops airlifted the last batch of AU soldiers into Darfur. Germany has I believe been generous with its support behind the scenes, aid contributions and diplomatic effort. Perhaps the German government play down their efforts for PR reasons. Maybe after 60 years they and the German media prefer not to publicise issues that could hark back to past history and genocide.

I find it difficult to understand why the Arab League is not helping more. No doubt there is much more going on behind the scenes that we know little of.

Ingrid J. Jones said...

Bill, I have just put the word Germany into the search box at Passion of the Present and realised that Jim Moore has written quite a few posts relating to Germany and the Holocaust. My posts on Germany mostly contain news re aid, Khartoum, EU, UN, AU etc.