On March 29 when I turned on my car radio to listen to NPR, the news started with coverage of events in Zimbabwe. As usual the story wasn't good. The radio reported how Zimbabwean security had broken into the opposition headquarters and may have arrested the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai; this coming just a few days after he had been arrested and beaten.
While this was a sad story that needed to be told, it paled in comparison to what a US ally started doing that very day in Somalia.
Starting on March 29 the Ethiopian army stationed in Somalia began new military operations in the capital that led to the death, injury and displacement of thousands of civilians. According to Somali media outlets Ethiopian forces were indiscriminately shelling residential areas. Quite conveniently this news was omitted from the headlines of US news outlets.
NPR for example didn't cover the events in Somalia until April 3rd*, even then omitting much of the detail that Somali News Outlets such as Shabelle Network were reporting. In the mean time it had carried stories on Zimbabwe on April 1 and April 2**. The BBC to its credit did a better job (atleast online). For those of us in the US, unless we sought out the news on Somalia on the web, there was little evidence of what transpired in Mogadishu over four days of heavy fighting.
It is outrageous that supposedly impartial media outlets omit and editorialize news to keep the names of loyal representatives of US power, such as Meles Zenawi, out of the spotlight. Such blatantly partial coverage, even of supposedly "remote" areas erodes trust in the institutions that are essential to the working of free societies.
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*Just to make sure that I didn't merely miss the coverage, I did a search on their website which yielded no results for Somalia during Mar 29-April 2.
**It should by now be obvious that the coverage of Zimbabwe has nothing to do with human rights or democracy and everything to do with powerful western interests that want to see change in the land reform policies that Mugabe and Zanu-PF are pushing.
