Recent events caused me to form opinions on subjects I usually tried to avoid. I never wanted to choose sides in debates about Tibet, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Zimbabwe and other regions so far away that I could never have enough information to say something useful about them.

My main news source has always been the Western media. First the Dutch ones, and later on other Western broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC and several Belgian channels. It soon became clear that American news is different from European news, that British news is different from Continental news and that Belgian news is different from Dutch news. As a result I learned how to read between the lines and to be sceptical about our 'free press'. In retrospect I began to realize how coloured the news had always been.

During the war in Bosnia Herzegovina, the Serbs had been presented as barbaric killers, while the Bosnians were shown as their innocent victims and the Croats as the brave people that had cast off the Yugoslav yoke. Of course in reality it must have been chaos with good and bad people on all sides. Serbs had suffered just as well as Bosnians and Croats, but somehow they alone had been labelled 'evil' by the western press. An entire people was demonized and even here in the politically correct Netherlands racism against Serbs was suddenly justified.

Apart from the one sidedness of these reports, it was also striking that the Bosnian war got so much attention, while meanwhile at the Malukku islands and in Aceh  tragedies similar in scale occurred. These conflicts were a legacy of Dutch colonial rule, but the Dutch media were very sparse in their coverage.

More recently there was the unrest in Tibet, where mobs went onto the streets killing and looting. Here the Dutch media lost all their credibility as far as I am concerned. I read the first reports on the BBC and they were shocking enough: People burned alive or beaten to death in the street by gangs, just because they weren't Tibetan.

The Dutch media didn't mention these victims. Instead they showed modified images of 'Chinese' policemen (who were actually Nepalese) arresting 'protesters' and they came with made-up stories about how the PLA supposedly dealt with the situation.

It did cause me to look up a few things about Tibet's past and it became clear to me that the Western view of Tibet in the days before Mao Zedong is overly romantic. It never was Shangri La, but unfortunately the fairy tale is considered to be true by many people who never bothered to look any further than Hollywood's impression.

By the time the Tibet issue had calmed down, I had discovered Xinhua News and while before I had noticed how different British reports were from Dutch ones, it seemed as if Chinese and British networks were reporting on two different planets. In an issue concerning the Middle East, it was obvious both had cut different bits and pieces from the speeches of several politicians, but the result was so completely different that it was hardly recognizable they were talking about one and the same thing.

And now there's Georgia. Who had ever heard of South Ossetia and Abchazia before? Yet I wonder why NATO is allowed to bomb a country to support the independence of one of its provinces while Russia isn't? When Kosovo declared independence Britain and France were amongst the first to recognize it, yet now they condemn Russia for doing something similar.

The main reason why this media bias caused me to think about such issues, that would otherwise be something remote and distant is that it seems many people don't even think about questioning their 'free and independent' press.

Some of the greatest achievements of the West are its liberalism, its freedom of choice, and its scientific scepticism; So why then do so many people act like parrots and sheep? Why do they echo the one-liners of their politicians and don't they even bother to distinguish between propaganda and news?

It's time for the Western press to look at itself with the same criticism that it applies when looking at others...