Here’s a quote from the BBC this morning,
Arriving on the border on Saturday, Vladimir Putin declared it was unlikely now that South Ossetia would reintegrate with the rest of Georgia.
This is precisely the outcome Georgia was trying to avoid.
Does anyone reeeeally think that South Ossetia is going to reintegrate with Georgia after all of this? Or is the BBC banking on most of its readers being utter morons?
I have more on the Russia-Georgia conflict, and am hoping to publish accounts from Georgians as well. Please let me know if you want to contribute.
Natalia A. 
The BBC is having a hard time remebering it is supposed to be impartial, and is assuming that Russians = bad and whoever they are fighting = total fluffy bunnies.
This leads to some very odd reporting as they try to balance every comment about the Russian side of things with something designed to show this, without actually coming right out and saying it.
The communicative value of the above is that _clearly_ the Georians are saddened and surprised by the conflict and have been working humbly and quietly all this time to try to stop the SOs completely unreasonably throwing their toys out of the pram. And _clearly_ Putin is simply making mischief.
No news source is truly impartial, but I hate the BBC’s smug superiority on all things Russian (oops, they’ll never hire me now… Oh well, it had to be said).
Honestly, sometimes, I prefer Faux News to this whey-faced bullshit. Faux, at the very least, are loud and upfront and bitchy with their biases.
And the worst of it is that they do truly believe they are impartial. I’d much rather they were being paid or something.
Unimpartial news is much easier to deal with, I agree. Really I also prefer the newspapers in the country: at least, as you say, you know where you stand.
“BBC banking on most of its readers being utter morons?”
Morons, maybe. More likely just fiercely anti-Russian, since that appears to be what the BBC tries in earnest to train their readers to be.
Perhaps peripheral to the topic, but – in Georgia, didn’t Gamsakhurdia, Shevardnadze, and Saakashvili all come in as democratic reformers only to end up as autocrats? What is it about Georgian politics that gives it these “say hello to the new boss” leaders?
Ukraine had the same deal. First there was Kuchma, now there’s Yuschenko. And I don’t care what the BBC says, Yuschenko’s an asshole. 😦