Western news media bias in coverage of Georgia-Russia conflict

From a reader comment at Global Voices:

The following is quite clear now, if you exclude any emotions:

• Georgian preindent has sent his troops to settle it in S. Osetia. It is clear, that he has started the war, whatever the reasons he has
• There is a huge number of civilians dead - and they are NOT georgians. They are South Osetian people.
• BBC and CNN disinform whoever views it (it worked well with Iraq once, so why not again…?). For instance, they put more stress on a very few victims from the georgia side, georgian woman is crying from the BBC pic headlined “Russia has expanded the conflict with air strikes against targets in Georgia” - but ignore wounded and killed from osetian side (who are the majority)

One source of the perceived bias is likely that the Western media hesitation to put faith in reports of Russian media sources. In contrast to the upheaval in Tibet -- which led to accusations of bias from the Chinese -- the Western media cannot claim to have been prohibited from reporting on the initial outbreak of violence in South Ossetia (Russian media sources report that 2,000 Ossetians have been massacred by Georgian forces).

For example, Russia Today reports:

The conflict over Georgia’s breakaway republic is as much about information as it is about weapons. South Ossetia's press service claims Western media outlets can't be trusted because they haven't been operating in the region ”since the conflict began”. (WATCH THE VIDEO)

“Only the Russian media and one Ukrainian channel have been filming in the breakaway republic. No western camera crews have been working in the conflict zone,” Suslan Bekoev, South Ossetian committee for information and press, said.

Look, at some point, major Western news organizations -- especially American ones -- have to wake up and realize that they employee too few correspondents to responsibly cover world events! There is no excuse for having to depend on Russian news sources for information about a long-anticipated crisis concerning one of the world's known hot spots. No excuse whatsoever.