BBC's Orla sees 'different visions' than Ch. 4

[Teddy Bear]

First here's an article showing another victory for the blogger, as presented by Honest Reporting. I strongly recommend any hitherto doubters of BBC bias read the full article at the the bloggers webpage. 'Drinking From Home' as well as follow the various links that show the full extent of Guerin's bias.

This is followed by a report of a debate over whether Israel should reinstitute its boycott of the BBC following its bias in covering the recent conflict in Lebanon.

BBC's Orla Exposed

Few tears were shed by our readership when the BBC's Orla Guerin concluded her posting in the Middle East at the end of 2005. Guerin has, however, returned to report from Lebanon during the recent conflict. This alerted many media watchers, including the Drinking From Home blog, which compared Guerin's 14 August report from the Lebanese village of Bint Jbeil with Alex Thomson's of Channel 4 News on the same day.

Walking down the same street in the same village, both correspondents painted very different pictures of the level of destruction (emphasis added):

Guerin: "I haven't seen a single building that isn't damaged in some way. Many have been flattened, many have been singed. This town has really been wiped out."

Compare this with Thomson: "As you can see, the centre of the town destroyed on a really wholesale scale, more so than since the last civilians left here, though it has to be said that on the outskirts, the suburbs - pretty much untouched by the Israeli attack and invasion."

Indeed, while Guerin would have you believe that Bint Jbeil has been entirely reduced to rubble, the view across the valley to the outskirts of town through the lens of a Channel 4 cameraman (pictured) confirms what Guerin evidently does not want BBC viewers to see.

Thomson even asks: "Does this bizarre landscape where so many buildings are really quite untouched and then some totally pancaked really mark the end for the Hezbollah?"

(See more images from Drinking From Home for visual evidence that Guerin and Thomson are reporting from identical locations.)

Much of the rest of Guerin's report is presented in typical BBC style. Despite seeing the evidence of Hezbollah munitions and weaponry located in Bint Jbeil, Guerin states: "The international community may well ask how Israel can explain all this in the name of fighting Hezbollah." More snippets of editorialising include:

Here in the south of Lebanon no-one doubts that Hezbollah won this war... In a month of fighting, Israel couldn't beat Hezbollah - probably not how its ally the United States expected things to turn out. For George Bush this is a bad chapter in the war on terror... To many here and in the Arab world, Hezbollah are covered in glory...

Comments to BBC Complaints. Please let HonestReporting UK know if you receive a response by forwarding e-mails to [e-mail].

DEBATE OVER BBC BOYCOTT

According to the Jerusalem Post, the BBC's one-sided coverage of the Lebanese conflict prompted some pressure on the Israeli Foreign Ministry to resume a boycott of the corporation and to withdraw credentials from its correspondents. The report stated that:

diplomatic officials said the network had not been reporting the war fairly. Senior diplomatic officials in Jerusalem went as far as saying that "the reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah instead of doing fair journalism."

In the same paper however, Times columnist and frequent critic of the BBC, Stephen Pollard, argues that a boycott would be counter-productive despite the BBC's anti-Israel bias:

But the idea that the BBC's bias would change if it was denied access to press conferences and Israeli officials is risible. The BBC's bias is the result of a pervasive contemporary left-liberal mindset, which holds that Israel is at best a bully and at worst illegitimate as a nation....
Boycotts do not work against organizations such as the BBC, whose existence and funding are guaranteed by British law and which are driven by a conviction in their inherent superiority.

[Teddy Bear]

Honest Reporting tells of the BBC response to one letter of complaint on the above, after many took the time to do so.

"AN IMPRESSIONISTIC PHRASE"?

Many subscribers contacted the BBC following HonestReporting UK's exposure of Orla Guerin's attempt to exaggerate the level of damage in a Lebanese village. The BBC's response, however, surprised even us with its poor effort to exonerate Guerin's report. Part of the standard e-mail sent to complainants is produced below. We leave it to you to judge:

I appreciate that you felt a recent BBC News report from Orla Guerin was biased against Israel.

I should state that Orla Guerin's report on the 14th August from Bint Jbeil in Southern Lebanon made clear at the start that she was reporting on the perspective of Lebanese people returning home in their thousands.

She reported: "I haven't seen a single building that isn't damaged in some way. Many have been flattened. Many have been singed. This town has really been wiped out."

Orla did not say that every building had been wiped out. She was using an impressionistic phrase implying extreme damage which is justified by the scale of what she saw.

There's a story about different blind people who touch a different part of the same elephant, and each decribe it differently. The one on the tail, describes it as a snake; The one one the body, like a house; The leg, like a tree; etc. Since they are blind they can be forgiven for having wrong impressions, but what's Guerlin's excuse?