BBC Misreporting in Israel/Lebanon conflict

[Teddy Bear]

Considering their record, it is hardly surprising that the BBC has been actively biased against Israel in the present conflict between them and the Hizbollah in Lebanon. It's more a matter of how to verbalize this bias than recognizing it. Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News, and does an admirable job.
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000767.html

LETTING THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG

Extracts from the article below:

* The BBC's coverage of the present war has been so
extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London
seem rather embarrassed - in conversation, not on the air,
unfortunately. If the BBC were just a British problem that
would be one thing, but it is not. No other station
broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV,
radio and online.

* From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts,
and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties by the
media, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of
death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in
Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of
thousands of non-Arabs.

* Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week.
Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon,
Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, casually
mentioned in the middle of a posting: "To the south, along
the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas,
but I'm loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God
has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've
already hassled a number of us and threatened one."

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FULL ARTICLE

THE MEDIA AIMS ITS MISSILES

Media Missiles. Working for the enemy.
By Tom Gross
National Post (Canada) / Jerusalem Post (Israel) / National
Review (U.S.) / Ma'ariv (Israel)
August 2, 2006

article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjVlMmRjNDllNzhkZmE1OWM3NmE1OGQ4OGQxMDA1YjQ=

Large sections of the international media are not only
misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are also
actively fanning the flames.

The BBC World Service has a strong claim to be the
number-one villain. It has come to sound like a virtual
propaganda tool for Hizbullah. And as it desperately
attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of committing "war
crimes" and "crimes against humanity," it has introduced a
new charge - one which I have heard several times on air in
recent days.

The newscaster reads out carefully selected "audience
comments." Among these are invariably contained some version
of the claim that "Israel's attack on Lebanon" will serve as
a "recruitment" drive for al-Qaeda.

But if anything is going to win new recruits for the likes
of Osama bin Laden, it will not be Israel's defensive
actions, which are far less damaging than Western TV
stations would have us believe, but the inflammatory and
hopelessly one-sided way in which they are being reported by
those very same news organizations.

While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough,
the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the
way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would
think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in
the aftermath of World War II air raids. International
television channels have used the same footage of Beirut
over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual
buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been
razed.

A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas
targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific
buildings housing Hizbullah command centers in the city's
southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of
Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used
to ferry Hizbullah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon,
has been left pretty much untouched.

From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and
almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be
forgiven for thinking that the level of death and
destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur,
where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands
of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a
million in Southeast Asia.

In fact Israel has taken great care to avoid killing
civilians - even though this has proven extremely difficult
and often tragically impossible, since members of Hizbullah,
the self-styled "Party of God," have deliberately ensconced
themselves in civilian homes. Nevertheless the civilian
death toll has been mercifully low compared to other
international conflicts in recent years.

A CNN MAN LETS SLIP

The BBC, which courtesy of the British tax payer is the
world's biggest and most lavishly funded news organization,
would of course never reveal how selective their reports
are, since such a disclosure might spoil their campaign to
demonize Israel and those who support her. But one senior
British journalist, working for another company, last week
let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to
be distorted.

"CNN senior international correspondent" Nic Robertson
admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18
about civilian casualties in Lebanon, was stage-managed from
start to finish by Hizbullah. He revealed that his story was
heavily influenced by Hizbullah's "press officer" and that
Hizbullah have "very, very sophisticated and slick media
operations."

When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN
program "Reliable Sources," Robertson acknowledged that
Hizbullah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where
and what to film. Hizbullah "had control of the situation,"
Robertson said. "They designated the places that we went to,
and we certainly didn't have time to go into the houses or
lift up the rubble to see what was underneath."

Robertson added that Hizbullah has "very, very good control
over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists
access into those areas. You don't get in there without
their permission. We didn't have enough time to see if
perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi
driver by day, and a Hizbullah fighter by night."

Yet "Reliable Sources," presented by Washington Post writer
Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of
CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not
have had the opportunity to learn from CNN's "Senior
international correspondent" that the pictures they saw from
Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hizbullah.

Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week.
Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon,
Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, casually
mentioned in the middle of a posting: "To the south, along
the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas,
but I'm loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God
has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've
already hassled a number of us and threatened one."

Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled
viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC's Richard
Engel, CBS's Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and
other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by
Hizbullah minders. Palmer commented on her report that
"Hizbullah is also determined that outsiders will only see
what it wants them to see."

Palmer's honesty is helpful. But it doesn't prevent the
damage being done by organizations such as the BBC. First
the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the
greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided
coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the
assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place
in London, but did not give any details for a rally in
support of Israel also held in London a short time later.

IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN

Indeed, the BBC's coverage of the present war has been so
extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London
seem rather embarrassed - in conversation, not on the air,
unfortunately.

If the BBC were just a British problem that would be one
thing, but it is not. No other station broadcasts so
extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio and online.

Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners.
It pours forth its worldview in almost every language of the
Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. Needless
to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it
does broadcast in the languages of other small nations:
Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kinyarwanda and
Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either;
but then the BBC doesn't concern itself with Kurdish rights
or aspirations since they are persecuted by Moslem-majority
states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC,
for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and
injured in March 2004 by President Assad's regime.)

It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are
completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided
war (started, of course, by Hizbullah) is all but obscured.
As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by
dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldn't
really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been
living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but
resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old
grandson were killed by a Katyusha during a Friday night
Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have
died.

You wouldn't have any real understanding of what it is like
to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down
indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one
third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.

You wouldn't really appreciate that Hizbullah, far from
being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the
Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced
weapons (UAVs that have flown over northern Israel,
extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise
missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having
already killed 114 people in Argentina during the 1990s.

The BBC and other media have carried report after report on
the damaged Lebanese tourist industry, but none on the
damaged Israeli one, even though at least one hotel in
Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, was hit by a Hizbullah
rocket. There are reports on Lebanese children who don't
know where they will be going to school, but none on Israeli
ones.

[Teddy Bear]

Honest Reporting also reports on the scandalous coverage of the BBC in this conflict



Commentators Criticise BBC

The BBC comes under fire for its unbalanced coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

No media outlet incurs the wrath of our readership more than the BBC. With such a vast amount of coverage broadcast on TV and radio over the course of 24 hours, it is humanly impossible to monitor each and every instance of bias displayed by the world's largest and most influential broadcaster. Nonetheless, a number of respected commentators and columnists have identified and eloquently pointed out what HonestReporting UK has constantly drawn attention to.

Tom Gross states that "the BBC's coverage of the present war has been so extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London seem rather embarrassed - in conversation, not on the air, unfortunately."

It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hizbullah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldn't really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old grandson were killed by a Katyusha during a Friday night Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.

You wouldn't have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.

Writing for the Jewish Chronicle, respected commentator Stephen Pollard also critiques the BBC:

The central problem with the BBC's coverage is that, for all the fair and accurate reporting which the BBC carries, there are two regular and systematic forms of bias against Israel. First, editorialising masked as reporting, which usually begins with the assumption that Israeli action is 'disproportionate' and which gives free and uncritical rein to the allegation that the IDF is guilty of war crimes. And second, unbalanced reports or programmes.

Take the 23rd July edition of what the BBC describes as its 'flagship political programme', Sunday AM with Andrew Marr. There were four guests, all known for their hostility to Israel: Glenys Kinnock, Matthew Parris, Nayla Mouawad and Sir Menzies Campbell. All were simply invited by Andrew Marr to offer their thoughts. Not one guest was invited on who might have acknowledged that there is another view.

From the very first day it was obvious how the BBC would treat the conflict, when a film on Newsnight concluded with the reporter, Peter Marshall, remarking across a picture of a blown-up bridge: "All this destruction. And still more threatened" - as if it was a given that the IDF was on a wilful mission of destruction.

On Sunday, BBC1's 10'o'clock News' coverage of the destruction of Hezbollah's launch sites in Kana treated the IDF's film of rockets being launched from the bombed building as an irrelevance, and allowed the Security Minister, Isaac Herzog, just two sentences to put Israel's case - the only element in the entire bulletin which did not portray the IDF as guilty of wilfully murdering civilians.

Yaakov Lappin, writing for Israel's YNet, notes how Israeli war deaths are being underreported by the international media and gives another example of BBC bias:

Meanwhile, an article has appeared on the BBC website in which a reporter for the British broadcaster, Hugh Sykes, relays a conversation he has with Lebanese residents.

The article is remarkable as it contains the views of a BBC journalist being given to Lebanese locals, rather than the other way around.

In the piece, written in first person narrative, Sykes tells people in Lebanon that there would be "no point" for Israel to strike Hizbullah targets in Lebanon: "'People keep asking me... 'Beirut - will they bomb Beirut again?' 'What would be the point?" I reply.'"

The BBC journalist also attempts to second guess where Israeli strikes hit.

"Four massive thumps one night, and six the next, as Israeli bombs or shells slammed into the ground a few kilometres away. Or into the children's homes," Sykes wrote.

Comments about these examples and any other incidents of bias you may see to BBC Complaints.

[Teddy Bear]

For any readers who may not understand why the BBC should be particularly biased against Israel, or may be loathe to think that the BBC is anything other than pure and pristine in its efforts to present a balanced view of this or any other conflict, consider this;

Why does a worldwide media organisation like Reuters purposefully produce doctored photos to misrepresent the situation in this conflict?

Reuters sent out a photo showing Beirut in flames. It turns
out that the flames, the smoke and the destruction were not
caused by Israeli bombs but by Photoshop. See
littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/ for convincing
evidence that Reuters is, as usual, lying.

It turns out that the Reuters photographer who submitted the
photo ("took the photo" would be the wrong term to use here)
is the same one who submitted the photo of dead the baby in
Qana, the baby who was covered in dust but whose
heart-wrenching pacifier was clean as a whistle. See EU
Referendum's exhaustive collection of images that
indisputably shows the ghoulish display for exactly what it
was-a depraved terrorist photo op: Qana - the director's cut
<http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/qana-directors-cut
.html> .

While it is now common to call this 'anti-Israel' bias, it may be more accurate in many cases to call it pro-militant Muslim bias. So why should any organisation representing free democratic societies support the strategy of another society that is hostile to our own?

Corrupt Politicians would do it for votes; selling out the long term security and principles of our structure to gain short term power.

Corrupt businesses would do it to increase their sales.

Corrupt individuals would do it if they received enough money to make it worthwhile. The despotic Muslim regimes who sponsor this militancy among their subjects have plenty of money to to invest in their cause. It is far cheaper to invest a little of their wealth gained from their countries resources to keep their subjects brainwashed than to share it with them.

All of those from our society who sell their souls for the prospect of a short-sighted gain, without principle or morality gain something. They're easy to recognize since most use the very thing they sold out - the idea of principle and morality, to denounce Israel, the US, ANYONE OR ANYTHING that fights this militancy, without any attempt to really present an honest appraisal of what, why, and wherefore.

What do you think those at the BBC gain from it?

[Teddy Bear]

Extract from article in Saturday's The Telegraph

Covering Lebanon? Child's play
By Vicki Woods
(Filed: 12/08/2006)

I had an e-mail this week from an acquaintance in Dubai. She runs a very hip little fashion shop there with two friends: one is Emirati, one Kuwaiti and one Lebanese. Dubai is very cosmopolitan: the shop's customers are well-heeled Western tourists, even better-heeled Middle Eastern jetsetters and - richest of all - a handy cohort of Russian hookers. The e-mail was a round-robin announcing a charity fashion sale.

Her store was participating (with other Dubai shops) in a hastily arranged fundraiser: all proceeds to the UAE Red Crescent for the "children of Lebanon". The e-mail was unemotional, but I was feeling pretty bad about the children of Lebanon when it popped up, having just read that morning's papers. One had front-paged a little sleeping baby, with a woman's arm curled round it.

The caption said the baby was 10 days old and not sleeping, but dead. As was his mother. Her body had been cropped out of the picture, leaving only her hand and arm cradling the baby, in death as in life. It was an irresistible picture, especially as cropped. You were meant to be wrenched; I was wrenched.


So I replied to the e-mail saying I would send the shop a donation for "the children of Lebanon"; how hideous it was; they have babies themselves; they must all be agonised. She replied within minutes, with some lines about dead children by the Lebanese poet Gibran Khalil Gibran, which did for me.

Since I don't personally know any young Israeli women who run posh shops catering to jetsetting fashionables, I don't have any emotional hook to the "children of Haifa". Not that it matters - disinterested observers of the Middle East wars (ie journalists) do better without hanging their emotions out for all to share. Fergal Keane's throbbing outrage (for BBC news) over the deconstruction of Lebanon and the "Qana massacre" is driving half the viewers wild with rage and giving the other half (me) stress headaches. I put "massacre" in quotes, because some people insist it was a carefully staged Hizbollah photo-op, not a massacre. I don't know.

What I do know is that the Beeb should think of pulling Keane out of Lebanon for a bit of quiet R & R before he has to see any more massacres. (Or "massacres".)

The BBC is taking a lot of stick for its coverage of the conflict. It is charged with being, a) generally anti-war (in a sloppy-liberal, bien-pensant way) and b) anti-Israeli (and therefore pro-Hizbollah, pro-Palestinian, pro-terrorist). And therefore anti-Semitic. I don't think anti-Semitic sticks, but the anti-war/anti-Israeli charge is harder to defend.

It obviously bothers the BBC to be seen as partisan. Last week, Newsnight did a very odd piece about the coverage of Israel/Lebanon with a panel of three Jewish artsy/literatis. Paxman wanted to know how they were affected - as British Jews - by "the sight, night after night, of children, mothers and old people being killed and maimed by Israeli weapons". Alain de Botton said he was obviously affected, you couldn't not be; you couldn't not be horrified by the worldwide cry of "disproportionality". But what could you do? Hizbollah were terrorists and the Israelis lived defensively inside a tiny nation surrounded by people who wanted to "wipe Israel from the map".

He sounded wrenched. But nuanced.

Fashion designer Bella Freud sounded slightly hysterical. She said Lebanon was "nothing to do with being Jewish" - everyone she knew was "appalled" by what was happening. She grew emotional about "the plight of the Palestians in Gaza" who are "imprisoned, hemmed in, they can't escape".

Dramatist Julia Pascal (she wrote The Holocaust Trilogy) was cool and composed, and remained so, despite Paxman's efforts. Yes, she was affected, because she went to Haifa every year. Now Haifa was crouching in shelters in fear of the Katushya rockets raining down on them; that's what she thought about. Paxman asked: "So what goes through your mind when you see those pictures of children?" She remained cool. "What goes through my mind is: Where were their men? Are they all in Hizbollah? Why are we only seeing women and children?" Paxman went into outrage mode: "That's your first thought? When you see those pictures?" She remained staunch.

Nicely balanced, eh? Three Jews with three views: one anti, one nuanced and one pro. The fact that any "balance" was wrecked by Paxman's posturing over Pascal's Zionism spoilt things rather, but there we are.