Here we go
again – another "serious escalation" has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC
World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what prompted the BBC's
judgment that the crisis was escalating once more?
You can be
sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days
of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes
that are making the country's south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a
crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and
children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or
significance in this confrontation.
Nor is it
the Lebanese roads and bridges being pounded into dust, the petrol stations and
oil refineries going up in smoke, the phone networks and TV stations being
obliterated, the water and electricity supplies being cut off. The rapid
transformation of a modern vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category
of open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC's view.
No, the BBC
proffered a first, hesitant "escalation" on Thursday night when Hezbollah had
the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at Haifa in response to the growing
Lebanese death toll. The worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a
chunk of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.
But the BBC
felt confident to declare the escalation had turned "serious" on Sunday when
Hezbollah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one killed a group of eight
railway workers in a station depot.
Now that
Israeli civilians as well as Lebanese civilians are dying – even if in far
smaller numbers – the BBC's battalions of journalists in northern Israel finally
have something to report on.
So BBC
World's broadcast at 9 a.m GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time) hardly veered out of
Haifa or Jerusalem. After the presenter's headline declaration that the
Hezbollah strike on Haifa was a "serious escalation," the news segued into a
lengthy and sympathetic interview with an Israeli police spokesman in Haifa by
Wyre Davies; followed by another lazy interview, lasting the better part of five
minutes, with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem; followed by Ben
Brown in Beirut interviewing a British holidaymaker about her night of horror in
her hotel.
And in
those 15 minutes that was about as close as we got to hearing what the Lebanese
had been enduring from a night and morning of Israeli aerial strikes on Beirut
and the country's south. If there was any mention of the suffering of Lebanese
civilians – and doubtless the BBC will tell me there was – the reference was so
fleeting that I missed it. And if I missed it, then so did most BBC World
viewers.
The true
nature of the "serious escalation" was soon apparent – or at least it was if one
watched Arab TV channels. They showed an urban wasteland of rubble and dust in
the suburbs of Beirut and Tyre that was shockingly reminiscent of New York in
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
They cut
intermittently to local hospitals filled with Lebanese children, their faces a
rash of bloody pockmarks from the spray of Israeli shrapnel. More terrible
images of children burnt and lying in pools of blood arrived in my e-mail inbox
from Lebanese bloggers.
But in the
BBC's lexicon, escalation has nothing to do with the enormous destruction Israel
can unleash on Lebanon, only the occasional, smaller-scale blow Hezbollah scores
against Israel.
Switching
from the Arab channels back to the BBC for their 11 a.m. broadcast in the hope
of finding the same images of devastation in Tyre and Beirut, I stumbled on yet
another timid interview with Israel's ubiquitous spokesman Mark Regev. It was
followed by two headlines: Nine dead in Israel after a "barrage" of attacks on
Haifa, and foreign governments prepare to evacuate their nationals out of the
region.
At noon,
James Reynolds as good as gave the game away: the Hezbollah strike on Haifa, he
said, proved that the rockets are "no longer just an irritant." Now it was clear
why a "serious escalation" had begun: Israel was actually being harmed by
Hezbollah's rockets rather than just irritated. Until then the harm had been
mainly inflicted on Lebanese civilians, so no escalation was taking place.
As I
regularly flicked to the BBC's coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention
of those dead in Lebanon. They had become "non-beings," irrelevant in the
calculations not only of our world leaders but of our major broadcasters.
It wasn't
till the 7 p.m. news that I saw meaningful images from Lebanon, as Gavin Hewitt
followed a fire crew trying to put out an enormous oil refinery blaze in Tyre.
Although we saw some of the suffering of the Lebanese population, the anchor
felt obliged to preface the scenes from Lebanon with the statement that they
were Israeli "retaliation" for the Haifa attack, even though Israel had been
launching such strikes for four days before the lethal rocket strike on Haifa.
In the same
broadcast, an Israeli cabinet minister, Shaul Mofaz, was given air time to make
the claim that parts of the rockets that landed in Haifa were Syrian-made.
Allegations by the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, widely shown on Arab TV
that Israel had been using phosphorus incendiary bombs – illegal under
international law – received no coverage at all.
On the 8
p.m. news, one of the headlines was a menacing quote from Sheik Hassan Nasrallah,
the Hezbollah leader, that "Haifa is just the beginning." Mike Wooldridge in the
Jerusalem studio made great play of the quote, taken from a broadcast Nasrallah
had made several hours earlier.
The BBC may
have lifted the sentence from the Israeli media because they missed out the
important conditional context inserted by Nasrallah – it was only the
"beginning" of what Hezbollah could do if Israel continued its attacks.
They could
have found this out even from the Israeli media if they had taken the care to
look more closely: "As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits
and red lines, we will pursue the confrontation without limits and without red
lines," Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the daily Ha'aretz newspaper. In other
words, Nasrallah was warning that Hezbollah would give back as good as it gets –
a standard piece of rhetoric from a military leader in times of confrontation.
The BBC is
no worse than CNN, Sky and, of course, Fox News. It is possibly far better,
which is reason enough why we should be outraged that this is the best
international broadcast coverage we are likely to get of the conflict.
The
reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there
is no other word to describe it. The journalists' working assumption is that
Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead
Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention.
The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I
see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.
That is why
the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than
the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have
followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the
130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die
in the coming days.
There is no
excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they
are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can
find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut
as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties
just as easily as they can to those in Israel.
But they
don't – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.
My previous
criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel's
military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve.
Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry –
from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage,
unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not
take sides. They are not "campaigning" journalists after all, they are
"professionals" doing a job.
But the
problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of
the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC's Wyre Davies cares as much
about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his
career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give
valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only
platitudes.
Similarly,
we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive
footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens
go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That nonevent
was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it
more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over
the border? These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all
day showing them.
Matthew
Price knows too that in the BBC's view it is his job as he stands in Haifa,
after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of
events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he
passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must "retaliate" to
protect its citizens, how it must "punish" Hezbollah This is not journalism;
it's reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.
Can we
imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC
cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel's military
onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and
targeting civilian infrastructure to "pressure" Israel to negotiate?
Would the
BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut
in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and
his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being
hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the
Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only
Israeli fears are newsworthy.
These
reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless
news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the
institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the
result.
They know
that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without
suffering flak; that the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to
the BBC's reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions
of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to
remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American
rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.
This
distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in
the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both
Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as
the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a
regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army –
is likely to become inevitable.
So to
Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the
other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the
faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with
the best of intentions, but shame on you.
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