Bias on Israel/Palestine/Lebanon
Much of the agitation and protest about the war being waged by Israel in the Lebanon has been focused on the perceived bias of the mainstream media in favour of Israel, Bush and Blair. I think this has been much exaggerated. Here's The Guardian with a piece reflecting the traditional middle-of-the-road view that points out accusations of bias from both sides.
Unfriendly fire from all sides: A war is raging over perceived bias in the media's coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, with the BBC apparently both pro and anti Israel
James Silver
July 31, 2006 The Guardian
Few subjects inflame the conspiracy theorists, finger-jabbers and those who accuse the mainstream media of bias - in either direction - like a crisis in the Middle East. As the region continues to flare and shudder from Israel's struggle with Hizbullah, cyber-space crackles too, as irate bloggers and self-appointed media watchdogs pick over every moment of coverage.
The Israelis have long believed they get a raw deal from the European media. A week ago frustration appeared to boil over, when Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said that international TV coverage had entirely misrepresented his country. "The massive, brutal and murderous viciousness of Hizbullah is unfortunately not represented in its full intensity on television screens outside of Israel . . . the victim is presented as an aggressor."
However, Media Lens (www.media-lens.org), a media watchdog that argues that "mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world", alerted its readers to an article published on July 17 in the hawkish Jerusalem Post, which appears to suggest that in the first few days of the conflict at least, the Israeli government felt it was succeeding in getting its side of the story across.
"Assaf Shariv, Olmert's media adviser, boasted that Israelis have been interviewed by the foreign press four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese . . . and cited a poll of Sky News viewers that found that 80% believe Israel's attacks on Lebanon were justified," wrote Media Lens, quoting from the Post. It also reproduced a comment by foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir, who reportedly said: "We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."
One regular contributor to Media Lens, David Miller, professor of sociology at Strathclyde University and a serial critic of Israel, is convinced there is clear evidence of growing media bias in the way the conflict is being covered. Writing for Socialist Worker Online (www.socialistworker.co.uk), he said: "If you only have information from the mainstream media about the Middle East, you won't understand what is happening. It is a diet of almost undiluted lies . . . The bias didn't used to be as clear as this . . . But in the current neo-liberal climate the media becomes more and more nakedly an instrument of imperialism."
The BBC, in particular, finds itself facing flak from all quarters - including from those on the far left who consider it to be demonstrably pro-Israel. One contributor to Media Lens's message board asserts that "Posting after posting here proves ad infinitum that the BBC supports Israel." Indeed, the watchdog's editors themselves brand a BBC News Online story by Clare Bolderson in Jerusalem as "a case study in BBC bias . . . remarkable even by BBC standards."
Postings in a similar vein can also be found on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee's website (www.mpacuk.org). MPAC, which bills itself as the "UK's leading Muslim civil liberties group", publishes an editorial about BBC "double standards" over its coverage of the events that led up to the current crisis, accusing it of "skewed moral and news priorities".
Ranged against such voices are a number of high-profile pro-Israel columnists-cum-bloggers, including Stephen Pollard and the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips. Pollard's blog (www.stephenpollard.net) in particular is peppered with examples of what he sees as the BBC's blatant bias.
"I could fill my entire site with examples of the BBC's distortion of Israel's military actions in the past few days," he wrote on July 13 of a report by Peter Marshall on Newsnight. "Across a picture of a blown up bridge, he remarked: 'All this destruction. And still more threatened.' As if the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] was on some kind of wilful destruction spree, just for the hell of it. How about the reason why the bridge had been destroyed? Because Israel has been continually attacked by Hizbullah, and the IDF has to take action to prevent further such attacks."
Ten days later he rounded on Andrew Marr's Sunday AM programme, again for bias. "I can't imagine that the BBC has ever broadcast a more poisonous or vile programme than this morning's show . . . Every guest was simply nodded into the studio and handed airtime to pour out as much anti-Israel bile as they could manage in their allotted slot. And there was not one slot allocated to anyone who thought that Israel might have even the basis of a case."
The following day, Pollard reproduced an email from an anonymous BBC News staffer who agreed with his point of view. "As a Jew (aargh) and a (whisper it) Zionist, I'm torn asunder by the way the BBC has done this," he wrote. "There is no intelligence here, no in-depth questioning of why this conflict has erupted. It's a hammer with which to whack Israel."
The BBC's coverage of the conflict has also deeply riled Phillips, an arch-critic of the broadcaster's reporting of the Middle East. "The BBC (as opposed to Sky which is far more even-handed) has turned into the Beirut Broadcasting Corporation, reporting the war almost entirely from the perspective of a Lebanon that is entirely innocent and victimised," she says on her blog (www.melaniephillips.com).
"And this despite the fact that those Israeli casualties are being specifically targeted for death, whereas the Lebanese casualties are the inadvertent victims of attacks directed against Hizbullah terrorists and their infrastructure."
It is an impossible task to judge who is right. The ferocious claims that the BBC is pro-Israeli? Or the equally vituperative voices who insist it is a poisonous well of anti-Zionism? A spokesman for the BBC said in response: "Individuals with strong opinions will sometimes detect bias when it doesn't exist. Our duty is to provide independent reporting and analysis of all perspectives of a story. There can be times when this is misread by one or other side of a debate. However, this is not to suggest that we don't take complaints extremely seriously; we do."
The BBC is acutely aware of the criticism, and much time has been spent over the past year on getting its reports of the Middle East right. A study commissioned by the governors said it needed to put its reports into their proper historical context. To address this, the BBC's recently appointed Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen has been doing just that every night on the Ten O'Clock News.
But even that move has been criticised. "Ludicrous and self-indulgent," was the verdict of Michael Cole, a former BBC reporter commissioned by the Daily Mail to rail last week against the "refusal" of BBC correspondents in the Middle East to wear, of all things, a tie.
Unfriendly fire from all sides: A war is raging over perceived bias in the media's coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, with the BBC apparently both pro and anti Israel
James Silver
July 31, 2006 The Guardian
Few subjects inflame the conspiracy theorists, finger-jabbers and those who accuse the mainstream media of bias - in either direction - like a crisis in the Middle East. As the region continues to flare and shudder from Israel's struggle with Hizbullah, cyber-space crackles too, as irate bloggers and self-appointed media watchdogs pick over every moment of coverage.
The Israelis have long believed they get a raw deal from the European media. A week ago frustration appeared to boil over, when Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said that international TV coverage had entirely misrepresented his country. "The massive, brutal and murderous viciousness of Hizbullah is unfortunately not represented in its full intensity on television screens outside of Israel . . . the victim is presented as an aggressor."
However, Media Lens (www.media-lens.org), a media watchdog that argues that "mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world", alerted its readers to an article published on July 17 in the hawkish Jerusalem Post, which appears to suggest that in the first few days of the conflict at least, the Israeli government felt it was succeeding in getting its side of the story across.
"Assaf Shariv, Olmert's media adviser, boasted that Israelis have been interviewed by the foreign press four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese . . . and cited a poll of Sky News viewers that found that 80% believe Israel's attacks on Lebanon were justified," wrote Media Lens, quoting from the Post. It also reproduced a comment by foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir, who reportedly said: "We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."
One regular contributor to Media Lens, David Miller, professor of sociology at Strathclyde University and a serial critic of Israel, is convinced there is clear evidence of growing media bias in the way the conflict is being covered. Writing for Socialist Worker Online (www.socialistworker.co.uk), he said: "If you only have information from the mainstream media about the Middle East, you won't understand what is happening. It is a diet of almost undiluted lies . . . The bias didn't used to be as clear as this . . . But in the current neo-liberal climate the media becomes more and more nakedly an instrument of imperialism."
The BBC, in particular, finds itself facing flak from all quarters - including from those on the far left who consider it to be demonstrably pro-Israel. One contributor to Media Lens's message board asserts that "Posting after posting here proves ad infinitum that the BBC supports Israel." Indeed, the watchdog's editors themselves brand a BBC News Online story by Clare Bolderson in Jerusalem as "a case study in BBC bias . . . remarkable even by BBC standards."
Postings in a similar vein can also be found on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee's website (www.mpacuk.org). MPAC, which bills itself as the "UK's leading Muslim civil liberties group", publishes an editorial about BBC "double standards" over its coverage of the events that led up to the current crisis, accusing it of "skewed moral and news priorities".
Ranged against such voices are a number of high-profile pro-Israel columnists-cum-bloggers, including Stephen Pollard and the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips. Pollard's blog (www.stephenpollard.net) in particular is peppered with examples of what he sees as the BBC's blatant bias.
"I could fill my entire site with examples of the BBC's distortion of Israel's military actions in the past few days," he wrote on July 13 of a report by Peter Marshall on Newsnight. "Across a picture of a blown up bridge, he remarked: 'All this destruction. And still more threatened.' As if the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] was on some kind of wilful destruction spree, just for the hell of it. How about the reason why the bridge had been destroyed? Because Israel has been continually attacked by Hizbullah, and the IDF has to take action to prevent further such attacks."
Ten days later he rounded on Andrew Marr's Sunday AM programme, again for bias. "I can't imagine that the BBC has ever broadcast a more poisonous or vile programme than this morning's show . . . Every guest was simply nodded into the studio and handed airtime to pour out as much anti-Israel bile as they could manage in their allotted slot. And there was not one slot allocated to anyone who thought that Israel might have even the basis of a case."
The following day, Pollard reproduced an email from an anonymous BBC News staffer who agreed with his point of view. "As a Jew (aargh) and a (whisper it) Zionist, I'm torn asunder by the way the BBC has done this," he wrote. "There is no intelligence here, no in-depth questioning of why this conflict has erupted. It's a hammer with which to whack Israel."
The BBC's coverage of the conflict has also deeply riled Phillips, an arch-critic of the broadcaster's reporting of the Middle East. "The BBC (as opposed to Sky which is far more even-handed) has turned into the Beirut Broadcasting Corporation, reporting the war almost entirely from the perspective of a Lebanon that is entirely innocent and victimised," she says on her blog (www.melaniephillips.com).
"And this despite the fact that those Israeli casualties are being specifically targeted for death, whereas the Lebanese casualties are the inadvertent victims of attacks directed against Hizbullah terrorists and their infrastructure."
It is an impossible task to judge who is right. The ferocious claims that the BBC is pro-Israeli? Or the equally vituperative voices who insist it is a poisonous well of anti-Zionism? A spokesman for the BBC said in response: "Individuals with strong opinions will sometimes detect bias when it doesn't exist. Our duty is to provide independent reporting and analysis of all perspectives of a story. There can be times when this is misread by one or other side of a debate. However, this is not to suggest that we don't take complaints extremely seriously; we do."
The BBC is acutely aware of the criticism, and much time has been spent over the past year on getting its reports of the Middle East right. A study commissioned by the governors said it needed to put its reports into their proper historical context. To address this, the BBC's recently appointed Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen has been doing just that every night on the Ten O'Clock News.
But even that move has been criticised. "Ludicrous and self-indulgent," was the verdict of Michael Cole, a former BBC reporter commissioned by the Daily Mail to rail last week against the "refusal" of BBC correspondents in the Middle East to wear, of all things, a tie.
posted by badmatthew at 2:11 pm
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