May 25, 2011 "Media Lens" -- - One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, 'Violence erupts at Israel borders'. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC 'impartiality' decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.
Clicking on the link did at least bring up a more accurate headline: 'Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters'. But the brutality was sanitised, with no details of the many victims. The Israeli viewpoint was prominent with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he 'hoped' that 'calm and quiet will quickly return, but let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty'.
Somehow a 'neutral' BBC perspective dictated that the lead image illustrating the story was of young Palestinian men throwing rocks in 'clashes' with fully armed soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces.
The Palestinians had been taking part in annual protests on Nakba ('Catastrophe') day which, as the BBC put it, 'marks the moment when 100,000s of Palestinians lost their homes' on the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Again, the BBC's sanitised version of 'lost their homes' buries awkward history, as though homes had simply been repossessed when families fell behind on their mortgage payments. In reality, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted and 531 village destroyed (Ilan Pappe, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', Oneworld, 2006).
After complaints from us, and perhaps realising the newspeak was just too much to swallow, the BBC tweaked the sentence the following day to read:
'Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in fighting after its creation.'
BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir was quick to implicate foreign powers in the latest annual Nakba protests, asking the leading question: 'Palestinian protests: Arab spring or foreign manipulation?' and pointing his finger at Syria and Iran. True to type, the BBC journalist's 'analysis' was not a million miles distant from the message being broadcast from Tel Aviv. Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist based in Nazareth, notes:
'With characteristic obtuseness, Israel's leaders identified Iranian "fingerprints" on the day's events - as though Palestinians lacked enough grievances of their own to stage protests.' (Jonathan Cook, 'On an old anniversary, a new sense that change is possible', The National, 17 May, 2011)
The BBC's famed 'balance' should mean that, in the wake of Muir's piece, we see a BBC article about US 'foreign manipulation' of Syria and Iran, and indeed the whole Middle East. Presumably the balancing piece is in the pipeline.
As with the most effective propaganda published by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, there may be something in what Muir says. But the required journalistic emphasis, as ever, is on the misdeeds 'our' officially sanctioned state enemies may be committing, not on the crimes of our own government. [...]
No comments:
Post a Comment