While most of the British media published editorials condemning the recent Palestinian suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at least one commentator was critical of his own paper’s coverage. On 24 April, the Independent’s Stephen Glover wrote that he:
was a little dismayed at the manner in which the Independent – though it was not alone – reported the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The opening paragraphs of the piece were entirely devoted to the youth of the bomber, Samer Samih Hamad, and to the anti-Israel remarks of his relatives, who sought to justify the bombing. There was little description of the horrors that the bomber had inflicted, and scant details about the nine victims.
Generally I do not go along with suggestions by members of the Jewish lobby that reporting of Israel is skewed. On this occasion, I could see their point.
While HonestReporting UK rejects Glover’s assumption that distorted reporting of Israel is merely the concern of “the Jewish lobby”, we are pleased that some writers are not blind to some of the media’s shortcomings.
Such shortcomings were again evident in the BBC’s coverage of the aftermath of the terror attack. The main 10pm BBC News on 18 April featured an interview with the suicide bomber’s mother, where Matthew Price concluded his report saying: “Both sides feel under attack and both sides feel they need to defend themselves.” Price thus attaches an amoral equivalence to Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-measures, legitimising suicide bombings as a means of Palestinian ‘defence’.
Comments to the BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/
CLARKE CRITICAL OF MEDIA TERMINOLOGY
While HonestReporting UK takes no official view of Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s 25 April speech at the London School of Economics on the Government’s record on civil liberties, we were interested to hear his comments on the media’s use of intemperate and inaccurate language. This could, we believe, be equally applicable to the case of Israel. Clarke stated:
In the absence of many of the genuinely dangerous and evil totalitarian dictatorships to fight – since they’ve gone – the media has steadily rhetorically transferred to some of the existing democracies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, some of the characteristics of those dictatorships.While HonestReporting UK takes no official view of Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s 25 April speech at the London School of Economics on the Government’s record on civil liberties, we were interested to hear his comments on the media’s use of intemperate and inaccurate language. This could, we believe, be equally applicable to the case of Israel. Clarke stated:
So some commentators routinely use language like ‘police state’, ‘fascist’, ‘hijacking our democracy’, ‘creeping authoritarianism’, ‘destruction of the rule of law’, whilst words like ‘holocaust’, ‘gulag’ and ‘apartheid’ are regularly used descriptively of our society in ways which must be truly offensive to those who experienced those realities….
As these descriptions and language are used, the truth just flies out of the window as does any adherence to professional journalistic standards or any requirement to examine the facts and check them with rigour.
HonestReporting UK urges subscribers to be vigilant for the usage of terminology such as ‘apartheid’, employed to denigrate Israel’s security barrier and even the state itself, along with misleading and highly emotive terms such as ‘holocaust’ used to portray Palestinian suffering.
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