Channel 4’s excellent documentary on the Israeli media blockade of Gaza was on so late last night that it was probably unseen by many people.
That’s a shame because Jon Snow’s Dispatches Special was an outstanding piece of media analysis.
Snow interviewed a range of journalists as they stood on that media hill outside of Gaza, which was about as close as most came to the conflict.
Western journalists were not allowed into Gaza but Al Jazeera and the BBC both had staff already based there, and as I have discussed elsewhere, there was a stream of horrific imagery pouring out to shock the world.
The point that many journalists made to Snow was that you can’t beat actually being there. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen is the epitome of the experienced, knowledgable TV correspondent who is a master teller of both human and complex political stories. He was desperate to be there so that he could get his facts straight and to put tough questions to all concerned.
So there is no doubt that the journalism suffered. However, I remain uncovinced that this worked in the Israelis’ favour.
Perhaps in the short-term it reduced the ability of the Western media to hold them to account. But I didn’t detect any shortage of coverage and most of it felt critical of Israel. By that I don’t mean it was ‘biased’. It’s just that killing children generally doesn’t do wonders for one’s national image.
Overall, the media blockade undermined Israel’s case to the rest of the world that it is a democracy and morally superior to Hamas.
All conflict reporting is deeply flawed. Most journalists were embedded during the Iraq conflict and even independents were restricted by the hazards of that war. In a way, the Israelis were just being clear and open about the kind of censorship and control that all states operate during war.
John Snow’s documentary manages to describe a number of difficulties British correpondents encountered when trying to cover the war in Gaza.
Perhaps the analysis of the situation will be considerably helped if the British audiences get answers to the following questions:
If there were restrictions on entering and reporting from Gaza, how many civil liberty advocates from groups such as B’TSELEM – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories were consulted and interviewed as to how BBC can verify reports about civilian killings in Gaza?
How many representatives from Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and other emergency assistance networks were interviewd?
How many items were shown where ex-Israeli pilots demonstrated against air raids on gaza’s civilians? Did BBC show the mother of an Israeli soldier
who spoke against killing of innocent civilians?
How many medical personnel with experience of humanitarian relief and medical assistance in urban war settings i.e. Serbia, Bosnia were interviewed to help BBC audience get a comparative perspective of consequences of armed incursions into civilian areas.
Some news outlets claim that because of restrictions imposed they could only cover the incursion on Gaza from what many name as the hill of same since most coverage despatched from the same spot in Israel overlooking Gaza’s outskirts.
How many times did any news outlets air reports from the Palestine-Egyptian border in Rafa from the Egyptian side which would have served to bring a new dimension to provide the story from more than one restrictive angle?
How many transferred to Rafa for treatment in Egypt were interviewed?
How many medical personnel both Egyptian and foreign were consulted?
Why a comprehensive picture of the gravity of the situation at hospitals in Gaza is not being given? What is the daily pressure on the medical personnel? What kind of shortages are they facing?
What prevents BBC from using commercially available satellite images for a then and now perspective to allow the viewers have an idea how the sea side strip has changed say from 25 December 2009 and today.
How many times Israel’s spokespersons were and still are given airtime
vis-à-vis human right activists and medical experts in urban casualties?
BBC and Sky News among others can easily give the number of appearances and duration form 26 December 2008 and 17 January 2009 for those appearing across its various channels in different bulletins/news programmes:
Mark Regev
Avil Leibovich
Issac Herzog
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and others.
Perhaps an exercise similar to the above will prove helpful to clearly determine if news outlets did make enough efforts to explore and exhaust alternates to allow a fair, neutral and objective coverage of events in Gaza.