Silly Little Country

Shabby Reporting

Richard Landes cites one simple instance of a lost reporting opportunity. Now it is possible that Dobbie is not just lazy, though my guess is the cause is laziness in some broad sense - the BBC already has its narrative set and following up as Landes suggests would be a lot of work and might not even get airtime.

Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.

A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli caused fatalities and Israeli suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place is so densely populated an area. “The math doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, “200 dead in one day, vs. 20 dead in seven years?” Partaking in the growing chorus of disapproval for Israel’s “disproportionate use of force.”

So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: “The math doesn’t work? If you are so distraught at the loss of life of your own people, why don’t you take care of them? What on earth would possess you not to avail yourselves of what you pleadingly tell us you so desperately need?” As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”

He characterizes the deficiencies, not just of the BBC, but of the CBC and CNN as I have seen it.

And the pathetic thing is, it works even in the West. And it works primarily because of the behavior of the Western media, who systematically frame the conflict in terms of the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David, who do not hesitate to challenge Israeli spokesmen, interrupt them, contradict them; but who fail to do anything of the sort with their Arab interlocutors.

Thus, for hours and days after the story of idling ambulances first broke, BBC never mentioned it, never raised it with the multiple Palestinian and NGO and UN officials and spokespeople who complained bitterly about the conditions of the hospitals. On the contrary, they continued to run footage of complaints from Gaza about the terrible condition of the hospitals and calls for international intervention to save the poor people of Gaza. This enables the worst kind of hypocrisy, of demopathic behavior — accuse others of violations of a humanitarian code which you flout, not only with your enemies, but with your own people.

A few hours ago, I heard an unchallenged Palestinian spokesman on CNN using the phrase 'carpet bombing'. Only a short while earlier, CNN had broadcast a picture of a Gazan marketplace with absolutely no sign of damage.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:19 PM