UK TV censorship bolsters Israel's Lebanon invasion crimes, Hybrid war, Asymmetric war, Endless war

Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah continues to repel Israeli aggression on the Lebanese soil while hitting the regime’s targets deep inside the occupied territories.

When is an invasion not an invasion? When the British media report on Israel…
Des Freedman 03Oct24

https://www.counterfire.org/article/when-is-an-invasion-not-an-invasion-when-the-british-media-report-on-israel/

The UK media’s reporting consistently favours Israel to the extent of reflecting UK foreign policy rather than reality, argues Des Freedman
The mainstream media’s coverage of Israel’s bombing of Beirut and its subsequent invasion of Lebanon is straight out of its playbook for how they cover Israel and Palestine more generally.

Their instinctive position is to marginalise the impact of Israeli state violence (in this case, on ordinary Lebanese people, one million of whom have had to flee in recent days), to neglect the context of Israel’s previous occupations of Lebanon, to present Israel as the innocent victim of Hezbollah rocket attacks (when data show this not to be the case) and to euphemise the actions of the Israeli military.

For example, the UK’s leading public-service news outlets initially failed to call Israel’s invasion of Lebanon an ‘invasion’. This was certainly not the case when reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that led to the Gulf War.

On Tuesday morning, 1 October, when Israeli troops had already crossed the border, the BBC’s headline was ‘Israel says troops enter Lebanon for “limited, targeted” ground raids on Hezbollah’. ITV News led with a very similar headline. Hugo Bachega, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent on the ground in Beirut described it simply as a ‘ground incursion’ (not that different to the IDF spokesperson’s description of the invasion as a ‘raid’). Only later in the day did both news organisations change their language to recognise that this was indeed an invasion.

Not to have immediately described it in these terms is both spineless and symptomatic of a long-standing nervousness on the part of the media to stand up to Israeli atrocities and to call out Israeli spokespeople.

What’s extraordinary is that the right-wing press were actually more prepared to describe this as an ‘invasion’ that the more ‘liberal’ media. Tuesday morning’s newspaper headlines – prepared before the actual invasion had started – in The Times, Telegraph and Mail all used the word while the Guardian’s overnight lead simply referred to ‘ground attacks on Hezbollah’. Some twelve hours after the invasion started, the Financial Times was still using a headline of ‘Israeli troops move into Lebanon’ as if this was some sort of inconsequential tactical manoeuvre and that the IDF was merely stretching its legs.

Asymmetric coverage

This behaviour follows similar euphemisms when reporting on the huge bombardment by Israeli forces on Beirut on 27 September that killed hundreds of people. The BBC’s headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’ while ITV News went with ‘strikes hit Beirut’, and Sky following suit with ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for the straightforward and accurate statement of Al Jazeera: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis).

As we have seen so often in relation to reporting on Gaza, broadcasters are reluctant to name Israel directly and immediately as the source of violence as if these ‘strikes’ and ‘blasts’ just materialise from the night sky. It’s similar to the mainstream media’s reporting of deaths in Gaza where, as the Centre for Media Monitoring (CMM) argued in its comprehensive report earlier this year, ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel) and the action (shot, bombed, killed) is used’ in contrast to the far more ‘emotive’ language used when covering the deaths of Israelis.

Yet despite this asymmetry of media coverage, it’s never enough for supporters of Israel who seem to think that any pro-Palestinian voice on the airwaves or online is evidence of some underlying anti-Semitism across the media. The Jewish Chronicle, desperate to regain some credibility after it published made-up stories about Israeli intelligence, went onto the attack. Stephen Pollard, its former editor who once described the JC as ‘Israel’s candid friend’, fumed that the BBC’s flagship Today programme gave airtime to an ‘Iranian government apologist, Prof Seyed Mohammad Marandi of Teheran University, to broadcast a series of grotesque antisemitic slurs.’

Obviously having an ‘Iranian government apologist’ on the radio meant a little less time for Israeli government apologists to appear on the Today programme, a particularly frequent event given the regular slots given to people like Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi H or various Israeli government spokespeople like David Mencer who was allowed to make the outrageous claim that ‘we don’t want to harm ordinary Gazans’ and that the IDF.....