Melanie Reid has hit out at Fergal Keane's reporting for the BBC in Lebanon yesterday, in an extraordinarily heartless article in the Herald:
There was one particularly ghastly example of Keane as emoter-in-chief last week, when he followed the plight of a Lebanese family wrenched apart while fleeing their country by sea. In the turmoil of embarking, the family were separated: the mother got on a ship for Cyprus; her children did not. We were subject to offensive, lingering camera work of the two crying little boys, as close as I have seen the BBC go to the pornography of grief. Moreover, the report failed to make clear that the boys were all the time in the company of their father. It reminded me, strikingly, of one of those manipulative, tear-jerking clips shown on Red Nose Day: the ones designed to make people reach for their credit cards.
Even the most ardent supporters of Israel manage to pause, no matter how insincerely, to acknowledge the suffering in Lebanon. Reid herself described tales of woe in the most vivid manner, but airily dismissed it all as an inconvenience and blot on her television screen.
Without the coverage of Keane and others, the news agenda would surely have moved on elsewhere by now. Because of it, at least there is some international talk of a ceasefire.
I also happen to think what we've seen from Beirut, Tyre and Qana, is exactly what has happened in Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah and countless other towns and villages in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last few years. It's just that now reporters aren't embedded with US and UK troops - they're off the leash and telling people what the horror of war is. Hopefully it will go some way to stopping it.
Hence the pro-Israeli obsession with criticising the reporting with all sorts of excuses ranging from "it's all staged by Hizbullah and not real", to "it's Hizbullah's fault for hiding amongst civilians", to "we've told them all to get out so it's their own fault anyway".
"Off the leash"???? Would they rather us live in a world where reporter censorship is the norm?
Posted by: Mohammad | 03 August 2006 at 12:14 PM