{"id":5944,"date":"2024-05-05T13:01:41","date_gmt":"2024-05-05T11:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5944"},"modified":"2024-05-05T13:01:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-05T11:01:41","slug":"why-the-media-have-failed-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2024-05-05\/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the media have failed Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

The media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, doubt and confusion. Our job is to explode that lie, denying them and the political class they protect an alibi<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

[This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance\u2019s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.<\/p>\n

First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.<\/p>\n

Israel has killed a tenth of their number \u2013 some 100 journalists \u2013 as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel\u2019s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

Second, we must shame the western media \u2013 not least the BBC \u2013 who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.<\/p>\n

The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa\u2019s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January \u2013 a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC\u2019s reporting.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel\u2019s hollow legal response.<\/p>\n

The BBC\u2019s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army \u2013 Russia\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv\u2019s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.<\/p>\n

BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post \u2013 apparently approvingly \u2013 a diagram<\/a> showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.<\/p>\n

Two years later, in its coverage of Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.<\/p>\n

It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks \u2013 even though those soldiers, unlike Russia\u2019s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.<\/p>\n

Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.<\/p>\n

But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren\u2019t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.<\/p>\n

The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.<\/p>\n

There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel\u2019s genocide, even if opposing Russia\u2019s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.<\/p>\n

The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.<\/p>\n