The British BS company is at it again

BBC is still busy systematically distorting the news, in little ways and in big ways. When they reported the Iranian kidnapping of British soldiers, they went out of their way to write a headline that violates several principles of journalism - UK sailors captured at gunpoint . BBC used a passive voice headline that provides minimum information. Perhaps it was just incompetence, but it looks like BBC was trying to minimize the damage and the identity of the perpetrators. Wouldn't the natural headline  have been, "Iran captures 15 UK sailors at gunpoint."?

 

Below, Melanie Phillips dissects BBC commentary on the Israeli war with Hezbollah (Iran). Actually, Phillips missed a point or two. For example, BBC claimed:

 

The conflict began on 12 July last year, when Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid and captured two Israeli soldiers...

Hezbollah also killed three other soldiers in the raid. Those boys are never coming back.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

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March 22, 2007

The war within the west (12)

An item on BBC Radio Four's Today programme this morning, along with a back-up article in this week's Spectator, provides a snapshot of Britain's moral sickness. Presenter Ed Stourton was trailing a programme he has made, to be broadcast next month, on last summer's Lebanon war. In the article, he repeats two misleading canards about that war:

The conflict began on 12 July last year, when Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid and captured two Israeli soldiers, and by the time the fighting ended almost exactly a month later some 1,200 people had been killed — the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

The Hezbollah attack that started the conflict did not simply consist of the kidnapping of the two soldiers, but also a barrage of rocket fire at Israel's northern towns. It was a significant act of war. Let us not forget also the thousands of Hezbollah rockets trained upon Israel from Lebanon's border, and the regular shellings of northern Israel and cross-border raids from Lebanon that Hezbollah had mounted for more than a decade. As for those who were killed in Lebanon in last summer's war, it is not known how many of them were civilians, since Hezbollah soldiers disguised themselves as civilians; according to the Israelis, 500-600 of these fatalities were actually Hezbollah fighters.

What was notable was that, despite all this, Stourton assumed that Israel's attempt to defend itself against that aggression was illegitimate — and that no reasonable person could disagree. He asked the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, why the Americans and the British had not supported the international calls for an immediate cease-fire.

Continued here