Back Towards The Locus

Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, has given a skillfully bland defence of the nauseating decision not to air a DEC appeal for Gaza. He argues that “us[ing] pictures which are the same or similar to those we would be using in our news programmes” and soliciting donations “could be interpreted as taking a political stance on an ongoing story“.

I suspect that what he fears is the DEC description of the situation as a “humanitarian crisis“. In the face of aid organisations, the UN and, well, reality, Tzpini Livni has claimed that there is “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. That’s, apparently, what “impartiality” means for the BBC: that one can’t use facts for fear of contradicting lies.

I’d be interesting to know the motivation behind this squalid little farce. Daniel has noted the Sachsgate fall-out, but I’m not sure that the same feverish moral panic would apply (Melanie “I Spend My Saturdays Screaming From The Cliff-Tops” Phillips would obviously disagree). Bishop Hill has an interesting theory that the Beeb are fearing the Balen Report. The report, which examined the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, was initially blocked from publication, but the House of Lords are apparently expected to rule that it should be available under the Freedom of Information Act. If it indicated that there was institutional anti-Israel bias, Thompson & co. could always say “Woah, there! Didn’t you see the bitching that we got for this?”.

Still, this seems – while entertainingly devious – rather unlikely. For one thing, independent panels have already suggested that the BBC is anti-Palestinian, and so even if this report strongly disagreed (and I think it’d have to be fairly imaginative to) the issue would simply be divided, debated and forgotten about until the next report. I suspect that stupidity has a fairly weighty hand in this. Yes, showing the weight of Palestinian suffering would nudge the viewer towards a certain conclusion, but without the weight of Palestinian suffering there isn’t much to show.