What’s on the tube? CNN and BBC coverage of Gaza versus Russia’s Vesti reporting
What I am about to say is counter-intuitive, which, I submit, makes it all the more essential to set it out explicitly.
It appears that CNN and BBC coverage of the Israel-Hamas war is quite favorable to the Palestinian cause and doing a good job of exposing Israeli war crimes. Meanwhile, Russia’s leading news program Vesti is doing its best to be ‘neutral’ or ‘balanced.’
How can this be? After all, both CNN and BBC usually promote the foreign policy positions of their governments, and both the USA and UK are throwing all support behind Israel, calling the operation in Gaza a matter of legitimate defense.
What brings me to reach these general observations?
For a starter, CNN is devoting a lot of air time to the terrible deprivations suffered by the Palestinians living in Gaza ever since the Israelis cut off all supplies of fuel, drinking water, medical supplies and food into the enclave. It is now devoting even more air time to the disastrous situation in the Gaza hospitals, interviewing medical staff there. All of this reporting is in line with the priority CNN normally gives to “human interest” stories. But the net result is strongly anti-Netanyahu, anti-Israeli.
What is even more surprising, the BBC is actually trying to practice proper journalism, which marks a great departure from its full time propaganda broadcasts when the subject dominating the news was the Ukraine war. They only gave the Kiev side of the conflict and took every allegation of war crimes issued by Zelensky to be God’s honest truth.
This evening the BBC aired an interview with one of the Israeli medical authorities which was conducted in the spirit of “hard talk,” with probing questions about the death and destruction that the Tsahal is carrying out in the immediate vicinity of the Al-Shifa hospital in Northern Gaza. What has been done to implement the plan of evacuating the babies on incubators by Israeli ambulances, he asked and asked again. He allowed the Israeli spokesman to hang himself with the rope he was given. The host of the BBC program under that heading of Hard Talk, Stephen Sackur, never does this when he is facing a sacred cow, like John Kerry, for example. Now, for Israel, the rules of the game have changed. Nothing is taken for granted. The journalist doesn’t say it, but the Israeli official spokesman, by his own words, is shown up to be an outrageous liar and a deeply immoral person.
Meanwhile, Russian news on state television divides air time evenly between the atrocities being committed by Tsahal today and the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October. Those last named atrocities are not fresh news, you say. No matter: the Russian journalist takes us on today’s tour of one kibbutz in the South of Israel and shows us afresh how the inhabitants were burned alive and what was left of their lodgings after the Hamas rampage.
To be sure, Vesti is telling its audience about the horrors of being penned in Gaza today under Israeli attack. But it lets ordinary people tell the story, not the journalist himself. Now that 70 Russian passport holders were allowed to leave Gaza today, Vesti interviewed several after their arrival in Cairo for processing by Russian consular officials and just before they were flown to Moscow on special transport planes sent in by the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. They complained about food shortages and worries over their safety given the level of Israeli bombing. But that is not as shocking as the photos of babies in Al-Shifa getting no medical care for lack of electricity and medical supplies, which is what the BBC posted.
I do not have easy explanations for the rather unexpected editorial positions of the two major Western broadcasters and of the Russian state television. But it is likely that both domestic and international considerations were taken into account by the respective decision makers.
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Before closing these brief remarks on Russian media, I do want to signal something else that is coming to the fore and which I will be reporting on in detail as it progresses. I have in mind the debate within Russian elites over how the war in Ukraine should end. This is becoming all the more timely now that there appears to be growing agreement in the United States, in Europe that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a massive failure and there are signs of reluctance to extend further money or equipment to Kiev. The stage is being set for Western demands to end the fighting and negotiate a peace with Moscow. But how will Moscow respond to the likely ‘humanitarian’ pleas to end the deaths?
So far the Kremlin has been spared the need to find clever arguments for continuing the war to total victory. Zelensky’s law prohibiting negotiating a settlement with Russia so long as Putin is in power has done the trick for them. But Zelensky’s tenure in office may well be coming to a close and whomever the U.S. slots into the job would also be given a script that would appeal to the bleaters for peace in the West while putting the Russians on the back foot.
Today’s edition of Sixty Minutes already was presenting some thoughts on this very subject. We heard that if the West offered to recognize Ukraine’s loss of the territory now occupied by Russia, then further conditions would have to be set by Moscow, for example, at a minimum, demilitarization of the Ukrainian regions bordering Russia, meaning Kharkov in particular. But there are many hard liners in Moscow who want to stop at nothing short of mandatory neutrality for the whole of Ukraine and thorough going regime change that removes from their positions of power the neo-Nazi minders that have controlled Zelensky, not just president himself.
As this internal debate in Russia develops, I will be certain to report on it.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023