There's no doubt where the Sun stands. The day after Israel killed 56 in Qana, it gave ten paragraphs to the massacre, 11 to the protests (under the headline "Hate in the raw as mob rams UN") and 41 to Tony Blair's address to Rupert Murdoch's court in California.
But what of the BBC? John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman last week, and the MediaLens website insist it is far too generous to Israel. Stephen Pollard, the blogger and ubiquitous newspaper commentator, detects chronic anti-Israeli bias. Even the BBC online weather, he notes, carries no information for Israel. Indeed it doesn't, if you click on the site's Middle East map, though neither is there information for Lebanon. However, if Pollard uses the search facility, he will find weather details for eight locations in Israel, but only four in Lebanon, one in Palestine and one in Iran. Pollard's may prove to be the silliest comment that will ever be made about media bias, but I wouldn't count on it.
I am going to stick my neck out and say that, since it began bombing Lebanon, Israel, which usually gets a good press, has had a bad press.
The BBC has sent the emotive Fergal Keane to Lebanon and even the Daily Sport gave its centre spread, normally devoted to topless babes, to horrific Middle East pictures, and a call for protests at the Israeli embassy. The most decisive evidence comes from a Daily Telegraph poll, showing that 63 per cent of Britons think Israel's behaviour "has been inappropriate and disproportionate". This view must have been formed by media coverage.
In Israel, however, 95 per cent think its campaign is "justified and correct". In the UK, the Jewish Chronicle interviewed 100 British Jews at random and found only six against the Israeli actions. So the British media are more anti-Israeli than usual, while Jews here and in Israel are more supportive, and complain, in greater numbers than usual, about media bias.
Numbers game
Why? It starts with pictures. The results of bombing - whether a suicide bombing or bombing from the air - can be filmed. A kidnapping or a six-hour wait at an Israeli West Bank checkpoint can't. Moreover, the Israelis largely control entry to the West Bank and Gaza and can make it hard for reporters to establish exactly what happened, as they did in Jenin. In Beirut, Tyre and Qana, slaughtered children are more accessible. Then, as Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group pointed out to me the other day, there are the peculiar media rules about numbers.
The death of 56 people at once is a bigger and more shocking story than the same number of deaths on, say, eight separate occasions. Usually, therefore, suicide bombings in Israel get more coverage than the more frequent and numerous deaths of Palestinians.
What both sides complain about, when the pictures show them in a bad light, is lack of context. Pro-Palestinians often point out that many Britons think the Palestinians invaded Israel. Now British Jews criticise the failure to explain that Hezbollah's incursions threaten Israel's very existence in a way that even suicide bombers don't. This explains the unusual level of support for Israeli military action, both domestically and in the diaspora. Hezbollah, it is argued, is an Iranian proxy and Iran's leaders have not only vowed to destroy Israel but may soon have the means to do so. Israel has ceased to occupy both Lebanon and Gaza. Attacks from those quarters, therefore, suggest Israel will not be safe even behind her own borders.
The trouble is that, in the Middle East, context can go on for ever.
Israel bombed Lebanon because its soldiers were kidnapped. Which is because Israel holds Lebanese prisoners because they are supporters of Hezbollah, which was formed after Israel invaded Lebanon, causing 15,000 to 20,000 deaths, in 1982. Which was because it was threatened by Palestinian fighters in Lebanon who were exiled because Israel occupied their land in 1967 after she had been attacked by Arab countries. Which was because . . . you can go back to biblical times, and, if you try to get it all into a news bulletin, everybody will switch over to Big Brother except Stephen Pollard and the MediaLens crew.
And what of America's role? When reporters say that Hezbollah uses Iranian-supplied rockets, shouldn't they also say that Israel uses American-made bombs? I am sure they should, but it opens a whole new avenue of contextualisation.
As does this column. I have used the word "kidnapped". This is the word Israelis are using, yet, when Israel seizes people, they are said to be "arrested". Someone tried to unravel this linguistic knot on the BBC editors' blog. He got 165 comments, mostly hostile.
I fear that attempts at fairness and balance in the Middle East are doomed. Best to take one side or the other. At least you'll have some friends.
