Has the BBC forgotten the dangers of biased reporting?
Gary O’Donoghue seems to have gone native. As a result, we should ask: has the BBC forgotten the dangers of biased reporting?
In his piece on the BBC News website, he refers to “Iran’s brazen attack directly targeting Israel on Saturday”.
The definition of “brazen” is “bold and without shame” – but why should Iran be ashamed of retaliating after Israel aimed an airstrike at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, levelling it and killing 13 people? UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron has admitted that this country would take “very strong action” if one of our own consulates in a foreign country was subjected to a similar terrorist attack by an aggressive third nation.
The BBC reporter’s use of the word slants his entire report, making it seem that Iran is in the wrong – when that country was only doing exactly what Cameron said the UK would do, in its place.
Highly successful?
O’Donoghue goes on to suggest that Iran’s airstrike, comprising “more than 300 missiles and drones” was repelled by a “highly successful, hand-in-glove military action by the US and Israel”. Again, has the BBC forgotten the dangers of biased reporting? A few missiles did get through Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defences – those targeting the Israeli airbase from which the attack on Iran’s Damascus consulate is believed to have been launched.
The others are believed to have been nothing more than a diversion, intended to reveal the locations of Israel’s air defence emplacements.
So Iran’s bombs reached their primary target, and also achieved a secondary target of providing detailed intelligence to Israel’s enemies. And the defence against them was “highly successful”? Hmm.
Contradictory lobbying
At least O’Donoghue is right about one thing: US President Joe Biden, like Cameron, must now urge Israel not to do anything that escalates this Middle East regional conflict further.
This, it seems, requires contradictory lobbying: “The president has to simultaneously lower the temperature with Iran, but at the same time, make Tehran understand there is a cost to its actions.”
It’s a forlorn hope. Why should Iran step down, when it was only avenging its sovereign territory that had been attacked, and defending its other territories from further attack? We have all been told ad nauseum that Israel has a right to defend itself; doesn’t Iran have the same right?
So, yet again, has the BBC forgotten the dangers of biased reporting? If Tehran has to “understand there is a cost to its actions”, why has nothing been done to make Tel Aviv aware that its actions should carry the same costs?
Is Biden just a doddery old hypocrite, along with other Western government representatives, like Cameron? And is O’Donoghue failing to report that in an impartial, fact-based way?
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