That charity broadcast

There were two interesting points to emerge from the debate about the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast.

The first was barely noticed because the Left was so obsessed with the BBC that it had nothing to say about Sky's refusal to broadcast the appeal. Sky's decision split the news organizations between the BBC and Sky, on the one hand, and ITV, Channel 4 and Five on the other. Looked at this way, there were two big international players expressing caution against three networks who no one takes seriously any more on any level. ITN used to be a world player. No longer. Messed around by ITV executives for a generation it has lost its mass audience in this country. On Channel 4 it has had a different problem, equally damaging to its credibility. It has become predictable in its left-wing bias. Jon Snow has become a parody of himself, shouting at Israeli politicians, hectoring and self-righteous. Sky, by contrast, has had a good war in Gaza, just as it did well covering the economic crash last autumn. It has won numerous awards in recent years, including a Bafta for News Coverage for reporting of the Glasgow bombings in April 2008 and has won News Channel of the Year for the sixth year out of seven at the Royal Television society awards. It has joined the BBC, displacing ITN as the second major TV news organization in this country.

The second point was more substantial. Were BBC and Sky right not to show the charity broadcast? Now that we have seen the broadcast, it is clear that both were right and for the reason they gave. News organizations like the BBC and Sky are not just answerable to their domestic audience. They are seen all around the world. In countries where there is no neutral or impartial news organization, people concerned with the truth have to find someone they can rely on for clear and impartial information, for making precisely the kind sof distinctions that the British Left is no longer capable of.

An alliance of clerics, charity workers, backbench Labour MPs, Leftwing journalists and newspapers had a field day attacking the BBC. One Labour MP insisted there was no distinction between Gaza and Darfur or Congo.It is true that in all three places many people, including many innocent people, have suffered and are suffering. At that level there is no distinction. But there are three very different categories of international disaster. The first two are incontrovertible, The third is less clear. The first is natural disaster -- floods, earthquakes, droughts -- which kill many and displace any more. There has never been an argument about this category. Second, there are disasters caused by people. War crimes and acts of genocide on a huge scale, when hundreds of thousands are killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands and more, driven from their homes. Biafra in the 1960s, Rwanda in the 1990s, more recently, Darfur and Congo. There has been debate in some of these cases whether they were acts of genocide or not, but the sheer scale fo the suffering was undeniable.

The third group are cases where there are far fewer deaths and where the politics are so complicated and disputed that debate has raged for weeks (in the case of Gaza) or years (in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo). All that was clear was the suffering and that the suffering was on a far smaller scale than in the first two categories. In each case, the claim for international attention was politicized and based not on criteria of scale but on other criteria -- the events took place in Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo) or involved Israel (Gaza). To show the undisputed suffering in Gaza would mean placing the emphasis entirely on the victims. But who were the pereptrators? Clearly Israel. What was the context for their actions? There was no room for any such conisderation in the DEC broadcast. The implication of their broadcast was that Israel was responsible for this suffering and there were no references either to Hamas or to attacks on Israel. The BBC and Sky were right to argue that to select Gaza for such an appeal was not a straightforward humanitarian issue. It involved questions of context and analysis which the charities and their supporters did not consider, but which are crucial to international news organizations if they are to be trusted, not by John Pilger or the Archbishop of York, but by unknown audiences throughout the post-colonial world who will feel if they cannot trust the BBC on this issue, they will not be able to trust the BBC on anything else.

This question of trust is central and it cannot be fudged. There were times during the Gaza dispute when various individuals, magazines and broadcasters forfeited the right to be trusted on Gaza, and therefore on anything else. Readers and viewers do not pick and choose particular issues. if they do not trust a magazine or a broadcaster on Gaza (or the US Election or Bosnia or the Economic Crisis) they will not turn to them again. John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman on 8th January, wrote that Israel's actions 'fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention'. He called it a 'holocaust-in-the-making' and quoted an American academic critic of Israel, Richard Falk, and his comparison of Israel's actions in Gaza with the actions of Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II. I am sure both Falk and Pilger were writing in good fith. They believe this to be the case. However, such a loss of proportion and such an irresponsible use of historical analogy, will make some readers wonder why The New Statesman can any longer expect to be taken seriously as a news magazine. This is the context in which the debate about Gaza was takingh place in Britain over the past weeks. Demonstrators with placards equating Zionism and Nazism, a documented rise in anti-Semitic attacks, journalists writing as if only they have a monopoly to wrte about human suffering, in particular the suffering of children and major public figures equating the deaths in Gaza with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. It wasn't only critics of the BBC who were angry. During this conflict, many began to wonder if they could trust such news magazines and politicians again. If they could be taken seriously again. If the BBC had broadcast this appeal, without being able to put its emotive pictures and commentary in any form of larger context, it would have forfeited the trust and respect of a significant number of viewers and listeners. It is no exaggeration to say that faced with the decision of whther or not to broadcast this appeal, the BBC came to the edge of an abyss. The BBC Trust and the BBC's most senior journalists stepped back in the name of journalistic impartiality and trust. This was an important turning-point for the BBC and the nature of the attacks it was subjected to, show what has happened to the British Left in the last fifteen years. It is an important moment in British culture and one that deserves further examination.