The UK media’s reporting consistently favours Israel to the extent of reflecting UK foreign policy rather than reality, argues Des Freedman 

The mainstream media’s coverage of Israel’s bombing of Beirut and its subsequent invasion of Lebanon is straight out of its playbook for how they cover Israel and Palestine more generally. 

Their instinctive position is to marginalise the impact of Israeli state violence (in this case, on ordinary Lebanese people, one million of whom have had to flee in recent days), to neglect the context of Israel’s previous occupations of Lebanon, to present Israel as the innocent victim of Hezbollah rocket attacks (when data show this not to be the case) and to euphemise the actions of the Israeli military. 

For example, the UK’s leading public-service news outlets initially failed to call Israel’s invasion of Lebanon an ‘invasion’. This was certainly not the case when reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that led to the Gulf War. 

On Tuesday morning, 1 October, when Israeli troops had already crossed the border, the BBC’s headline was ‘Israel says troops enter Lebanon for “limited, targeted” ground raids on Hezbollah’. ITV News led with a very similar headline. Hugo Bachega, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent on the ground in Beirut described it simply as a ‘ground incursion’ (not that different to the IDF spokesperson’s description of the invasion as a ‘raid’). Only later in the day did both news organisations change their language to recognise that this was indeed an invasion. 

Not to have immediately described it in these terms is both spineless and symptomatic of a long-standing nervousness on the part of the media to stand up to Israeli atrocities and to call out Israeli spokespeople. 

What’s extraordinary is that the right-wing press were actually more prepared to describe this as an ‘invasion’ that the more ‘liberal’ media. Tuesday morning’s newspaper headlines – prepared before the actual invasion had started – in The Times, Telegraph and Mail all used the word while the Guardian’s overnight lead simply referred to ‘ground attacks on Hezbollah’.  Some twelve hours after the invasion started, the Financial Times was still using a headline of ‘Israeli troops move into Lebanon’ as if this was some sort of inconsequential tactical manoeuvre and that the IDF was merely stretching its legs. 

Asymmetric coverage  

This behaviour follows similar euphemisms when reporting on the huge bombardment by Israeli forces on Beirut on 27 September that killed hundreds of people. The BBC’s headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’ while ITV News went with ‘strikes hit Beirut’, and Sky following suit with ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for the straightforward and accurate statement of Al Jazeera: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). 

As we have seen so often in relation to reporting on Gaza, broadcasters are reluctant to name Israel directly and immediately as the source of violence as if these ‘strikes’ and ‘blasts’ just materialise from the night sky. It’s similar to the mainstream media’s reporting of deaths in Gaza where, as the Centre for Media Monitoring (CMM) argued in its comprehensive report earlier this year, ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel) and the action (shot, bombed, killed) is used’ in contrast to the far more ‘emotive’ language used when covering the deaths of Israelis. 

Yet despite this asymmetry of media coverage, it’s never enough for supporters of Israel who seem to think that any pro-Palestinian voice on the airwaves or online is evidence of some underlying anti-Semitism across the media. The Jewish Chronicle, desperate to regain some credibility after it published made-up stories about Israeli intelligence, went onto the attack. Stephen Pollard, its former editor who once described the JC as ‘Israel’s candid friend’, fumed that the BBC’s flagship Today programme gave airtime to an ‘Iranian government apologist, Prof Seyed Mohammad Marandi of Teheran University, to broadcast a series of grotesque antisemitic slurs.’ 

Obviously having an ‘Iranian government apologist’ on the radio meant a little less time for Israeli government apologists to appear on the Today programme, a particularly frequent event given the regular slots given to people like Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely or various Israeli government spokespeople like David Mencer who was allowed to make the outrageous claim that ‘we don’t want to harm ordinary Gazans’ and that the IDF was taking ‘all possible steps’ to avoid harming civilians. 

What particularly offends pro-Israel voices is any suggestion that genocide might be taking place in Gaza, despite the findings of the International Court of Justice, or that Lebanon has the same right to self-defence that we are constantly told Israel has. As the Centre for Media Monitoring pointed out in relation to Gaza, there is a hugely disproportionate number of pieces in the media insisting that Israel has the right to defend itself in relation to those same rights being extended to Palestinians – and now to the Lebanese. 

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon has massively destabilised an already volatile situation. Journalists are now waking up to this fact without acknowledging how their asymmetrical coverage of Israelis and Palestinians has contributed to this escalation. Yet, while some civil servants involved in organising arms sales to Israel have publicly expressed their concerns that they might be complicit with war crimes in Gaza, the media tend not to reflect on their own role in legitimising Israel’s military objectives and reproducing a Western lens through which events in the Middle East are understood. 

This is indeed a crisis with global ramifications but the UK media are far from innocent bystanders. When we march on Saturday to demand ‘Hands off Lebanon’ and to stop arming Israel, we also need to demand that the UK’s leading news organisations stop framing this war as one where Israel has an unambiguous right to self-defence that is denied to anyone else in the region. That is not independent journalism but British foreign policy. 

This is a longer version of a piece, ‘Bombs Fall, Armies Move’, that first appeared on the LRB Blog.