More of the same

I just watched last night's Newsnight. 

There were three major interviews, all fascinating. 

The first two - with (British) former U.S. military advisor Emma Sky on Obama's failure over Iraq and former David Cameron advisor Steve Hilton on his 'human revolution' - placed the views of the interviewee first, with the BBC interviewer mostly smiling on, all agog. 

Only the third interview, with 91-year-old former Israel prime minister and president Shimon Peres, looking at the recent history of Israel, saw the interviewer, Evan Davis (without being wildly hostile), move much more to centre stage, ask nothing but critical questions (about Israel), interrupt his guest a fair bit, and, generally, sit back and look quizzical and unsmiling throughout.  

I thought there was a marked difference between those interviews.

And as for the BBC World Service's Business Matters and the opening episode of its "week of coverage from Israel and the Palestinian territories", entitled Live from Gaza: Business Behind the Blockade,...

...well, just allow me to quote you a bit from presenter Roger Hearing's introduction, which seems to me to achieve the status of being truly 'beyond parody':

In this programme we're going to try and park the politics and look at how an economy under these circumstances functions at all.

One of the reasons Gaza's often described as 'the largest open air prison in the world'...