Friday 20 November 2020

Just 60 or so words


It's impossible to keep up with the BBC at the moment. 

Their reports and articles, like infinite numbers, seem far too many in number for a human brain to handle.

But here's one very short example from BBC World/BBC One overnight:

 A BBC newsreader read out the following:
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has become the first top US diplomat to pay official visits to both a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and to the Golan Heights, seized by Israel from Syria in 1967. The Trump Administration has taken a staunchly pro-Israel position, both on settlements and on Jerusalem in defiance of international law.

A simple fact-stating BBC news bulletin?

Hardly.

I think those words clearly make out both Israel and the Trump Administration to be the bad guys - much as you'd expect from the BBC. 

It's all in the language, of course. 

Doesn't it make Israel sound aggressively bad for both "occupying" the West Bank (Mr Abbas's territory) and "seizing" the Golan Heights back in 1967 (context please BBC?) from the extraordinarily brutal, war-mongering Ba'athist regime of Salah Jadid - someone who even Hafez al-Assad found far too extreme and too much of an adventurist as far as Israel goes? 

And the loaded adverb describing the Trump Administration "pro-Israel position", "staunchly", is tied to the phrase "in defiance of international law" - which, on Jerusalem especially, is highly disputed, and which the BBC ought to acknowledge is highly disputed, and something that US presidents of both parties (Democrat and Republican, including the ones the BBC liked) have previously committed to.

Just 60 or so words, yet so much black-and-white opinion.

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