Choosing an angle

Talking a few screengrabs from the home pages of the BBC, Sky and ITV News websites tonight shows the same story leading each broadcaster's online news coverage.

It also shows, however, some differences in focus, with ITV and Sky taking somewhat different tacks to the BBC.

ITV's coverage is straightforward. Its main story is:

Brits begin flying home from Tunisia after terror alert

British holidaymakers are returning home from Tunisia today after the Foreign Office warned a further terrorist attack 'highly likely'

And its accompanying stories are:  

* Ireland government advises against Tunisia travel

* What to do if you're in or were going to Tunisia

Sky News's coverage leads with a new video showing how the "gunman" Rezgui was "unchallenged by security forces, tourists or hotel staff", and has the following accompanying stories:

*Irish told to leave Tunisia as Britons flee

*Tunisia massacre killer's parents defend son

The BBC, alone among the three broadcasters, doesn't feature the news that the Irish government has joined the British government in telling its citizens to leave Tunisia. 

Its main story is:

Tunisia Britons fly home after alert

The first British tourists fly home from Tunisia. as the UK defends its decision to advise all British nationals to leave the country

The use of "as the UK defends its decision", uniquely among the three broadcasters, raises a question mark over the British government's decision.

The BBC's accompanying articles are...

* Militants killed in Tunisia mountains

* What next for Tunisia holidaymakers?

* "We would have stayed in Tunisia"

* Tunisia Britons 'confused' and 'angry' 

...two for which also put dissatisfaction with the UK government's decision at the forefront of BBC online readers' minds.

There usually seems to be an angle when it comes to BBC reporting. Do you agree that there's one here?

"I don't think they were aware of what they were doing"

Oh my! Fergal Keane was 'fergal keaning' splendidly on this morning's Broadcasting House. 

Reporting from Tunisia, he clearly felt the hand of history on his shoulder:

If you ever wanted an example of how the past can lay claim to the present, it's here and now.

Sad voice. "The problems of unemployment, of lingering police repression, continue to cause alienation among many young men". There are "people looking purposeless" in poor districts - the kind of people drawn to the call of jihad.

Of course, it's easy to be cynical. Fergal also found some interesting responses: He spoke to a campaigner against jihadism who was angry at the Tunisian government for failing to take notice of the ongoing warnings of anti-jihadi protestors about the terrorist threat; and a crowd rushed towards him, having seen he was a Westerner, to offer their condolences. One man said, with deep passion, that Tunisia should be a place for everyone, "even the Jews". 

However...

One of the ways that bias in any kind of reporting could be monitored (it's recently struck me) is to check out how the report ends. What message does it choose to end with? What final thoughts are left lingering in the listener's ear? 

Well, this is the message that Fergal chose to end on. It came from the imam of the local mosque:

I don't think there are any religious reasons behind the act. I think those young men were lured by money and tempted by money more than by anything else. They were brainwashed and I don't think they were aware of what they were doing. 

Well, I do think there might have been religious reasons behind the act. Knowing that they would almost certainly be killed after carrying out their atrocity, I'm not convinced by the imam's "lured by money" excuse. And I very much doubt they weren't aware of what they were doing in going to Tunisia's national museum, fully-armed, and slaughtering every white face they could see. 

I suspect Fergal Keane chose to end his piece with that absurd statement from the imam because it puts across a couple of messages that he, Fergal Keane, also wishes to put across: (a) that such terrorist atrocities have nothing to do with Islam, and (b) that there are reasons (unemployment, poverty, police repression - the examples he cited earlier in the report) which might explain why these alienated, purposeless young men go off beheading, shooting tourists, slaughtering shoppers, raping women, persecuting followers of other religions, chucking gays off buildings, etc - which is a very 'nice', liberal way of looking at things but probably a long way away from being anything like the whole story.

The Two Faces of Tunisia

Douglas Murray has written a thought-provoking post about the 'Arab Winter' over at The Spectator. Its starting point is the man Sue and I have been keeping a careful eye on for some two years now, ever since we both heard his daughter being courted by Paddy O'Connell's Broadcasting House back in January 2011. He's Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the guiding light behind post-revolutionary Tunisia's election-winning Islamist party, Ennahda. 

Mr. Murray is scathing about Britain's role in helping his rise to power and goes on to describe the sheikh's influence on the North African country in this way:

Since returning to Tunisia this Brotherhood leader and leading Hamas fan, has – through his leadership of the major Brotherhood party in the coalition – helped to lead Tunisia down the road of Islamic fascism.

Douglas Murray reports that Mr. Ghannouchi has recently taken part in a Tunisia-based ‘International Conference in Support of Palestinian Prisoners in the Jails of the Zionist Occupation' - a conference so closely tied to Hamas that the Palestinian Authority (Mahmoud Abbas's lot) were only invited as ‘observers’, provoking them to boycott the event in response to this snub. Having sat alongside a convicted Hamas terrorist who helped orchestrate the murder of eight Israeli children in a suicide bombing on a pizza restaurant, Sheikh Rachid went on to make the following statements:

‘Every day, the ummah is getting closer to the liberation of Jerusalem and Palestine…’

'Allah, permit me to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque, or [grant] me martyrdom at Jerusalem’s doorstep.’

Not very moderate remarks, are they? And yet 'moderate' is the word that keeps getting applied to Rachid al-Ghannouchi and his Ennahda party - not least by the BBC. And that's been going on for some time.

Shamelessly plugging an old comment of mine from a Biased BBC Open Thread from the early days of the 'Arab Spring', he's how I heard the afore-mentioned appearance by Mr. al-Ghannouchi's daughter at the time:

Craig has commented 16 January 2011,19:54:40

George R's predicted likely Islamist takeover of Tunisia may be about the get the BBC's blessing if this morning's Broadcasting House (Radio 4) is anything to go by.     

The programme put in a call to the daughter of one of the exiled opposition leaders and, almost inevitably, it was an Islamist politician: "Yusra Khreeji is the daughter of Rached Ghannouchi, the chairman of the Tunisian moderate Islamist En Nahda movement".     

    

When the likes of Paddy O'Connell call an Islamist movement "moderate", we know from experience that this probably needs taking with a large pinch of salt.  Does a "moderate" man really believe that Zionists are plotting to take over the world? Sheikh Ghannouchi does:       

"The Zionist project wants to inherit our Ummah and inherit the West itself. It wants to lead the world. After (the natural shift of) the center of civilization from London to Washington, it wants to move it to Orshalim (Jerusalem) and destroy all other civilizational and religious projects we have today."     

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/ghanush.htm     

Paddy O'Connell asked Ms Khreeji nothing about her father's ideology.    

 Sue was soon on the case too:

Toppling Tyrants

  By Sue | January 29, 2011

Throughout the uprisings in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, and of course Egypt, the BBC has avoided raising the alarm over the danger, some say inevitability, that when repressive dictatorships topple, there’s a vacuum, and in Muslim lands, Islamists are waiting in the wings, poised and raring to go. The BBC aint bovvered.

Political turmoil in Lebanon poses a serious threat to the stability of the region, but in an erratic tribute to impartiality, the BBC reports the utterances of Hassan Nasrallah, being scrupulously careful to avoid taking sides.

Kevin Connolly thinks the appointment of a pro-Hezbollah PM is a way out of Lebanon’s immediate political crisis, with the caveat: “It is an uncomfortable outcome for the US, which denounces Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation and reflects the growing regional influence of the movement’s sponsors, Iran and Syria.”

The Syria/Iran infiltration of Lebanon may not worry the BBC, but then they wouldn’t be worried by the content of this article by Michael J Totten.

“Hezbollah had 10,000 rockets before the war in 2006. Now it has between 40,000 and 50,000. Some are stored in warehouses. Others are hidden away a few at a time in private homes.”

Hezbollah positions itself amongst houses and mosques because they know the Israelis cannot retaliate without killing civilians.

“Its fighters and officers wear no uniforms. Only rarely do they carry guns out in the open.”

The BBC should be very alarmed at what is happening in Lebanon, not complacently telling us that the political crisis is over.

The Foreign Office is reported as stating that they have no objection to dictators being overthrown, but they’d prefer it if they were replaced by secular rather than religious governments. For example, “democratically,” as in Lebanon. What? Are my ears deceiving me?

Does this mean that the Foreign Office thinks that Hezbollah, having murdered the Lebanese Prime Minister, refused to accept responsibility for the murder, promised to cut off the hand of any accuser, embedded a massive stockpile of arms within civilian areas and in mosques, not to mention being dedicated to the destruction of Israel – does the foreign office or a spokesperson thereof, really hold Hezbollah’s roughshod trampling over the Lebanese government as an example of democracy, desirable for Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen et al ? And to add insult to that salty wound William Hague has gone off to suck up to Syria.

I wrote here about the BBC’s decisive action over a film produced by Christopher Mitchell. They abandoned it.