<p>I felt this was a interesting article about media and Hezbullah. It has some itneresting quotes and testimonials made by jouranlist reporting from Hezbullah areas. I would suggest reading up until the end of the discussion on CNN.</p>
<p>Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are also actively fanning the flames.</p>
<p>The BBC World Service has a strong claim to be the number-one villain. It has come to sound like a virtual propaganda tool for Hizbullah. And as it desperately attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, it has introduced a new charge one which I have heard several times on air in recent days.</p>
<p>The newscaster reads out carefully selected audience comments. Among these are invariably contained some version of the claim that Israels attack on Lebanon will serve as a recruitment drive for al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>But if anything is going to win new recruits for the likes of Osama bin Laden, it will not be Israels defensive actions, which are far less damaging than Western TV stations would have us believe, but the inflammatory and hopelessly one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news organizations.</p>
<p>While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in the aftermath of World War II air raids. International television channels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been razed.</p>
<p>A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hizbullah command centers in the citys southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used to ferry Hizbullah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.</p>
<p>From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia.</p>
<p>In fact Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civilians even though this has proven extremely difficult and often tragically impossible, since members of Hizbullah, the self-styled Party of God, have deliberately ensconced themselves in civilian homes. Nevertheless the civilian death toll has been mercifully low compared to other international conflicts in recent years.</p>
<p>A CNN MAN LETS SLIP</p>
<p>The BBC, which courtesy of the British tax payer is the worlds biggest and most lavishly funded news organization, would of course never reveal how selective their reports are, since such a disclosure might spoil their campaign to demonize Israel and those who support her. But one senior British journalist, working for another company, last week let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted.</p>
<p>CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon, was stage-managed from start to finish by Hizbullah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hizbullahs press officer and that Hizbullah have very, very sophisticated and slick media operations.</p>
<p>When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program Reliable Sources, Robertson acknowledged that Hizbullah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hizbullah had control of the situation, Robertson said. They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didnt have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath.</p>
<p>Robertson added that Hizbullah has very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access into those areas. You dont get in there without their permission. We didnt have enough time to see if perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi driver by day, and a Hizbullah fighter by night.</p>
<p>Yet Reliable Sources, presented by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNNs Senior international correspondent that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hizbullah.</p>
<p>Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon, Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, casually mentioned in the middle of a posting: To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but Im loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalists passport, and theyve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.</p>
<p>Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBCs Richard Engel, CBSs Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by Hizbullah minders. Palmer commented on her report that Hizbullah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see.</p>
<p>Palmers honesty is helpful. But it doesnt prevent the damage being done by organizations such as the BBC. First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.</p>
<p>IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN</p>
<p>Indeed, the BBCs coverage of the present war has been so extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London seem rather embarrassed in conversation, not on the air, unfortunately.</p>
<p>If the BBC were just a British problem that would be one thing, but it is not. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio and online.</p>
<p>Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its worldview in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kinyarwanda and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesnt broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesnt concern itself with Kurdish rights or aspirations since they are persecuted by Moslem-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didnt hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured in March 2004 by President Assads regime.)</p>
<p>It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hizbullah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldnt really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old grandson were killed by a Katyusha during a Friday night Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.</p>
<p>You wouldnt have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.</p>
<p>You wouldnt really appreciate that Hizbullah, far from being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (UAVs that have flown over northern Israel, extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having already killed 114 people in Argentina during the 1990s.</p>