It’s all about working the war-porn circuit

Which is why a press more interested in making a difference’ than reporting the news would ‘completely ignore the diversity of opinion and the voices of reason, even from Lebanon.

Mr. Nasralla, we understand the necessities of a guerilla war…we understand that you are fighting what you and your people consider a battle of existence…but we are not in the Mekong delta or the jungles of Vietnam…this is Lebanon Mr. Nasralla…the 10452Km2 are totally inhabited…so wherever your people hide, they are endangering HUMANS…
You vowed Jihad on the Israelis…but the whole country has not…you vowed their destruction and care less if in the process you loose your life…but the whole country has not…

further

When those people stayed in Qana despite the warnings issued by the Israelis to evacuate, they did so because they had put their faith in the men of the resistance…they believed that those men would protect them, would keep them safe from the Israeli enemy…

Alas…they discovered, and it was too late when they did, they discovered that those men who were supposed to protect them, were in fact hiding behind them.

Which takes us back to the BBC’s Fergal Keane.

t's not Keane's fault, in a sense, that modern war, as framed by the television lens, has become first and foremost a human drama, and he a celebrity member of the cast. Of course war is always a human drama as well as a political one, but more than ever the issue is one of coolness and objectivity in the reporting of it. Get the emphasis wrong, and one either sanitises war or one tips over into a simplistic – and exploitative – form of victim journalism.

Sadly, the latter is happening to the BBC. Without doubt it has succumbed to the pressures to emotionalise events in Lebanon: dumbing down almost, it seems to me, to the level of EastEnders.

He was so busy emoting in his first report from Qana, that as he mentioned that the residents had neither the cars of the busses to get away, the image panned across a car and a bus (!) next to the collapsed structure that became the new vessel of hope for those ‘trying to make a difference’. the fuse is lit!