The Assassination of Osama Bin Laden: The propaganda of the deed

“Osama bin Laden is dead” is quite a headline to wake up to on a sunny May morning and worthy of a few immediate thoughts while the full story filters through. If the Al Qaida attacks on America, Madrid and London can be defined as “the propaganda of the deed” – purely symbolic and having [...]

Targeting Gadaffi: British TV News, Propaganda and Verifiable sources

So in its latest effort to protect civilians in Libya, NATO has killed Gadaffi’s son, Said al-Arab, and three grandchildren with an attack on their home in Tripoli, yesterday (30 April). By all accounts, the leader himself was in the house but narrowly escaped. (This has eerie echoes of 1986 when the US bombed Gadaffi’s [...]

Bombing Libya: The “Reality and unreality” of national interests.

Reporting from Tripoli against the backdrop of NATO bombardment, Richard Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, describes the “reality and unreality” of the Libyan regime and its very idiosyncratic approach to international diplomacy (BBC Radio 5 Live, 21 March). But if Operation Odyssey Dawn” is anything to go by, flakiness is not a Libyan preserve. What [...]

“Death in the Med” for BBC Journalism? Panorama investigates the Mavi Marmara incident

A recent edition of BBC Panorama, ‘Death on the Med’ (16 August), set out to investigate Israel’s assault on the Turkish ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla last May, 31st,  particularly the lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara. However, certain features of this 30-minute film raise questions once again about the way in which western journalism deals with controversial issues [...]

The War on Jobs 3: Echoes of Argentina

In The War on Jobs 2 (20 July), I wondered about how we should respond to the current economic crisis and if there are lessons we can learn from what happened in Argentina in 2002. But why Argentina eight long years ago? Why not an example nearer to home and more recently, such as Greece [...]

Destination Israel

The contradictions between a newspaper’s editorial and advertising content are often amusing, sometimes bewildering but now and again so glaring they deserve exposure. I’m thinking here about an opinion piece that appeared in the Guardian on Friday, 23 July, ‘Israel turns upon its own’, by Rachel Shabi. The article looks at growing intolerance and racism [...]

The Children of Fallujah: Explaining the birth defects

The BBC has recently reported on unusually high rates of genetic defects among children born in Fallujah after 2004, when US forces launched an overwhelming assault against Iraqi insurgents in the city (BBC2, Newsnight, 21 July). While it’s good to see the Beeb tackle stories like this, its inhibited approach presents a problem for its [...]

How many calories does a Gazan need? Ask Israel.

The BBC recently gained access to documents submitted to an Israeli court, revealing that the list of food imports allowed through the blockade is determined by a calculation of how many calories the people of Gaza might need to survive; though the documents mention that this is apparently not linked to government policy making, whatever that means. [...]

The media and the Israeli occupation

In my post, Apartheid Israeli-style, I recommended some alternative reading on the Israeli occupation and repression of the West Bank and Gaza; alternative, that is, in the sense that the conventional history and wisdom on the issue is so overwhelmingly pro-Israeli and subject to what David Miller of Spin Watch calls a “control culture” of [...]

Apartheid Israeli-style

As the World Cup 2010 kicks off in South Africa, the pundits reflect on how far the country has come since the dark days of Apartheid etc. Apparently, we’re now living in a world where such an iniquitous system of ethnic segregation can no longer be tolerated. Except, we’re not. And it is: in the [...]