Occasionally I am told that I go too hard on the BBC. It is an understandable gripe which I sometimes hear from disgruntled journos from Broadcasting House. So let me start by saying that, as an equal-opportunities insulter, I would like to put on the record how completely rancid Sky News in the UK has become.
To give an idea of where Sky UK has gone wrong since being sold, allow me to highlight one story as the channel reported it this week. After the targeted strikes on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and walkie-talkies, Sky ran a story headlined: 'Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.'
That is truly fascinating framing. For it suggests that the terrorists of Hezbollah should be allowed to fire thousands of rockets into Israel with impunity, and that if Israel responds to this – even in the most targeted and personal way possible – it is being 'provocative'. Poor Hezbollah. It's just too beastly – can't it be allowed to fire missiles at Israeli civilians in peace?
Much of the broadcast media in Britain has been similarly skewy. The BBC news website last week led with 'Lebanon reels from two days of device attacks'. ITV News lamented not just the pager and walkie-talkie explosions but Israel's strikes on Hezbollah arms dumps. Presenting these as though they were strikes on civilian targets, ITV – in its own footage – showed the secondary explosions in the buildings Israel had hit. Which gives the game away, surely?
I have seen all this before. I was on the Israel-Lebanon border 18 years ago during the last Israel-Hezbollah war. Back in 2006 much of the media played the same game. Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into Israel, Israel responded and before you knew it the world was running headlines about Israel striking Lebanon. I remember being in a hospital on the Israeli side of the border that had been hit by Hezbollah. There was no mention of this in the next day's media outside of Israel but there were plenty of reports about Israeli 'aggression' against Hezbollah.
That conflict ended with a UN resolution (1701) which was meant to ensure that Hezbollah would not be allowed to rebuild its stockpile of rockets in southern Lebanon. Over the succeeding years Hezbollah more than replenished these supplies. By last year the group that has done so much to destroy Lebanon – and to decimate its Christian population, among others – was estimated to have around 160,000 missiles in position to launch at Israel.
Labour and Conservative governments never had very much to say about this – and certainly did nothing about it. Under successive governments, people who generally enjoy talking about UN resolutions were silent about 1701. Hezbollah more than rebuilt its armoury, and then, from 8 October last year, it started firing its missiles into Israel again, keen as it was not to miss out on the genocidal opportunities opened up by its Hamas colleagues the previous day.
Over the past year I have witnessed plenty of this activity for myself. On a normal day a few dozen missiles might be fired by Hezbollah into Israel. On some days – like this past week – hundreds are fired over. This almost never makes the British news. But many thousands of Iranian-gifted rockets have been fired by Hezbollah into Israel in the past year. And all this has happened under the watchful eye of UN 'peacekeepers' whose effectiveness approximates to that of a eunuch in a harem.
Meantime the court eunuchs in the western media rarely mention that Hezbollah fires the occasional rocket. When they do they tend to suggest it is simply trying – utterly reasonably, of course – to target Israeli military sites. As to why Hezbollah fired rockets into a playground in a northern Israeli town, killing a dozen Israeli Druze children playing football, nobody will say. It's just one of life's little mysteries.
If there is anyone left in Britain who still watches Sky News then they will be almost uniquely misinformed about what is actually happening in the world. In the past week its crack squad of misinformants, led by someone called Dominic Waghorn and Alex Crawford, did manage to utter the word 'terror'. But they used it while referring to the 'two days of terror' recently suffered by the 'fighting group' Hezbollah.
I am sure Hezbollah terrorists were terrorised when they found their balls blown off by exploding pager devices. But that is probably one of the job hazards that comes if you make the mistake of joining a terrorist group and then try to wipe out your neighbours on the orders of the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. Decisions have consequences, and joining what Ms Crawford calls a 'fighting group' should be seen for what it is: a distinctly bad career choice. Worse even than entering broadcast journalism.
People sometimes wonder why the media in a country like Britain has gone so partisan on a story which should not be that complicated to report. A number of reasons present themselves. The one I am most prone to is simply that failing television networks attract less and less talent and that Sky, ITV and even the BBC just don't get the best or brightest any more. The idea that they have been 'bought' or compromised in some way seems to me a little too conspiratorial.
Then I notice that just about the only regular sponsor of Sky News UK is the terrorist-supporting slave state of Qatar, through its national airline. The Qataris are, of course, not just funders of Hamas but also hosts to the Taliban. But I am sure this is a coincidence and their efforts to provoke their remaining viewers into reaching for the 'off' button comes from ignorance rather than anything worse
