Postscript to 'What's on the tube...'
Since several readers have asked me for some clarification of my enigmatic conclusion about the domestic and international considerations that have driven the editors of CNN and the BBC on the one hand and of Russia’s Vesti on the other hand, to deliver coverage of the Gaza conflict that is ‘counter-intuitive,’ I can offer the following remarks:
There are a lot of possiblities to explain subjectively what CNN and the BBC are doing. Objectively what theyy are doing is re-establishing their credibility as news as opposed to propaganda providers. And I think this is especially obvious for the BBC. One of their senior journalists who has his own program now calls it "Unspun" and repeats in the trailer-adverts that he is delivering news without spin. Why would he be saying this if it were not obvious that everything the BBC has been saying about Russia for the past 20 months is "spun" and is being rejected by viewers for such tendentiousness.
This is all the more timely for these broadcasters now that the lies they have been disseminating about the Ukraine war are overturned by the latest news from the supreme Ukrainian military commander Zaluzhny in his widely cited interview in The Economist. Now, finally, we read in mainstream that the Ukrainian losses in the war may approach 400,000 dead, not 70,000 as official Kiev claims and that the kill ratio till now may be 10:1 or 12:1 in Russia’s favor.
The media in the West are being given more space to do actual journalism on the Ukraine war now that Washington is looking for the exit ramp.
Actually my intention was to focus on the Russian news coverage when I said domestic and international considerations are in play. First, Russia does not want to be sucked into the Middle East conflict. It has its hands full with the Ukraine war. I imagine the Kremlin is confident that the principal Muslim nations in the region, namely Iran and Turkey, are fully capable of handling the situation on their own without its taking sides and issuing security guarantees to anyone. So it wants to project neutrality. Second, domestically, it does not want to inflame anti-Jewish, anti-Christian feelings among its big Muslim population by putting on air images of the Israeli savagery in Gaza and its hospitals.
Though I did not mention it till now, the Chinese broadcaster CGTN, like Vesti has been very restrained in its reportage on the Gaza war. The notion within the Biden administration that under pressure from the United States China can be persuaded to counsel restraint on Teheran should Israeli atrocities overstep all bounds is as delusional as the notion by these same supposedly strategic thinkers that China can be persuaded to stop backing Russia in its Ukraine war.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023