The war in Gaza has stopped, for now at least. But as the Gazans are searching the ruins for the remains of their homes and loved ones, what is going through their minds? The despair, grief, hatred and frustration are clear to the eye, but did we get a complete picture of what happened there? Last week, UN officials visited Gaza and were shocked by the destruction. Sir John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, told the BBC that the situation was “worse than he anticipated.” His comment leads to an inevitable question: How did the media report the Gaza crisis? With the limitations on foreign journalists’ work there and the targeting of the ones who were inside, the coverage was affected immeasurably.
The foreign press was most affected by the Israeli ban, having to depend on journalists inside as well as on bloggers and eyewitnesses. British journalist John Snow presented an episode of Channel 4’s program “Dispatches” called “Unseen Gaza” in which he talked to foreign media men and women who were kept outside the war zone, stationed on a hill beyond the territory where all they could see was columns of smoke on the horizon. He noted that from where he was standing, he could hear “the crumph (sound of distant bombs), but could see nothing of value.”
The journalists gathered there were heavily guarded by the Israeli military. One of them told Snow that she and her colleagues referred to the spot as “the hill of shame” but that this was later changed to “the hill of same” as they had one unchanging view in front of them everyday.
The frustration of these journalists was clear as they had to listen to the Israeli side all the time, which they said was “sleek” propaganda.
In his first day in Jerusalem, Snow had to go to the press accreditation center to get a press card. In the center stood a clutter of rocket fragments fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. He was given a file full of illustrated material containing the Israeli side of the story. To him this was a sign of a “war like no other,” one uniquely well-managed, in propaganda terms, by one side of the conflict. There was no equivalent information from the other side. As one journalist told him, they “could not balance the Israeli side with Hamas’ side.”
The Telegraph journalist Tim Butcher said it was obvious that Israel did not want foreign journalists to file reports that would harm Israel in the eyes of the world. The inability to film inside Gaza meant that the media were compelled to depend on footage provided by the Arab networks, which offered the only glimpse of events on the ground.
The BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen told Snow that depending only on the images provided by the Arab networks was for him only half the coverage. He said that those images needed to be followed by investigation. He gave as an example a picture of a man who was sitting on the ground weeping over his dead son and three other members of his family. To Bowen, the picture’s impact could have been made stronger by following the man’s story, bringing him closer to the viewer by telling his story and showing his house and talking to his remaining family.
Another interesting point that the program raised is one which is often debated in both the Arab and the Western worlds: How much blood and gore are TV stations justified in showing?
The program gave an example of a picture of a five-month old baby who was burned and partly eaten by dogs. This harrowing image was shown on Arabic networks. When it came to British networks, the decisions varied; some decided against showing it, others showed a sanitized version of it in which the corpse of the baby girl was shown partly wrapped in a blanket, not held up to view. There was a debate on the effectiveness and propriety of showing graphic images on TV.
The BBC news director was against showing such images on the grounds of the guidelines set by OFCOM (independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries.) Another editor for Sky TV said showing the images all the time was “counterproductive” as people got used to seeing blood, which would eventually lose its impact.
On the other side of the argument, Al Jazeera Editor in Chief Ahmed Al-Sheikh supported the use of such images, saying that war was ugly, and that his channel was showing the reality of what was taking place. These images had to be broadcast no matter how much viewers may be disturbed. The differences between network decisions to show scenes of death and carnage were wide. Each had a viewpoint and each was criticized for it.
The international media have to solve this dilemma on a day to day basis, and reach a decision on how much people can see. They have to strike a balance between showing images of the aftermath of attacks — pools of blood, shell-marked buildings — and graphic images of dead or injured people, without compromising their credibility as impartial news reporters.
Ironically, by preventing the entry of foreign journalists into the war zone, Israel may have inadvertently ensured a more graphic image of the conflict to dominate. The media may have been compromised as a result of Israeli official policy, but owing to the sophistication of modern technology, they were not entirely eyeless in Gaza.
