TV News and the Israel/Gaza Conflict
Thoughts on TV News, journalism, and digital media. Issue#3
Alongside the actual conflict between Israel and Hamas, there’s also been a bitter and complex dispute over the way that TV News organisations have covered the developing story.
All wars and outbreaks of violence raise editorial debates – but I can’t remember a conflict that has led to so many editorial issues and arguments.
The safety of the journalists and crews on the ground in southern Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. The large amount of propaganda, misinformation and disinformation on social media. The difficulty in sending Western reporters into Gaza. The decisions on what images of casualties and victims to show on TV programmes. And, of course, the row over the use of the word terrorist.
All of these issues have been widely and, in some cases, hotly debated over the last few weeks.
Safety
On safety, the teams on the ground are probably better supported now than at any time in the past. Shared information through organisations like the International News Safety Institute (INSI), the standardisation of internationally recognised safety equipment, conflict training, and the use of security experts – all of these have made a big difference.
But it’s still an incredibly dangerous story to cover, and the deployment of staff to the conflict zone continues, no doubt, to be stressful for all concerned.
The Committee to Protect Journalists talked about “the unprecedented” level of danger for journalists in Gaza, and has so far reported 36 journalists killed covering the Israel-Gaza war since October 7th.
Gaza
The difficulty of getting Western reporters into Gaza also creates difficulties in trying to present a balanced picture of what’s happening.
There’s no shortage of video or interviews coming out of Gaza. But it obviously creates a skewed perspective when most Western reporters are based in Israel.
The Israel Defence Force has taken one group of journalists into Gaza so far. The embedded journalists were carefully controlled, and their reports were vetted for security issues.
For the mainly Palestinian journalists working in Gaza, it’s been dangerous and stressful. The BBC’s Gaza correspondent Rushdi Abu Alouf described the situation when his family was made homeless for the second time because of bombing warnings. He wrote on the BBC News website:
Honestly, I don't know what to do - it is hard to be a reporter and try to look after my family like this. I struggle to find food and water for them. We now don't have a home.
I've covered the previous wars in Gaza but this is the first time my family has been so affected.
I can cope when I'm in danger but when your family is too, you feel guilty.
Misinformation
Furthermore, the flow of inaccurate and misleading videos, photos and information has been relentless, and it’s led to a new role in newsrooms – fact-checkers and verification teams.
In many ways, it’s a new kind of journalism – the painstaking process of checking whether videos and stories are accurate and valid, and then describing the investigation and outcomes in articles and TV news reports.
Images
In terms of images, many of us will have been in edit rooms, as video editors, reporters, output producers or programme editors, having to make decisions on what images of violence to edit in and what to leave out.
I remember doing it for Bosnia. I look back and wonder whether I was too cautious, and whether we should have shown more of the reality of the atrocities, particularly on the late evening programmes.
But it’s such a difficult one to get right, and I’m relieved I am no longer involved in having to make those decisions.
Words
Finally, there has been extraordinary focus on the words that have been used to cover the conflict. One correspondent in Israel, Channel 4’s Secunder Kermani, put it well early in the conflict by saying during an interview on the BBC’s weekly Media Show programme that the biggest challenge reporting this conflict was:
“just how emotive it is… every word you say is being scrutinised and is likely to be contested by one side or the other, or both”.
In particular, there has been the argument over the use or to be precise the non-use of the word ‘terrorist’. In the UK, it’s mainly involved BBC News.
The commercial channels, ITV News and C4 News, used the word terror in their reports on the Hamas atrocities, but, as far as I could tell in my viewing, they too avoided describing the Hamas militants as terrorists.
I’ll be returning to this complicated issue in a later edition of the News Angle newsletter…
This newsletter is an expanded version of a column I wrote for the ITN 1955 Newsletter.
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