The Journalist in charge of training Middle East BBC reporters and imparting "standards of impartiality and accuracy" is Ibrahim Helal formerly editor-in-chief of the Al-Jazeera television channel, and the man who aired the Bin Laden tapes and "gave the go-ahead for Al-Jazeera to screen footage of easily identified US soldiers captured and killed during the Iraq war, as well as graphic close-ups of the bloody bodies of two British servicemen."
asiamedia.ucla.edu
Here he is in an interview discussing Palestinian "martyrs:"
PAXMAN:
Do you think there is any kind of moral equivalence between the Zionist and anti-Zionist causes?
HELAL:
Yes, there is an equivalence between Zionist and anti-Zionist causes. They are not asking for killing. They are just ideologies. You cannot compare between any two ideologies in the world.
PAXMAN:
But if one of your reporters refers to somebody killed by an Israeli soldier as "a martyr", that is use of biased language, isn't it?
HELAL:
It is a different environment in the Arab world. You are broadcasting to Arab viewers, mainly. I am not broadcasting for the whole world, I am broadcasting for the Arab listeners all over the world. It's a different context, actually. Here, in the Arab world, in the Islamic world, if you call somebody a martyr because he was killed accidentally, killed accidentally... This is the context of this word. But in the English translation of it, it's completely different. I would like to emphasise that. You can check out my explanation.
PAXMAN:
What would you call, then, the Israeli victims of a Palestine suicide bomber?
HELAL:
Because they are not Muslim, you cannot call them martyrs.
PAXMAN:
You don't accept that that in itself is an editorial judgment, and that it affects how your viewers see the conflict in Palestine?
HELAL:
No, we don't respond to our viewers. We just tell them events by the language they can understand. This is the main point here. In our coverage of Palestine, we are telling our viewer things accurately by the language they can understand. I cannot call a child murdered by an Israeli soldier just a child killed. Our viewer will not understand that. He will understand it, or she will understand it, as a biased statement to Israel. So I have to be very careful. I have to tell things with the language our viewer can understand. If I transmit these events in English, I would change the language because the audience is different, the mentality is different and the environment is completely different.
news.bbc.co.uk
He obviously has brought these culturally relative "standards" to the BBC. |
