It is possible to write articles which are partisan, but without 'bias' - without favouring or selective reporting of events and views.
For example, this (longish) article is by a former Beirut-based journalist, now editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Startlingly enough, he's partisan (guess which way <g>)... he has a sane POV. And interestingly I don't see the word terrorist anywhere.
guardian.co.uk
The scene is the tiny village of Hadatha in south Lebanon, nestled among sun-scorched hills barely a mile from the border. Israeli mortar fire thumps in relentlessly. Warplanes scream overhead, first on reconnaissance and then to disgorge bombs. Villagers crouch terrified in homes and farmhouses. The aim of Israel's military offensive? To clear a 'security zone' and, once and for all, to keep a guerrilla army that is clearly beyond the control of Lebanon's government from raining rockets on to towns throughout northern Israel.
That was March 1978. It could have been yesterday - not least because, along with an American reporter and the Guardian's David Hirst, I was cowering behind a knee-high wall for more than eight hours as bombs and shellfire poured down. Our families were informed that we were missing and surely dead.
But the resonances between last week's escalating Israeli offensive and Lebanon's wars of the 1970s and 1980s are more than personal. Some of the names have changed: in 1978, it was not Hizbollah that was rocketing Israel, but an assortment of Palestinian guerrilla factions. Syria, currently in league with the Iranians in supplying and egging on Hizbollah, was directly occupying Lebanon with some 40,000 troops. Yet the similarities are striking. And the lessons - above all for Israel - are powerfully relevant.
Now, as then, Israel's leaders are doing what any elected government would do if confronted with well-armed irregulars indiscriminately bombarding its towns and cities. It is striking to remove the threat. Now, as then, Lebanon's government will not and probably cannot extend its writ over a guerrilla army that represents a state-within-a-state and is resented by many ordinary Lebanese as much as the Israeli assault it has provoked.
And now, as then, the crucial question is whether Israel's conventional military superiority can alone deliver the security it seeks. The overwhelming evidence from decades of violence in Lebanon is that it cannot.
...
The imperative for Israel, in the days ahead, is to choose the template of 1978 over 1982 - to limit military action to dealing with the immediate threat in the south and to get out as soon as the job is done. The challenge for the rest of the world is to complete the unfinished business, not only of recent UN resolutions but of the Security Council intervention that ended Israel's incursion in 1978: to extend central Lebanese control over all of Lebanon.
He doesn't address the (IMO) important question of whether Israel's actions are disproportionate, killing ten mostly unconnected Lebanese civilians for every Israeli dead and inflicting vastly more damage on general Lebanese infrastructure: and only tangentially touches even on the advisability of their actions - whether this invasion is likely to be as counter-productive as the previous ones...
But he's partisan, not biassed. There's no attempt at misrepresentation and notable attempts to be fair. |
