Coverage of Middle East news by New Zealand media

@hdpaONENEWS: Thanks for your call today. Sorry I wasn’t able to help you. I see, however, that you have now identified the Kiwi who sailed with the Freedom Flotilla. My sense of frustration, which you may have detected, arises from (a) the frequent failure of the New Zealand media, with perhaps one or two exceptions, to give us any kind of warning of/background information on catastrophic overseas events, even when such events are clearly imminent, and (b) the media’s failure, in some instances, to record extremely serious overseas events.

In connection with Point A: We knew, long before the Freedom Flotilla sailed from Cyprus, that there would be an almighty showdown, even if the flotilla got through to Gaza (which was always extremely unlikely). Yet we saw none of the available footage of preparations for the voyage, interviews with participants, etc., on TV One. As I said, my family watches your channel, so I can’t comment on the coverage, or lack of coverage, of other channels. I did, however, make a search of the Fairfax newspapers — my employers, incidentally — and found that only The Press, in Christchurch, had carried a story on preparations for the voyage. Incredibly, yesterday morning, only hours before the storming of the Freedom Flotilla by Israeli troops, the story of the flotilla’s approach to Gaza didn’t even make the Briefs column on the world news page of the Dom-Post — although this Fairfax flagship did mention the previous Saturday’s Israeli air raids on Gaza. What on earth is going on? Is this sheer incompetence, or what? When I remember that, in 2004, I was relieved of my duties as editor of the world news page of the Manawatu Standard for running “too many stories about Iraq” (major stories about the “insurgency” getting under way), I wonder whether there has been a decision by some news providers to tell us nothing about events in the Middle East unless those events are so big they simply can’t be ignored.

This leads me to Point B. Since 2006, there have been numerous attempts by international humanitarian groups, by both land and sea, to break the siege of Gaza — a siege that is, according to aid agencies, resulting in many Gazan children being stunted by malnutrition. Yet here in New Zealand, you would never know that anything was happening. To the best of my knowledge, no one reported the June 30, 2009, incident in which the Israeli Navy seized the Spirit of Humanity, which was carrying Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, despite the fact that this incident also occurred in international waters and was clearly an act of piracy (see http://tinyurl.com/29e548e). Yet while this crime was being committed, and apparently being ignored, both television and press were giving extensive coverage to the activities of Somali pirates. Again, one has to ask: What is going on? Has someone swallowed the Israeli doctrine of exceptionalism, under which Israel is not required to obey the laws that other countries are required to obey? Have we, at some level, accepted the Zionist assertion that all Palestinians are “terrorists”, or incipient “terrorists”, and deserve to be collectively punished for voting the “wrong way” in elections that were accepted by international observers as free and democratic?

Finally, I remember that, for several years in the late 1980s, TV One screened some excellent full-length documentaries on Israel/Palestine. I think the last was the BBC documentary Life Under Occupation, featuring the work of Dr Ang Swee Chai in Gaza. I later heard from someone in TV One that this elicited a storm of protest from the “Zionist lobby”. And as far as I know, that was the last such documentary that TV One screened. Today, if you want to watch such documentaries, you have to go to the internet. There’s almost nothing on television except puff — and the infotainment at 6pm, which might include a few snippets of footage from events in the outside world. Actually, television is so execrable, I gave up checking the programmes long ago. So if something good did come along, I would probably miss it.

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