Sky News has lost its way

Occasionally I am told that I go too hard on the BBC. It is an understandable gripe which I sometimes hear from disgruntled journos from Broadcasting House. So let me start by saying that, as an equal-opportunities insulter, I would like to put on the record how completely rancid Sky News in the UK has become.

To give an idea of where Sky UK has gone wrong since being sold, allow me to highlight one story as the channel reported it this week. After the targeted strikes on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and walkie-talkies, Sky ran a story headlined: ‘Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.’

That is truly fascinating framing. For it suggests that the terrorists of Hezbollah should be allowed to fire thousands of rockets into Israel with impunity, and that if Israel responds to this – even in the most targeted and personal way possible – it is being ‘provocative’. Poor Hezbollah. It’s just too beastly – can’t it be allowed to fire missiles at Israeli civilians in peace?

Much of the broadcast media in Britain has been similarly skewy. The BBC news website last week led with ‘Lebanon reels from two days of device attacks’. ITV News lamented not just the pager and walkie-talkie explosions but Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah arms dumps. Presenting these as though they were strikes on civilian targets, ITV – in its own footage – showed the secondary explosions in the buildings Israel had hit. Which gives the game away, surely?

I have seen all this before. I was on the Israel-Lebanon border 18 years ago during the last Israel-Hezbollah war. Back in 2006 much of the media played the same game.