Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East

December 15, 2009

Should KBRM broaden its scope?

When KBRM was created, its mission was to combat anti-Israel bias in the NZ media and to present ‘the missing truth’, as do other groups like CAMERA (www.camera.org) and Honest Reporting (www.honestreporting.com) . As KBRM has grown, there have been suggestions that it broaden its focus to include biased reports about other countries, like Iraq. After a spirited discussion among the Action Group (our ‘Board of Directors’, so to speak), it was decided to stick with the original mission, for reasons expressed in the following letter that was part of the discussion:

I do not think that the reporting about Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan is biased or unbalanced in the way the media reporting about the Arab-Israeli conflict is biased. The Allied ‘invasion’ of Iraq is controversial because it was literally a foreign, multinational military force invading a sovereign nation in order to bring down that nation's government, however good, bad or ugly that government was. The basis for the initial ‘invasion’ (Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction) may have been overstated or entirely fabricated.

I think that the bias against Israel is different and unique in that it comes not from the media, but from the UN, from Arab and Islamic states, Islamist organisations and ‘left-wing’ political organisations (such as Trade Unions); it is consistently applied across all media (TV, radio, print and internet ); it is intense and is totally focussed on undermining Israel's right or ability to exist, and it is becoming universal — there is little debate allowed about Israel's right to exist.

It is also unique in that it focuses its scrutiny and criticism on one tiny nation, while turning a blind eye to the misdeeds and injustices committed against Israel and perpetrated by other nations around the world.

As we saw on the Sunday documentary, any attempt to give Israel's perspective is either stone-walled or manipulated and distorted to reflect badly on Israel and its supporters.

By contrast, there is debate about the Allied involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and although the groups that denounce Allied forces are vocal, their opinions are not uniformly accepted or presented as "fact" as are the opinions of those who denounce Israel. I think it would be harder to prove imbalance in reporting about the Iraq situation.