In the days since the Jan. 3 U.S. military operation in Venezuela, which resulted in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, BBC radio, broadcast, and podcasts have dedicated hours of coverage to the subject. BBC News, The World Tonight, The World at One, Today, The Global News Podcast, Newscast, World Service Newshour, and Radio 4 Six O’clock News have all dedicated multiple reports, in some cases entire episodes, to the subject of U.S. action in Venezuela. One point, however, which has been studiously avoided in the coverage is the deep links between the Islamic Regime in Iran and the Maduro regime in Venezuela, and the Hezbollah presence in the country.
This omission becomes even more striking when the two countries are being discussed simultaneously. For example, in a report on the unrest in Iran repeated in the Radio 4 6 O’clock News of Jan. 5 and The World Tonight of the same day BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said:
Ayatollah Khamenei, in a veiled rebuke to President Trump’s threat to send in his war planes if Iran continue to attack and kill protestors, the Ayatollah said rioters had to be put in their place, if the enemy intervened it would be brought to its knees. But the U.S.’s dramatic military action in Venezuela is concentrating minds in Tehran too. Iranian leaders have to find ways to quell this unrest without provoking the anger of the public and the American President too. On both fronts there are no quick or easy fixes.
On the Jan. 4 edition of The Radio 4 6 O’clock News she reported regarding Venezuela:
Mr. Trump has been making it clear that his mantra make America great again requires seeking resources and taking on regimes beyond its borders. In the last 24 hours he’s already made veiled warnings to Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico, and the day before US forces went into Caracas the president warned Iran on the other side of the world of possible military action there if it continued to attack and kill protestors taking to its streets over the past week.
The story becomes Donald Trump’s erratic and unpredictable behavior making people all over the world nervous, without mentioning the international sanctions-busting and Hezbollah-linked narcotics and money laundering networks that have operated between Iran and Venezuela since the Chavez era, which connect the events directly.
The links between Venezuela and Iran are a long–established fact of which the BBC cannot claim to be unaware. In fact, on BBC 1 News on Dec. 31, before the action in Venezuela took place, Sally Bundock reported:
Now the Trump administration continues to ramp up pressure on Venezuela, with the US now announcing sanctions targeting Iran’s drones trade with Caracas, the US Treasury announced ten individuals and entities based in Venezuela and Iran would be targeted over issues including the purchase of Iranian made drones and efforts to procure chemicals used for ballistic missiles. The Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said it was holding Iran and Venezuela accountable for their aggressive and reckless proliferation of deadly weapons around the world.
But on Jan. 6 when interviewing Venezuelan dissident Isaias Medina, she cut him off when he mentioned the connection:
Atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights. And then it turned also into a criminal regime by having occupation of rogue states like Iran with their proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah…
Bundock interrupted: “But the question is what will happen next?”
On the Jan. 5 edition of the Radio 4 Today Program, guest Robert Wilkie, former U.S. Secretary for Military Veterans, also mentioned the link:
What does exist is that Hezbollah, Iran and Russia and China have set up their operations there, their intelligence operations, their financial criminal organizations, again, five million people coming across the border that is unsustainable, and that threat continues to exist and the underpinning, undermining of American cities, American universities, we’ve seen the gangs take over, Venezuelan gangs, take over large sections of American cities. We’ve seen them finance through the Iranians unrest, incredible unrest on our campuses across the nation.
Presenter Anna Foster simply ended the interview.
Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly linked the operation in Venezuela with Iran and Hezbollah, and yet the BBC still felt it unnecessary to report.
Omission is a powerful tool of narrative control. When important context is left out of BBC reporting it creates a deliberate frame through which viewers see and hear a story. The BBC notes this in their own editorial guidelines:
Omitting significant details may lead to inaccuracy. Audiences should be provided with the relevant facts, complete information and context to enable them to have an accurate understanding of the content.
By leaving out the coordination between Iran and Venezuela the BBC turns a story about two deeply connected allies engaged in long-standing cooperation against US interests into a story about random American aggression, and it turns Iran and Hezbollah from internationally connected, savvy geopolitical actors with sophisticated financial networks into isolated and purely reactive characters in a Western-centric world. Once again the BBC is failing in its duty to its audiences to provide balanced and neutral reporting of the facts over distorted narrative framing.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.