If BBC Swahili, BBC Turkish, BBC Indonesia, and BBC Hausa could provide an informative profile of Iranian negotiator Mohammad Ghalibaf – in some cases two weeks before the talks in Islamabad – then the corporation’s English-language services should surely have been able to follow suit.
Despite clear statements from both the US and Israel that the ceasefire agreement did not include Lebanon, the BBC Today program's framing and language created an image of an out-of-control Israel risking the fragile peace, while never clearly informing listeners that Hezbollah is a proxy Iranian military occupying Lebanon which has, once again, started a war with Israel on behalf of the Islamic regime.
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.
