Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 15.10.2024
According to al Manar TV, seven BBC Arabic employees suspended their work on Monday in protest over the news agency’s report from South Lebanon, where its reporters were with the Israeli army attempting to invade the area.
The employees, Sanaa al-Khoury, Mohammad Hamdar, Marie-Josee Azzi and Joy Slim, along with three others from the BBC Extra team, stated that they would not return to their jobs unless the agency issued an apology or held the team that accompanied the Israeli army accountable.
The report broadcast two days ago shows a BBC crew inside the Zionist military vehicles interviewing the IOF, who managed to advance only a few miles within the Lebanese territories.
This is not the first time that the imperialist mass media reports have been biased in favor of the Zionist monster. The imperialist mass media are part of the Western imperialist’s support for the genocide by the Zionists of the Palestinians and of the Lebanese.
The mass media reflects the side the ruling class supports, and we cannot trust the imperialist mass media to reflect the Palestinians or the Lebanese side. Freedom of the press is an empty phrase. In workers’ states fighting for their survival, newspapers that support the enemy will be repressed as the mass media of the imperialists repress reports against the Israeli imperialist settler colonialists. So when we read an article, we must ask ourselves if the newspaper or the TV is on our side or the enemy’s side. If it reflects the interests of the enemy, our role is to expose the lies.
Trotsky wrote on this subject:
“During the war, all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become the enemy’s interests directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The latter’s nature is such that each of the struggling sides has considerable circles of the population in the rear of its armies on the enemy’s side. In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity–still less civil war. Can it be seriously demanded that, during a civil war with the White Guards of Denikin, the publications of parties supporting Denikin should come out unhindered in Moscow and Petrograd? To propose this in the name of the “freedom” of the Press is just the same as, in the name of open dealing, to demand the publication of military secrets. “A besieged city,” wrote a Communard, Arthur Arnould of Paris, “cannot permit within its midst that hopes for its fall should openly be expressed, that the fighters defending it should be incited to treason, that the movements of its troops should be communicated to the enemy. Such was the position of Paris under the Commune.” Such is the position of the Soviet Republic during the two years of its existence.
Let us, however, listen to what Kautsky has to say in this connection.
“The justification of this system (i.e., repressions in connection with the Press) is reduced to the naive idea that an absolute truth (!) exists and that only the Communists possess it (!). Similarly,” continues Kautsky, “it reduces itself to another point of view, that all writers are by nature liars (!) and that only Communists are fanatics for truth (!). In reality, liars and fanatics for what they consider truth are to be found in all camps.” And so on, and so on, and so on.
In this way, in Kautsky’s eyes, the revolution, in its most acute phase, when it is a question of the life and death of classes, continues as hitherto to be a literary discussion to establish… the truth. What profundity! … Our “truth,” of course, is not absolute. But as in its name we are, at the present moment, shedding our blood, we have neither cause nor possibility to carry on a literary discussion as to the relativity of truth with those who “criticize” us with the help of all forms of arms. Similarly, our problem is not to punish liars and to encourage just men amongst journalists of all shades of opinion but to throttle the class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the proletariat, irrespective of the fact that in both camps there are fanatics and liars.”[i]
Exposes the lies of the imperialist mass media!
Endnote:
[i] L. Trotsky, from Terrorism and Communism. May 29, 1920