Thoughtful Telegraph column by Vicky Woods about coverage of the conflict in Lebanon…

Disinterested observers of the Middle East wars (ie journalists) do better without hanging their emotions out for all to share. Fergal Keane’s throbbing outrage (for BBC news) over the deconstruction of Lebanon and the “Qana massacre” is driving half the viewers wild with rage and giving the other half (me) stress headaches. I put “massacre” in quotes, because some people insist it was a carefully staged Hizbollah photo-op, not a massacre. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the Beeb should think of pulling Keane out of Lebanon for a bit of quiet R & R before he has to see any more massacres. (Or “massacres”.)

The BBC is taking a lot of stick for its coverage of the conflict. It is charged with being, a) generally anti-war (in a sloppy-liberal, bien-pensant way) and b) anti-Israeli (and therefore pro-Hizbollah, pro-Palestinian, pro-terrorist). And therefore anti-Semitic. I don’t think anti-Semitic sticks, but the anti-war/anti-Israeli charge is harder to defend.

She’s right about Keane. His self-righteous cant makes one cringe. And to think that he is a fellow-countryman of mine…

The more general issue Woods raises is really difficult. TV coverage of a conflict like this is fraught with problems. On the one hand, there is a proper army, with tanks, aircraft and terrifying firepower. Back home, their folks cower in properly-constructed bunkers, which is why Hizbollah rockets seem to kill very few Israelis.

On the other hand, there is a guerrilla outfit which blends with the civilian population (and allegedly hides rocket launchers in village streets). There’s a population of desperately poor civilians who have no protection — no bunkers — and no means of escaping the war zone. Whenever the Israeli forces destroy something, there are civilian casualties, many of whom are — inevitably — children.

TV goes for images — always. The more memorable the better. And suffering generally makes for better TV. Remember the reporter on Drop the Dead Donkey who, when sent to cover a disaster, always brought with him a little teddy bear that he could place strategically in the wreckage for that heart-wrenching footage?

Formal armies are easier to film, and the footage shows professionals purposefully embarked on a killing mission. It’s rationality applied to destruction — and that’s a repellent prospect for most of us liberals.

But Hizbollah can’t (and probably wouldn’t allow itself to) be filmed in the same way. Yet it’s just as intent on destruction as are the Israeli forces. It too, is applying rationality to its mission. But TV apparently cannot show that. So its coverage is always going to be ‘unbalanced’ even while cameramen argue that they are just filming what’s happening. Imbalance is, in a way, an unintended consequence of TV coverage, just as bias is an unintended consequence of US media outlets’ obsession with balance (Fox News excepted).

Thanks to Neville Stack for the link.

How fitting. To ease the pain of being dropped from the England squad, David Beckham and his wife have launched a new range of perfumes.

Styled ‘Intimately Beckham’ fragrances, they will be in the stores on August 21.

Packaged in chunky glass cubes, the women’s scent is coloured pink while the men’s version is golden brown. They are made by the perfume house Coty, which has created fragrances for Céline Dion and Sarah Jessica Parker. The high-street chain Superdrug said Intimately Beckham would be priced at around £19.45 for a 30ml eau de toilette spray and £25.95 for the 50ml version.

Heau, heau!

A new YouGov survey conducted for (and reported in) the Economist confirms that Britain is still an acutely class-conscious society. For example, while 48% of people questioned thought that they would wind up earning more than their parents, only 28% expected to end up in a different social class. And the markers they use for identifying class? Why, occupation, address, accent and income. In that order.

The Financial Times (who else?) spotted another upside of the new airport security regime — an upsurge in ‘duty free’ sales, which had been languishing in recent years because so many of us fly within the EU and therefore derive little benefit from buying in an airport.

Nice New Yorker piece by James Surowiecki about the absurdity of much of what passes for business journalism — this time about the allegedly-terminal problems of Airbus.

What much of the talk about the inherent weakness of Airbus ignores is that, just a few years ago, it was Boeing that looked fundamentally flawed, while Airbus was seen as the future of the industry. Beginning in the late nineties, Boeing’s commercial-aircraft business went into a long and nearly profitless slump. In 2001, Airbus surpassed Boeing in new orders, a lead it maintained until this year. During that period, Airbus’s unusual structure was praised; its insulation from the stock market supposedly allowed it to invest in long-term research and development. Boeing, by contrast, was thought to be trapped in a short-term, cost-cutting mentality, because, as one analyst put it, “the money guys don’t reward long-term thinking and investment.” In 2003, Business Week declared that Boeing was “choking on Airbus’ fumes,” and warned that Boeing’s “slip to No. 2 could become permanent.”

Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, Surweicki thinks,

we see patterns where none exist. It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time. In 1999, after all, it was hard to find a business book that didn’t hold up Enron as the embodiment of one important principle or other. Of course, some strategies and structures work better than others, but real meaning emerges only over the long term. Let’s give Airbus a few more years of floundering before we decide that it should be put out of its misery.

Amen. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

We came home yesterday evening, courtesy of RyanAir. The flight was bang on time. RyanAir’s bedside manner may leave something to be desired, but they’re terrific at turning round aircraft.

The biggest hassle was finding a way of safely packing delicate gear (MacBook and cameras) in check-in baggage. If the new security regime remains in place (and I suspect it will), then cabin baggage will become a thing of the past. The big irritations of this are (a) having to put mobile phones in the hold — which means that one becomes incommunicado from the moment of check-in; (b) not being able to take a book, a notebook, a camera or even a pen through security.

Daft side-effects of (b) include the fact that passengers departing from small airports like City of Derry are stuck with no means of entertainment while those flying from a big airport like Stansted can buy newspapers, books, pens — not to mention laptops and cameras — to their hearts’ content in the departure area.

Once you get over the anxiety of entrusting a laptop etc. to baggage handling, there are some upsides. Getting people on and off the aircraft is much easier — for both crew and passengers. (It’s actually quite pleasant not having to lug a laptop, cables, etc. around.) Secondly, there will be a new commercial opportunities in (i) ‘disposable’ laptops — ones that you could afford to lose or have smashed; (ii) really robust laptop cases; and (iii) book sales in departure lounges and on board planes.

The kids were really pissed off to be deprived of their iPods during the long wait between check-in and departure. But there was a story somewhere today claiming that the supposed terrorist plot involved using iPods to detonate the explosives. After iTunes comes iBlast?