BBC News Online continues to downplay Iranian threats
This week, Iran announced that it would construct ten new uranium enrichment facilities. This development resulted in widespread coverage, with several outlets analysing what the implications were for the Iranian nuclear programme, and how Western governments should proceed if they suspected that Iran might be attempting to develop nuclear weapons.
Particular significance was given to how Israel would react, given the history of animosity between the two states. While all the broadsheet coverage mentioned Iranian threats against Israel as context for why it might feel threatened by any nuclear programme, the BBC News Online coverage did not.
‘Nations warn Iran on nuclear sites’, which discussed the diplomatic fallout from the announcement, made no mention of Iranian threats, while ‘Iran – more sanctions after new defiance?’ an analysis piece by Paul Reynolds simply stated that ‘Israel is not and will not be convinced that Iran's intentions are peaceful’, with no further explanation. By way of contrast, The Times, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times all explicitly mentioned the belligerency of Iran in their coverage of the story, with particular emphasis on statements by President Ahmadinejad.
For example, the lead editorial in The Times, ‘Iran’s Adventurism’, characterised him as ‘a leader who believes in a literal and imminent apocalypse and who gleefully anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state’. In ‘What will it take to tame Tehran?’, The Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin noted that ‘Israel regards Iran’s nuclear quest as an existential threat to the Jewish people equal to that of the Holocaust, which is hardly surprising, given that Mr Ahmadinejad has repeatedly declared his desire to wipe Israel off the face of the Middle East.’ The Financial Times included an article by Daniel Dombey and James Blitz that mentioned that ‘Israel views Iran as an existential threat whose rhetoric cannot be ignored.’
The recent coverage on BBC News Online shows that while the issue of Iranian nuclear ambitions continues to draw increasing levels of attention, the website continues to omit details of Iranian threats to Israel.