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Bullish coverage

Of course, straight after 7/10, mainstream journalists were quick to promote the deployment of planes and personnel to support “our ally” in the region. 

While the Sun splashed photos of British jets and frigates heading to the eastern Mediterranean with the headline “United We Stand”, the BBC basically reproduced a Ministry of Defence press release in its story, “UK to deploy Royal Navy ships to Middle East to ‘bolster security’.”

On 2 December, the Ministry of Defence released a short statement on UK military activity in the region, ostensibly to secure the release of (only) Israeli hostages. 

The BBC, along with other news outlets, immediately ran a story repeating the MoD’s words verbatim (with a sprinkling of additional text from the Pentagon) as if these were to be innocent “surveillance flights” despite the fact that over 15,000 Palestinians had already been killed in brutal air strikes since 7/10.

This was followed by a flurry of highly bullish coverage of two further military interventions directly related to bolstering UK support for Israel – evidence of the “extensive defence and security cooperation” between the two countries that was embedded in the ‘Roadmap’ agreement signed in 2023 (and ignored by the media).

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Censorship by omission

This lack of interest in the British government’s military links to Israel shouldn’t suggest, however, that there is nothing to investigate.

Indeed, Declassified UK has published multiple stories on the more opaque actions of the UK government that have been largely ignored by mainstream news including the deployment of a British spy team in Israel since 7/10, the dozens of flights by UK military aircraft to Israel in this period, the surveillance activities in support of Israel and the training of Israeli military personnel in the UK. Almost none of these have been followed up in broadcast bulletins and articles.

There is one area, however, in which the media do appear to have engaged with this topic: British arms sales to Israel that, according to the Campaign against Arms Trade, amount to £576 million since 2008. 

That there were 2,648 stories mentioning “arms sales to Israel” and “UK” between 7 October and 19 June 2024 might suggest this is a major area of concern for journalists.

Not so fast. 85% of all stories appeared after 1 April when three UK citizens were among seven aid workers killed when Israeli jets attacked the food convoy they were managing. 

For the 177 days between 7/10 and 1 April, the media (with the exception of the Scottish National, Guardian and BBC Parliament) showed little inclination to open up discussion on the issue. 

Despite serious concerns that, through its exports of weapons to the Israeli military, the UK is complicit in ongoing war crimes, major news outlets only started to show an interest in the topic once British people, not Palestinians, were the story.

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