[A version of this essay appears at Pajama's Media with some interesting comments. It is the first in a series of posts that will examine the (pathetic) way the MSM has covered the Gaza operation based on a 24/7 recording of BBC, CNN International, and Skye. If any other stations have particularly interesting coverage, please send me links.]

At about 1:10 on Sunday December 28, 2000, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.

A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and forcefully challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli caused fatalities and Israeli suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place is so densely populated an area. “The arithmetic doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, “Nine Israeli dead versus 1400 Palestinian dead.”

So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: “The math doesn’t work? If you are so distraught at the loss of life of your own people, why don’t you take care of them? What on earth would possess you not to avail yourselves of what you pleadingly tell us you so desperately need?” As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”

Alas… the BBC did nothing of the sort. The next hours and days saw nothing but canned footage repeating Palestinian complaints, voiced not only by Hamas spokesmen and BBC reporters, but also UN officials like Chris Gunning and Human Rights advocates.

Too bad. Had the BBC behaved like real journalists, they might have taken the “golden” (read excremental) thread that leads out of the labyrinth, and straight to the “real story.” That story, of course, is the classic Palestinian strategy, taken to new heights by Hamas in the early 21st century – play the victim card… at all costs. It was the same one Hizbullah played so effectively in the summer of 2006.