24-Jun-13: A small question for the BBC's news editors and their audience

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The BBC's prominence and incomprehensibly vast budget get it influence that far exceed the impact that its owner, the United Kingdom, has or ought to have. The editors at the world's largest broadcaster routinely engage in the spinning of events that have more to do with advancing British interests than with the objective and dispassionate reporting of news.

But this is meant to be a short observation about one of its minor reports and not a larger analysis of what's wrong with the BBC and its approach to news reporting. We do think there is plenty there that is wrong. So do many other people. BBCwatch speaks (well) for some of them and for us.

As we posted here earlier this morning, there was a major wave of incoming rockets during the night, originating in Gaza and directed at exacting civilian casualties. Thank heavens, there was little fallout though enormous fear and disruption to ordinary people's lives.

In reporting on this today, the editors at the BBC (see "Israel hits back after Gaza rockets") started with this sentence:

Israeli warplanes have attacked targets in the Gaza Strip after missiles were fired into southern Israel late on Sunday night.

We wonder: why are Israel's defensive weapon systems, those that are brought into play after the country comes under unprovoked attack yet again, and this time because of an in-house power-struggle between two of Iran's well-funded terror agents in Gaza, called warplanes?

And if you insist that that is what they are, why are the explosive missiles that the non-uniformed terrorists, operating from deep within residential neighbourhoods and from behind civilian shields, hurl in the general direction of towns, school buses and shopping centers (any hit is a win for the terrorists), not called war rockets?

There are two major adopters of the "warplanes" terminology when describing terrorist attacks on Israel and the defensive response of the IDF. They are (a) the BBC News Service and (b) the government-controlled mouthpieces of the Iranian regime. Click on this Google search to confirm we're right on this.

Just wondering.