A Day Late and a Dollar Short

If there is any good news to this story, it is that the BBC has obtained the video of an Israeli settler in Hebron harassing her Palestinian neighbor, the video that had been so aggressively (and righteously) attacked by Yosef Lapid. The bad news is that they presented it as an abbreviated story of two cultures at each other's throats, restricting themselves to comments from within Hebron and making no mention of Lapid's remarks and why they were important. Furthermore, on their Web site this story is available only as a video clip, a rather evanescent medium for such a complex issue. (The half-hour news summary I just watched seemed to feel that Leonardo Di Caprio's comments about Blood Diamond on the even of the Oscar nominations demanded more air time than Hebron!) In other words (with respect to the title) they were two days behind Al Jazeera in reporting the Hebron story at all and short-changed most of the issues that made it more than just another story about conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. So much for the BBC being a cut above the news reported by American television!