D'Ancona: Media Got It Wrong in Lebanon

The editor of the Spectator is to attack western media reporting of the war in Lebanon, saying reporters collectively "floundered like an English tourist abroad with a badly-written phrase-book".

Matthew d'Ancona, appointed editor earlier this year, will say tonight in a speech at Oxford University that western media groups were not biased against Israel - but failed in their responsibilities to report the geopolitical nature of the conflict and the size and strength of Hizbullah.

"The underlying problem is not, in my view, something as simple as media bias, but rather a category mistake," Mr d'Ancona will say tonight in the Philip Geddes Memorial Lecture at Oxford University, named after the journalist who died aged 24 in an IRA explosion.

"The media has yet to learn the new language of a new conflict. It flounders like an English tourist abroad with a badly-written phrase-book."

Mr d'Ancona believes that the media failed in its responsibility to capture the true geopolitical nature of this conflict.

"Because Hizbollah maintained such a low profile until the war had ended, there was little sense that it was running a full-blown state within a state, armed with state-of-the-art weaponry, or that what we were witnessing in northern Israel and southern Lebanon was the first battle in a new war waged by theocratic Iran - vigorously pursuing its nuclear ambitions and supporting Islamist terror around the world."

Mr d'Ancona believes that Hizbollah better understood how to manipulate global opinion.

"Hizbollah's cunning in the conflict was to nurture the impression in the West that it was somehow a romantic maquis, a ragtag force of noble freedom fighters and pimpernels defending the people of Lebanon against murderous colonialists. It was almost completely absent from our screens, always nimbly one step ahead of the cameras.

"And for that reason, whatever one's audit of the military conflict, they certainly won the media war."