Dan Douglass on direct

Dan Douglass

This weekend the BBC DG Mark Thompson announced the corporation's refusal to air an appeal for the victims of Gaza, saying it would compromise the BBC’s hard-fought stance of editorial impartiality. Today, Sky followed suit. When questioned, Editor-in-Chief Thompson said he believed there was no political motivation behind the Appeal and that the public could distinguish between a humanitarian Appeal and a political message.

But, contrarily and uncomprehendingly, he still insisted that the BBC would be sending the wrong signal to the public if they went ahead and broadcast the Appeal. His reasons for doing so still require an adequate explanation. In the absence of which, here's one. Post-Hutton timidity. Many of the individual charities who form the DEC are on the ground in Gaza in places like Beit Lahia in the north and Rafa in the south and therefore well placed to take advantage of the fragile ceasefire. For the half a million people in Gaza who have not had access to clean water since the conflict began, this ceasefire is a humanitarian window. No one knows how long it ceasefire will hold - when or if Hamas will renew their rocket attacks into Southern Israel and how long it would then take for Israeli tanks to renew their pounding of 'Hamas positions'. So much is unclear, the fog of war is still thick on the ground.

But one truth is undeniable. Once again, it’s children who are caught in the crossfire. Children. And they know no political context, have no hatred in their hearts, assume no pretence of moral authority, exert no right to retribution. All they know is raw fear, hunger and pain. Surely we can apply the word ‘impartiality’ to an Appeal focused on Innocents. To quote one charity's programme manager who has been working on the ground in Gaza throughout the conflict, “Children are terrified by what they hear, by the bombs. They see the dead. The number of traumatised children is increasing rapidly.” Like Thompson, programme workers such as these and the NGOs they represent also hold sacrosanct the rule of impartiality in areas of conflict.

Like the BBC, it’s not an indulgence, a question of high principle or integrity. It's about survival. Without adopting an impartial position, they would neither gain access to the dying, the suffering, the bereaved and the traumatised nor would they themselves be secure. You can’t help feeling that Thompson’s stand is a kick in the guts to humanitarian and developmental charities who have themselves striven to maintain an impartial standpoint to save lives and rehabilitate people whose worlds have been torn apart by internecine political unrest. Mark Thompson’s judgment call comes almost five years to the day since the resignations of Gavin Davies and Greg *** following Government criticism and pressure on the organisation over the Hutton Report . Remember it? It was headlined as 'the biggest crisis in the 82-year history of the BBC'. It prompted BECTU and the NUJ to challenge any attempts to curb the independence of the organisation. One journalist went on record as saying “Any news organisation has to be seen as impartial to be credible and that is what we are fighting for”.

It's strange how these events have paled since then, slipped into our collective unconsciousness. But they're still all too real when it comes to the separation of State and an independent BBC - and they've re-emerged in the wake of Thompson's announcement. You really can’t help but sense the legacy of Hutton in the refusal to broadcast the DEC Gaza Appeal, that the top brass at the BBC has learned little since ***’s departure – that impartiality is merely a cloak for their lack of courage. Something I’m glad to say can’t be said of BBC journalists or NGOs who are every minute of every day struggling to establish a lifeline amid the rubble of Gaza.