BBC and Sky have every right not to broadcast the DEC appeal

The Disasters Emergency Committee is an invaluable organisation that helps co-ordinate the fundraising efforts of leading charities during natural disasters and famines. Its efforts in Darfur or after the Asian tsunami ensured more aid got to where it was most needed. There is also clearly a humanitarian need for aid and rebuilding in Gaza after the recent conflict. And the DEC is right to want to help co-ordinate such efforts. Indeed, I would encourage people to donate to their appeal using the embedded link here.

But it is wholly wrong to seek to bully broadcasters like the BBC and Sky, with large international audiences, into running the Committee's advertisements where to do so could damage the perceived impartiality of their news operations. Gaza is patently not a situation about which there is a clear consensus. Indeed, as Andrew Roberts pointed out this morning, some of the DEC charities have taken very clear sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I would argue that it is their right to do so, within the bounds of charity law, but it is most certainly not the role of news organisations.

So, I think Douglas Alexander and his Tory counterpart Andrew Mitchell were wrong to join the likes of George Galloway and Tony Benn in denouncing the BBC. And Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, was absolutely right not to intervene. Of course, the BBC has a bigger problem when it comes to impartiality in the Middle East, as its reports from the region sometimes show (exemplified in a piece by Tim Llewellyn yesterday, as noted by Danny Finkelstein).

But on this occasion it has taken a difficult but principled decision. And it has no reason to apologise for making it.

Great expectations

As Barack Obama takes the Presidential seal of office this afternoon, he will have the whole world in his hands. Despite the pragmatic good sense of his cabinet picks, he remains a figure on whom everyone wishes to project their views and hopes. And, of course, he will disappoint some of them. But that is not to say that he has to disappoint as a President.

On the contrary, good governance will require a combination of pragmatism and idealism. As The New Republic puts it in their editorial this week, "the real question is how Obama will determine the relative balance between the two." After today's pageantry, his in-tray is more than full enough: sorting out just one of the five big challenges - the recession and credit crunch, Middle East peace, Afghanistan, health care and climate change - would be enough for any Presidential first term, but he has no choice but to try to tackle all five.

Despite the churlish efforts of some to rain on his parade, there is good reason to believe that the combination of pragmatism and idealism that Obama has so far demonstrated will bring us closer to solutions to these seemingly intractable problems. On health care, for example, he has chosen in Tom Daschle the right man for the job, one who has already thought things through, and has already started to co-opt Republican opponents of Hillary Clinton's doomed efforts in the nineties. Of course, we need to see the meat of his and Hillary's foreign policy - 'smart power' is a good phrase, but doesn't yet mean a lot. And one gets the sense that no government has yet hit on the magic solution to get us out of the recession, though Obama's proposals - like Gordon Brown's - seem a lot more likely to do so than doing nothing. Yet even his transition has been smoother and smarter than most.

So we have great expectations for Obama today. The cynics would like us to think that those expectations will be dashed within months. Obama has already broken lots of records and set lots of precedents just by being elected. If he is honest about what he can do - and what others must do to help it happen - there is a real chance he can defy the doom-mongers and ensure that his blend of pragmatic idealism shines through.

A ceasefire is needed in Gaza - on both sides

Of course, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as the Israeli army tries to stop the daily indiscriminate firing of dozens of rockets at their civilians by Hamas. And Israel could do more to avoid genuine civilian targets, though the size of Gaza and the nature of its military make civilian casualties inevitable. And, of course, a ceasefire is urgently needed. But, as Tony Blair pointed out this morning, a ceasefire can only come when there is a verifiable end to those rockets, and arms shipments through tunnels from Egypt to Hamas, as well as an end to Israeli military action in Gaza.

Not that this would be terribly clear in some reporting on British television about events in the region. Channel 4 News makes little effort to hide its contempt for Israel: last night Sarah Smith was even given time to show how she was already falling out of love with Barack Obama because he failed to condemn Israel (given that he had made his views pretty clear during the election campaign, as even Smith acknowledged, why should this be a surprise?)




Equally, President Bush has said some daft things in his day, but this statement on Gaza is hardly among them: "I know people are saying: let's have a ceasefire. (Those are) noble ambitions. But any ceasefire must have the conditions in it so that Hamas does not use Gaza as a place from which to launch rockets."

Yet this was the subject of much head shaking on the ITN News at Ten last night and in much BBC reporting of the issues. Indeed, there were attempts to contrast his approach with that of Gordon Brown (a contrast which, I accept, may not have been entirely unprompted) who said this on Sunday: "So first we need an immediate ceasefire - and that includes the stopping of the rockets into Israel. Secondly we need some resolution of the problems over arms trafficking into Gaza. And, thirdly, we need the borders, the crossings open, and that will need some international solution."

We certainly need a ceasefire quickly in Gaza, but one that lasts and one that is observed by Hamas as well as Israel. Those who have taken to the streets to protest Israel's actions in Gaza - and their media supporters - would have a lot more credibility if one thought they genuinely believed that too.