Does the BBC present inconvenient stories as questions to discredit them? And why are they so weird about torture?

You'll have to excuse me if I seem to be harping on the BBC in a number of my posts, but this is the news that I grew up trusting, and which many people I care about still trust.

The BBC calls itself a news organisation, which implies a degree of impartiality. Obviously the easiest way for a media outlet to maintain a pretence of impartiality while being very partial to one side, is simply not to report on things that reflect badly on their side. Their trusting audience will assume that the outlet is reporting honestly on what is going on, and thus that these allegations don't exist, or are not credible. If a whole slew of other media outlets do the same, the impression given is that they have all come to the same conclusion, impartially.

So what can a media outlet do when stories gain enough traction independent of the mainstream, that people might hear about them from friends, colleagues or family members? The BBC's approach, it seems to me, is to grudgingly report on the events but to phrase all allegations as questions, allowing the reader to infer that there is some doubt over the veracity of the claims.

In March 2022 a very unpleasant video emerged on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels, recorded by Ukrainian soldiers, showing them torturing (by shooting in the legs/kneecaps) and killing Russian prisoners of war, who had clearly already been tortured a lot. It's the kind of thing one cannot un-see.

There is no reason to believe that any of it is fake, since the people who filmed themselves doing it clearly see it as something of a badge of pride. If this seems like incomprehensible behaviour, I would refer to my other blog post about the attack on Yelenovka prison in July, where just before the attack, a Ukrainian PoW claimed that they had received orders, coming down from no less than Oleksiy Arestovich, that they should make videos of this nature and distribute them via social media. Zelensky didn't even deny it, opting instead for a noncommittal "they are what they are", and apparently that was good enough for our media not to bring it up again.

The BBC reported the existence of this video on March 30th with an article titled 'Does video show Russian prisoners being shot?'. The answer is clearly Yes, but the headline implies an element of uncertainty, and the subheading describes it as "video footage which has been claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoners of war in the legs". Claimed by who exactly? The people who made it and everyone who watched it and shared it? The majority of the article is devoted to identifying where exactly it took place, as if that could somehow prove that it is not what it appears to be. The BBC didn't include the video and I won't either, but if you are feeling strong you can find it and make up your own mind. The same exact reasoning applies to another article, titled 'Ukraine war: Were Russian soldiers shot after surrendering?'.

Conversely, when the BBC want to report on allegations of Russians torturing Ukrainian PoWs, they run with the headline 'Ukraine war: Accounts of Russian torture emerge in liberated areas'. This article contains a photograph of a man, apparently named Artem, and a description of his account of torture at the hands of Russian forces. No audio, no video. One could say that they've done this to protect his identity, but they've already included a picture of him, so why not record his allegations on video? Orla Guerin's BBC crew didn't have their video cameras or microphones with them that day?

The same goes for Orla's article ''Walls full of pain': Russia's torture cells in Ukraine'. This time there are three people interviewed who are also photographed - Mykhailo Ivanovych, Olena Kazabekhov and 'Dasha' - and still no audio or video. Mykhailo says that he suffered gruesome torture at the hands of the Russians and saw the same done to many others, Olena is scared for the safety of her father on the frontline, and Dasha says that there was no drinking water and the fire truck brought water from the river, although she doesn't say anything about the Russians specifically. The stories are all indeed harrowing, and one feels bad questioning whether they are true - and I call that emotional manipulation. If they're true, there is absolutely no reason not to include video of these people saying it. The article is written in the cloying, sentimental, condescending language of the majority of BBC war reports, and includes this nonsensical line: "[Dasha] recounts the hardships of recent months, as [her son Tim] chases around the bushes." He does what?

If the stories we hear of Russian torture sound grisly, they're nothing to what Ukrainian soldiers are told they will endure if they get captured. This soldier, captured by Russian troops, says he begged them to shoot him rather than cut off his fingers and ears, as he had been told would happen in captivity:

By contrast, there are many video testimonies from Russian soldiers of abuse at the hands of Ukraine (including one whose finger was cut off), and even footage of the autopsy of an LPR soldier, showing clear signs of torture.

If these kinds of testimonies existed for Ukrainians held in Russian captivity, they would be front and centre. There would be no need to employ all the tawdry storytelling clichés that Orla Guerin and other 'war correspondents' use to conceal the paucity of actual evidence. Obviously it's not just the BBC that does this, it's practically standard for western news. Take this CNN story for example, in which we barely hear what the Ukrainians have to say at all - I don't want to say that I don't believe the people are saying what she says they're saying, but if they are then why not let us hear them say it?

If news outlets are trusted to report on what alleged victims say without presenting their testimony, the sky's the limit. Video evidence of war crimes gets dismissed, and reporters' news stories (for that is what they are) are understood by their trusting audience to be evidence, when they could be grossly misrepresenting what the people actually said, or just plain making it up.

How come the BBC didn't want to hear from this guy when they were reporting that Russia was blocking the evacuation corridors out of Mariupol?