Safe -- but where's the bunting?

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
12 March '10

Good news: it appears that the BBC journalist Paul Martin, who was kidnapped by Hamas four weeks ago, has been released.

What’s that – you didn’t even know a BBC journalist had been kidnapped by Hamas? This isn’t surprising. Virtually nothing has been written about this. And even now that Martin has been released, I can’t see any domestic coverage of this at time of writing -- not even on the BBC website home page, although it does appear on the BBC World Service page. Compare and contrast with the tsunami of coverage over the previous BBC journalist who was kidnapped in Gaza, Alan Johnston, and the enormous razmatazz over his release. At NRO, Tom Gross makes this key point:

One of Hamas’ aims in detaining Martin was, of course, to further deter any brave foreign journalist on assignment in Gaza who might dare report the truth about the Hamas regime.

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