Europe cut off

In the UK, there is a jocular – and probably apocryphal – headline from the 1940s that reads, “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”. The channel is the English Channel, and the continent is Europe.

The headline has been used since then, for instance, in The Times of 22 October 1957, to depict the UK’s stance vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. It was reused in 2016 in connection with the Brexit campaign.

The joke lies in the point of reference. Was Europe cut off from the UK, or was the UK cut off from Europe? The wording of the headline shows a clear bias towards the UK.

It would be more reasonable to phrase it the other way round:

• The UK has a population of 67 million, while Europe has 741 million. These figures would have been less in the 1940s, but the gap would have been similarly huge.

• The UK has a land area of 244,000 km², while Europe has 10.2 million km².

• The UK only has a land border with the Republic of Ireland. Apart from that, the UK is surrounded by sea. France – to take the closest country to the UK – has land borders with eight countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Spain and Andorra.

• It is thus impossible to drive overland from the UK to any other country – apart from Ireland, and then only from Northern Ireland. From France, one can drive overland to the rest of Europe, Scandinavia, Asia and Africa.

In short, Europe can hardly be cut off by fog. The focus in the headline is wrong, and revealing of the writer’s partiality.

Casualties

A headline appeared in the 24 January 2024 BBC News website: “Israel-Gaza war: IDF says 24 soldiers killed in Gaza in one day”. It is sad that anyone is losing their life in the current Israeli war on Palestine.

Later, in the sixth paragraph of the story, it was mentioned that “According to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, 195 Palestinians have been killed in the past day.”

Let us again contrast the two sides of this story.

• On the Israeli side, 24 people were killed that day, while on the Palestinian side, 195 were killed. This is nearly eight times as many. Since 7 October, 552 Israeli soldiers had been killed, compared with around 25,500 Palestinians (at the time of writing). This is around 46 times as many. In addition, many Palestinian bodies are still lying under the rubble of bombed buildings.

• The Israeli casualties were soldiers, that is, combatants, 21 of whom were reservists. No description is given of the 195 Palestinians. However, Palestine has no army, so none of them were soldiers as such. A large proportion of Palestinian casualties in the war have been women and children, ie non-combatants.

• Reports indicate that the Israeli soldiers were killed in two empty buildings where Israeli forces had laid mines in order to demolish them. The Palestinians were killed in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, where they had been instructed by Israeli forces to go, and which had been surrounded by Israeli forces. Even hospitals were not safe havens. “The dead were being buried inside the grounds of Nasser hospital because it has been unsafe to leave in order to reach the cemetery. It is said that Israeli forces stormed another hospital, Al-Khair – which is in the al-Mawasi area to the west – and arrested staff.”

Conclusion

We return to the original “fog over channel” question. Where is the focus of the headline? And what does this focus tell you about bias on the part of the writer?