Experimental listening
- 4 Sep 06, 06:15 PM
As you may have read elsewhere on this blog, my colleague Adrian Brown wrote about the World Tonight's staging of a war crimes trial over the recent conflict in Lebanon last Friday. Both the Israelis and Hezbollah had been accused of breaking humanitarian law by senior UN officials and the respected pressure group, Human Rights Watch.
We asked our listeners to be the jury and send us their verdict, and we announced the verdict last Friday; a little more than half say the Israeli Defence Force committed war crimes and just under half say Hezbollah are also guilty. But the debate goes on and the e-mails are still coming in - though the proportions have not altered substantially.
Unlike some other online debates we did not ask for a simple guilty/not guilty vote as we wanted to get a sense of the thinking that led our listeners to reach their verdicts, which make really interesting reading.
It was an experiment, and although we, the 大象传媒, were not making the cases - we left that to the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth - we did get some criticism for it. But the level and quality of the defence mounted on the programme and the e-mails we have received since, I think, made it - on balance - a successful experiment.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
