Comments on "How the BBC covered the Turner Prize"
We thank Sir Roger Tomkys for this comment on today's newsletter:
I think you underestimate the difficulty the BBC and the Media generally
face in deciding how much coverage to give to popular protest over Gaza
and Israeli actions more widely. I would make one comment on the BBC's
coverage of this whole tragedy. Jeremy Bowen's coverage of events, when
he was merely a respected Middle East Correspondent based in Israel,
always seemed to me weighted in favour of Israel. As an Editor I have
admired his ability to strike a scrupulous balance in his commentaries.
Many would argue on both sides that this asymmetric conflict is not one
in which neutrality is appropriate but I have been impressed and I
suspect Davie and others must have taken a good deal of flak to enable
Bowen to do his job.
We thank Hugh Miles for this comment:
Research commissioned by the BBC itself has repeatedly found that it is the Israeli perspective that is favoured in the Israel Palestine conflict.
On November 23, 2024 eight BBC journalists published an open 2300 word letter to
Qatari-based broadcaster Al Jazeera (banned from broadcasting in
Israel) in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the BBC’s Gaza
coverage. The letter accused the BBC of excluding decades of crucial
historical context and privileging Israel’s narrative of events,
allowing its brutal retributive assault to be understood on its own
terms as “self-defence.” As the authors put it: ‘The BBC has failed to
accurately tell this story – through omission and lack of critical
engagement with Israel’s claims – and it has therefore failed to help
the public engage with and understand the human rights abuses unfolding
in Gaza.’
Last December a study was
published by openDemocracy examining daytime coverage by the BBC One
television channel during the first month of the war. It states: ‘The
Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how
they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the
occupation under which they are living . . . this perspective, if it
occurs at all, is not developed as a theme by journalists or related
routinely to events, and has nothing like the status given to the
Israeli perspective. . . . The BBC’s coverage locates the origin of the
conflict in the recent actions of Hamas — but Palestinians see
themselves as resisting the actions of Israel stretching back
decades.... For the BBC and other western media to simply repeat the
propaganda of one side while denying legitimacy to the other will in the
long run do nothing for the cause of peace but will simply hold back
the public and political will needed to press for realistic negotiations
to end the conflict.’
Open Democracy’s findings were supported by research by
data scientists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, who analysed a total of
six hundred articles and four thousand live-feed posts on the BBC
website between October 7 and December 2, establishing a “systematic
disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated.”
Consider also this article published in the Jacobin by
an anonymous BBC journalist on April 11, 2024 which says: ‘Britain’s
BBC is one of the world’s most influential and trusted news sources. But
pressure from conservative political elites has warped its coverage of
Israel’s war and caused it to downplay the violence being inflicted on
Palestinian civilians... Journalists are only promoted to senior
positions after having demonstrated editorial caution, and stories
abound of careers ruined by on-air blunders. Typically editors will
succumb to this structure of incentives, disregarding the “due” element
in “due impartiality,” which amounts to allowing the oppressed and
oppressor equal airtime with equally vigorous pushback. The
investigation of Channel 4 News into the al-Ahli hospital blast
demonstrated braver journalistic ethics by questioning the credibility
of official Israeli sources. As Channel 4 correspondent Alex Thomson told viewers:
‘Israel has form when it comes to war propaganda. Israel denied
shooting dead Palestinian-American photojournalist Shireen Abu Akleh
last year only to backtrack later on, admitting they probably did kill
her.’ The BBC marches to the beat of the loudest drums, totally divorced
from a clear understanding of how it reproduces the dominant ideology.
It takes criticism from left and right as proof of its “impartial”
positioning, while being unwittingly disciplined by the hegemonic
political forces in Britain. In the face of what UN human rights
official Craig Mokhiber describes as an unfolding genocide, the BBC is failing the Palestinians, and history will not be kind to the role it has played.
The Jacobin also
published another article by the same anonymous BBC journalist on May
29, 2024 which says: ‘BBC editors live in fear of being reprimanded by
their superiors, alerted to some perceived injustice or other by the
ever-vigilant Israeli embassy.... Fundamentally the BBC is hamstrung by
its particular proximity to British establishment power and, by
extension, the Zionist cause. That, unfortunately, is why we have failed
in our reporting on Gaza — and will continue to do so.’
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