Today
Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s
coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist
Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and
other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures
within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s
narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of
staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network
uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. Jones’s
investigation of the BBC has three main components: a deeply reported
look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative
assessment of how the BBC characterizes the year-long siege on Gaza, and
a review of the histories of the people behind the coverage—and, in
particular, one editor, Raffi Berg.
Appropriately,
when Jones began this reporting as an independent journalist and
reached out to Berg for comment, Berg at first hired the famous
defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, who is also former Director of UK Lawyers
for Israel. Jones is a Guardian columnist and hosts his own searing
independent news coverage on YouTube. If you have the means to help pay for Jones’s $24,000 in initial legal bills in vetting the story, you can do so here.
We
are living in an era where many people expect the news to be delivered
in 280 characters or less. But investigative journalism often
necessitates a careful peeling back of layers, an examination of
background and context, and incorporating the insights of many sources.
This is a long read, and may take you a couple of sittings to get
through, but it’s well worth our attention given the global influence of
the BBC, which hails itself as “the world’s most trusted international
news provider.” As Jones notes, the BBC website is the most-visited news
site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits.
At Drop Site News, we believe in holding powerful people and institutions accountable, particularly when their actions—or what they publish and how—mean life or death. It is in that spirit that we are publishing Jones’s investigation.
Please subscribe (our journalism is all free) and consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work:
—Nausicaa Renner, founding editor
![]()
Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images
The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza
Story by Owen Jones
The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.
Their
primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site
News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the
extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change
have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these
journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about
Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli
media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and
creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.
The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point
to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s
Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on
Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal
complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed
aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too
critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.
In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter
accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to
adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently
fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza”
across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the
BBC make a series of specific changes:
reiterating
that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making
it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims,
highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making
clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing
proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against
humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023,
use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian
deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.
One
BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several
tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just
ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter
because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went
“way beyond” the signatories.
BBC
management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In
the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News
obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply
to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud
of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is
made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and
transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and
“external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued
“the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports
without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected
the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when
it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another
called it “very patronizing.”
Email from Deborah Turness
The
internal critique peaked again in December, after journalists say the
BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International’s report concluding that
Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Senior correspondents expressed their dismay at the angle chosen for the
limited broadcast coverage. In a WhatsApp group of senior Middle East
correspondents, editors, and producers—referred to as ‘the big dogs’ by
BBC management—one posted the chyron during coverage on the BBC news
channel: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.” Another
commented: ‘FFS!!—It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit
[afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in
an ‘Israel says’ narrative’. As one BBC journalist puts it to me: “These
are established senior correspondents—and it’s even bothering them.”
In
response to this criticism by their own senior journalists, a BBC
spokesperson said: “We take feedback on our coverage seriously, but
criticism of BBC output based on a single screenshot taken during a few
seconds of coverage, or on false assertions that topics ‘haven’t been
covered’ when they have is invalid and disingenuous.”
Another
strapline was also used that day: “Amnesty International accuses Israel
of genocide.” While it was discussed on BBC radio stations, journalists
note that the report was not covered at all on the BBC’s flagship news
programmes—BBC One’s News At One, News At Six or News At Ten or its
flagship current affairs programme, BBC Two’s Newsnight. According to
broadcast regulator Ofcom, BBC One is the most frequented news source in Britain. On December 5, the day the Amnesty report was released, 3.7 million viewers tuned into the BBC News At Six alone. The News Channel attracts only a small fraction of that audience.
The
Amnesty International report was also not afforded proper attention by
BBC online, the staffers say. It appeared on the BBC front page, but
long after the embargo on reporting ended, leading award-winning TV producer Richard Sanders
to ask “Why on earth did it take them 12 hours?” Even then, it appeared
as the seventh item in order of importance. And for a week after it was
reported, the story about the world’s most famous human rights
organization concluding that Israel was committing genocide did not
appear in the ‘Israel-Gaza war’ index tab which remains fixed at the top
of the BBC news front page. The BBC told Drop Site News that this was a
mistake. The Amnesty story was added to the index several days after
the report was released, meaning traffic to the story was suppressed.
According
to data seen by BBC journalists, in the first few days the story
received around 120,000 hits. One BBC journalist suggests that—if it had
been on the Israel-Gaza index featured on the BBC news front page—it
would have attracted far more traffic. They note a story which appeared
on the Israel-Gaza index and was just one day older, concerning the
recovery of the body of an Israeli hostage from Gaza, garnered around
370,000 hits.
In
addition to what they see as a collective management failure,
journalists expressed concerns over bias in the shaping of the Middle
East index of the BBC news website. Several allege that Berg
“micromanages” this section, ensuring that it fails to uphold
impartiality. “Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power
to reframe every story, and we are ignored,” one told me.
The
BBC journalists also point to Tim Davie, the director general of the
BBC, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC’s news division, as
standing in the way of change. Both are aware of the outrage against
Berg, the journalists said. “Almost every correspondent you know has an
issue with him,” one said. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but
they just ignore it.”
It is difficult to overstate the influence of the BBC’s online operation. According to media watchdog Press Gazette,
the BBC news website, which includes both news and non-news content, is
the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits, dwarfing second-place finisher msn.com, which had 686 million visits.
Berg’s
influence has a ripple effect, the journalists say. While BBC
broadcasters write and produce their own reports, editors and reporters
across the organization frequently draw on
web articles such as those edited by Berg to flesh out their stories.
“Part of the problem is that the staff on Today [the BBC’s flagship
radio current affairs programme] and domestic outlets in general are
pretty ignorant about Israel/Gaza,” says one BBC journalist, “as anyone
who goes to work there from World Service realizes very quickly.” BBC
news broadcasts are centered on coverage by veteran journalists with
on-the-ground experience like Jeremy Bowen who are regarded as more
balanced.
In
response to a request for comment, the BBC said it unequivocally stood
by Berg’s work and that Drop Site News's descriptions of Berg
“fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way
the BBC works.” The organization rejected “any suggestion of a ‘lenient
stance’” towards Israel or Palestine, and asserted that the BBC was
“the world’s most trusted international news source” and that its
“coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.”
“If we make mistakes we correct them,” the BBC said. More on that later.
“This is about editorial standards”
In
November 2023, BBC senior management attended a morning meeting with at
least 100 staffers to discuss coverage of Gaza. It soon descended into a
fiery debate. “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7
October,” Deborah Turness, the CEO of the news division, called out, in
an attempt to assert control of the meeting, two attendees told me.
Liliane Landour, the former head of the BBC World Service, disagreed,
pointing to the decades of Israeli occupation before October 7: “No, I’m
going to have to say that’s not the case, and I’m sure that’s not how
you meant to phrase it.” People were “livid” about Turness’s remarks,
one journalist said. When asked for comment, the BBC pointed to a blog post Turness authored in October 2023 detailing the organization’s approach to the conflict.
Internal
tensions over the BBC’s coverage of Gaza had been rising for weeks. On
October 24, Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC Arabic correspondent, sent
an email to Tim Davie, BBC’s director general, laying out the concerns
he and his fellow journalists had shared about the organization’s lack
of impartiality in its Gaza coverage. While
stories “prominently” used words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and
“atrocities” to refer to Hamas, they “hardly, if at all,” used them “in
reference to actions by Israel,” he wrote.
Ruhayem singled out the use of the word “massacre,” in particular, which the BBC had not used to describe mass slaughters perpetrated by Israeli forces. By contrast, on October 10, 2023, the organization published a story with the headline “Supernova festival: How massacre unfolded from verified video and social media.”
Ruhayem also noted the organization-wide failure
to frame reporting and analysis around Israeli statements signifying
war crimes and genocidal intent. He pointed out the lack of “historical
context,” emphasizing that “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and
settler-colonialism” were “terms used by many experts and highly
respected organizations to which the BBC usually defers.”
On October 31, 2023, for example, the BBC published a story
with a headline that excised Israel’s role: “Israel Gaza: Father loses
11 family members in one blast.” When the BBC does mention Israel as a
perpetrator, including when large numbers of civilians are killed by its
missiles, the organization’s headlines use the caveat
“reportedly.” The BBC repeats the Israeli authorities’ use of
“evacuate” to describe the forcible transfer of civilians—effectively
using a euphemism for a war crime. Instead of describing Israel’s total
siege on Gaza for what it is, an all-encompassing blockade on aid was
framed in an October 20, 2023 headline as “Israel aims to cut Gaza ties after war with Hamas.”
In November, around the same time as the meeting with Turness, eight BBC journalists sent a 2,300-word letter
to Al Jazeera outlining how their employer had failed to accurately
depict the Israel-Palestine story “through omission and lack of critical
engagement with Israel’s claims” and a “double standard in how
civilians are seen.” In the preceding
weeks, the BBC had either buried or failed to report on a number of
official statements announcing Israel’s intent to perpetrate war crimes.
Defense minister Yoav Gallant’s commitment to impose a “full siege” on
Gaza and its “human animals” received just one mention in BBC online content,
towards the end of an article headlined “Israel's military says it
fully controls communities on Gaza border.” No context about the
illegality of the statement was offered. A statement by Israeli General Ghassan Alian
addressed to both Hamas and “the residents of Gaza”—which unambiguously
denounced the Palestinians of Gaza as “human beasts” and promised a
total blockade on life’s essentials and the unleashing of “damage” and
“hell”—was not covered at all.
By comparison, weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, the BBC’s online coverage clearly identified war crimes committed by Russia, even without official rulings from international courts. “Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv,” read one headline
36 days into the invasion. After October 7, war crimes committed by
Hamas were treated as objective fact requiring no legal verdict: “Israeli community frozen as Hamas atrocities continue emerge.” When strong evidence similarly shows Israel committing atrocities, the same editorial guidance does not apply.
“They
wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your
community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental
health, but this is about editorial standards.’”
In the weeks after October 7, a number of BBC
journalists began venting their intense frustrations in forums like
WhatsApp groups, where they collected the “bullshit reasons given for
not commissioning stories.” They singled out Berg, one of whom says
plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of “systematic Israeli
propaganda.” After staffers were told by the BBC’s top brass to come
forward with any concerns about coverage, in meetings with senior
management, journalists have flagged numerous examples of problematic
editing by Berg. Again, having been invited to do so by BBC management,
journalists have sent large numbers of emails identifying problems with
such news stories. Staff members report rarely receiving responses to
such emails.
Instead,
the BBC’s approach has been to pathologize the problem. In early
November 2023, management convened several roundtables, described as
“listening sessions,” where, as one attendee told me, it became clear
that management sought to recast factual objections and bias concerns
raised by staff as emotional struggles. “They said they were concerned
about mental health [and] offered the telephone number of the BBC
support group,” one journalist who attended said.
“They
wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your
community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental
health, but this is about editorial standards. It’s about being a public
service broadcaster and impartiality not being abided by. They realized
they’d let the genie out of the bottle. We said: ‘What’s the next
session? We want a progress report, collating the evidence.’” Another
attendee said management told staff to “be as frank as possible” and
that it sought “honest thoughts on coverage.” Despite management efforts
to pigeonhole the objections to BBC's coverage, the internal dissent
extended far beyond Muslim staff.
“It
was quite bad, staff were not treated well,” says one BBC journalist.
“They were speaking their mind, then being shut down. They were told to
be honest, but managers didn’t want that and snapped.” Since the meeting
with Turness in November, staffers have asked, on three occasions, for
updates on whether there had been any progress on responding to and
acting on claims about biased coverage. “Three times there has been
nothing back,” one staffer said.
In March 2024, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a watchdog group established by the Muslim Council of Britain, released “Media Bias: Gaza 2023-24,” a 150-page document
detailing numerous allegations against the BBC’s reporting on Israel
and Gaza. That included stripping away context such as Israel’s
occupation of Palestine and siege of Gaza, far greater use of emotive
language to describe Israeli suffering or deaths than that used when the
victims are Palestinians and a pattern that BBC's position "has often
been to push the Israeli line whilst casting doubt on Pro-Palestinian
voices."
The BBC journalists said they presented the document to Richard Burgess, the BBC‘s director of news content who oversees content across BBC platforms. His response: He did not “recognize the bias.”
![]()
The
BBC's headquarters was splashed with red paint by pro-Palestinian
activists from Palestine Action on October 14, 2023 in London, United
Kingdom. Photo by Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images.
Without Fear or Favor
Between
November 2023 and July 2024, BBC management held five listening
sessions on Israel-Gaza. In a group meeting with Davie in May 2024,
staffers at the meeting acknowledged the pressure the BBC faced from
pro-Israel lobbyists. They also emphasized that their sole objective was
to uphold the BBC’s values of fairness and impartiality and to produce
content “without fear or favor”—principles staffers told me had been
cast aside in deference to Israeli narratives. They also noted examples
of individual senior journalists who had sent dozens of complaints about
coverage of Israel and Gaza, only to be consistently brushed off.
The
staffers also identified the website, headed by Berg, as the BBC’s most
egregious violator of editorial standards on impartiality on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Davie, BBC’s director-general, was already
aware that many BBC journalists had specific concerns about Berg. “He
did very little to hide his objective of watering down anything critical
of Israel,” said a former BBC journalist.
Berg
wasn’t the only senior figure discussed at the meeting in May. The role
of another powerful individual raised Robbie Gibb—one of five people
who serve on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee
along with Director-General Tim Davie, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, the
Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah.
In September 2024, when discussing “the Israel-Gaza story,” Shah told
British parliamentarians that the committee was “part of the process
where complaints are discussed, talked about and addressed.” He added
that the BBC’s next “thematic review” should focus on Israel and Palestine.
Gibb
is charged with helping to define the BBC’s commitment to impartiality,
and to respond to complaints about the BBC’s coverage on Israel and
Palestine—but his ultra-partisan record speaks for itself. The brother
of a former Conservative minister, he is a veteran of the revolving door
between Britain’s worlds of media and politics. In his thirties, Gibb
was the chief of staff for Conservative MP Francis Maude before becoming
deputy political editor of Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship
current affairs show, and, later, editor of BBC politics programs.
Between 2017 and 2019, he served as director of communications for
Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, and was knighted by her upon
her resignation. In 2020, Gibb also led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy. In 2021, Gibb returned to the BBC, joining its board as a non-executive director. In 2022, former senior BBC journalist Emily Maitlis
described Gibb as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who
shaped the broadcaster’s coverage by acting “as the arbiter of BBC
impartiality.” Similarly, Lewis Goodall, her colleague, said editors told him to “be careful: Robbie is watching you.”
Gibb’s deep involvement with the Jewish Chronicle
continued after he took up his BBC role. In the November 2023 BBC
Declaration of Personal Interests, he declared he was the 100% owner of
the newspaper, before being replaced by a venture capitalist in August
2024. One former Jewish Chronicle journalist declared that, “since the change in ownership, the paper has read more like a propaganda sheet for Benjamin Netanyahu,” and that Gibb regularly appeared in the office
“to check up on what stories were topping the news list and offering a
view.” Since the acquisition, Jake Wallis Simons, its editor since 2021,
has focused on zealously supporting Israel’s onslaught since October
2023. In one example, he tweeted a video of a 2,000-pound bomb exploding in Gaza City with the caption “Onwards to victory!,” before deleting with no apology.
In September 2024, four Jewish Chronicle columnists resigned in protest after the paper published a story that included fabricated quotes from Israeli officials,
with one declaring that “too often the JC reads like a partisan,
ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than
journalistic.” Four Israelis, including an aide to Netanyahu, were
subsequently arrested on charges of falsifying and distributing
fabricated documents to the Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s largest newspaper Bild.
In September, the Muslim Council of Britain wrote a letter expressing concern with Gibb’s position on the
editorial standards committee, noting his involvement with the Jewish
Chronicle, its political orientation, the fact that it had been
repeatedly reported to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. At
that May meeting, BBC journalists had emphasized that Gibbs’s agenda was
widely understood in British media circles, referring to his links to
the Jewish Chronicle and noting its right-wing partisan orientation and
slavish pro-Israel stance.
But it was Berg’s key role in shaping online coverage of the Middle East that the staffers emphasized
the most at the “listening session” meeting with the BBC director
general, Tim Davie, in May. They noted Berg’s history and associations
as indicative of bias, pointing to instances where journalists’ copy had
been changed prior to publication. They made specific requests: that
stories should, as a rule, emphasize that Israel had
not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the
practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact,
and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli
occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by
descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in
1948. While Davie told staff that management would “look into” staff
objections, to date no response ever came back.
A
crucial part of the BBC news website is its curation department, which
selects the stories that are displayed on each section’s “front page,”
as well as the overall BBC news homepage. If a story appears on the
front page, it often receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of
views, BBC staffers said, adding that stories published on regional
index pages tend to attract only a fraction of that number. BBC staffers
allege that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East
stories appear on the BBC News front page. The BBC denies that he has a
veto, and claims staffers are assigning “outsize importance" to Berg's
influence. Given that only a handful of stories are published to the
Middle East index each day, it is relatively easy for a single editor to
have an effect while also influencing coverage outside of the index.
“If it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before curation
even OK it,” one journalist said. “Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel
is asked: ‘Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it
gone to Raffi?’” another said.
In
response to BBC management claims that Berg’s power is being
exaggerated by staff, a former journalist at the BBC World Service says:
“I was working for a World Service department, producing content for
language services. ‘We have to run this past Raffi’ was the reflex
answer to any producer pitching anything on Israel.” The journalist said
that other editors were reluctant to sign off content, treating Berg’s
verdict as “their safety step” in the editorial process. “There was an
extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to do anything about
Israel or Palestine, editors would say: ‘If you want to pitch something,
you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff.”
This
dynamic was corroborated by a third journalist, who said that even if a
story which touched on Israel and Palestine appeared on another news
index, it would still be flagged for Berg’s attention and approval. “How
much power he has is wild,” said the journalist. “His reach goes beyond
just the Middle East index, but to adjacent subject matters.”
Raffi Berg on Netanyahu’s Bookshelf
Raffi
Berg began his career in local radio, later spending nearly a year as a
news editor for the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an outlet he later discovered was run by the CIA—a fact he was “absolutely thrilled” to learn.
Berg’s first job at the BBC was as a reporter. His bylined work included “Israel’s teenage recruits,”
a story published in 2002 that presented young IDF soldiers as
courageous defenders of their country while failing to mention the
occupation and settlement of Palestinian land or the widespread
allegations of crimes documented by human rights organizations, including in Israel, and even the U.S. State Department. One BBC journalist described the article as an “IDF puff piece.”
Berg’s reported work also included a three-part series on Israeli settlers
in the West Bank and Gaza. The series presented them as victims seeking
“a better quality of life” and did not mention the fact that the
settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal. Instead, the series included
a boxed sidebar, outside the text of the actual story, to relay that
the settlements are “widely regarded by international community as
illegal under international law,” but Israel maintains that
“international conventions do not apply in the West Bank and Gaza
because they were not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state in
the first place.”
On January 11, 2009, demonstrators
held a rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of Operation Cast
Lead, an Israeli military onslaught against Gaza in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them believed to be civilians. Demonstrators held Israeli flags and placards emblazoned with the words: “END HAMAS TERROR! PEACE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND GAZA.” While the
event was billed as supporting “Peace in Israel, Peace in Gaza,”
speakers at the rally voiced support for Israel’s military offensive.
“In this case, I think there is no such thing as disproportion. If you
have got a war to fight, then you fight,” one speaker said.
The BBC coverage of the event proclaimed: “Thousands call for Mid-East peace.” Its story opened with
several paragraphs that described the rally as showcasing speeches that
characterized the Israeli military offensive as pro-peace and repeated
without skepticism the claims of the organizers:
Thousands
of pro-Israel supporters have gathered in London's Trafalgar Square to
call for an end to the violence in the Middle East.
Organizers
said they wanted people in Gaza and Israel to live in peace, but argued
that Hamas must accept responsibility for the conflict.
Berg
did not write the unbylined piece. But he attended the event “in a
personal capacity” prior to becoming the BBC’s “Middle East online
editor, or indeed acting editor,” the BBC said. Yet Berg was still a BBC
staffer at the time, working on the website’s Middle East desk. In an
article in which the BBC omitted key details about the nature of the
rally, the organization interviewed Berg, a member of its own staff, as a
participant in the pro-Israel protest. Berg even went to the trouble of
writing a letter to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post
to take issue with its suggestion that only 5,000 people had attended
what he called the “Israel solidarity rally at Trafalgar Square on
Sunday.” “This is actually well short of the actual number,” he wrote.
“The organizers, the Board of Deputies, said it was 15,000, and in my
opinion (I was there) that is probably accurate.”
A decade later, the BBC amended its editorial guidelines
to clarify that “people working in news and current affairs and factual
journalism… should not participate in public demonstrations or
gatherings about controversial issues.” By then, the BBC had concluded
that the mere act of attending a protest in a personal capacity was a
threat to perceptions of impartiality.
In
2013, Berg became Middle East editor for BBC news online. It was in
this role where he encountered material that would form the basis for
his book, “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving
Resort,” an account of the Israeli spy services’ efforts to evacuate
Jews from Ethiopia between 1979 and 1983. In the book, Berg describes
Mossad in glowing terms, calling the agency “much vaunted.” Berg
received extensive cooperation from Mossad for the book, including “over
100 hours of interviews” of “past and present agents and Navy and Air
Force personnel.” It was published in 2020. In an interview
to promote the book, Berg said he collaborated on the project with
“Dani,” a former senior Mossad commander he described as a “legend” who
later became “a very close friend.”
An
expert on Mossad who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from
within their professional circles told Drop Site News that the book failed to present crucial context surrounding Israel’s intelligence services, including their record of human
rights violations, assassinations, and extraordinary renditions. Berg’s
close relationship with Dani “raises the risk of adopting the
viewpoints and value judgements of intelligence agencies,” the expert
said, raising questions about Berg’s interest in the book’s subject.
Books that romanticize the operations of spy agencies are “a powerful
legitimizing device for intelligence services,” the expert said.
“Authors who don’t even bother to raise tough questions about
intelligence services are the best spokesperson these services could
have hoped for. At the beginning of February 2020, Ohad Zemet, the
spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in London, attended a launch event
for Berg’s book, where he posed for a photo with the author and Mark
Regev, then Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Zemet posted the photo in a tweet in which he called the book “wonderful.” A year later, Berg retweeted Zemet’s post, with the words: “big honour for me on a very special night.”
On
August 23, 2020, Berg posted an image of Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu taking a phone call at his desk. In his post, Berg
has zoomed in on and circled a copy of Red Sea Spies visible on a bookshelf behind the prime minister. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister's bookshelf!” he wrote. “I know I’ve got one of #Israel PM @netanyahu’s books on mine—but wow!” He tweeted a similar image in January 2021.
The
BBC’s editorial guidelines concerning personal views and bias are
clear. They state that “views or opinions expressed elsewhere, on social
media or in articles or in books, can … give the impression of bias or
prejudice and must also be avoided.” BBC journalists far more junior
than Berg have been reprimanded or even disciplined for social media output seen as biased in favor of the Palestinian cause.
BBC journalists emphasize
this context when they point to how Berg reshapes everything from
headlines, to story text, to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to
foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as “death by a thousand cuts.”
In
response to a request for comment from Berg, Drop Site News was
informed that Berg had hired British-Israeli lawyer Mark Lewis, who is
described as “the UK’s foremost media, libel and privacy lawyer.” The
former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, Lewis attended the 2018 launch
of Likud-Herut UK, a right-wing Zionist organisation, whose national
director is his wife, Mandy Blumenthal. At the launch, Lewis emphasized the importance of “unapologetic Zionism.” Citing rising antisemitism, he announced that he and Blumenthal had immigrated to Israel in December 2018. “Europe in my view is finished,” he declared. His Twitter profile cites his current location as “Israel (legal work England).”
The
BBC then informed Drop Site that its responses to our questions covered
both Berg and the BBC. The BBC disputed the journalists’
characterization of Berg’s role and
alleged bias, though the network declined to answer specific questions
about claims made by current and former staffers.
Muhammed Bhar’s “Lonely Death”
In July, the BBC published a story
on its website about Muhammed Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with
Down’s syndrome and autism. He lived in Gaza with his family, who
provided him with around-the-clock care. Since Israel began its assault
on Gaza, he had been terrified of the shells exploding around him,
caused by violence he was unable to understand. On July 3, the Israeli
military raided Bhar’s home. The family begged for mercy for their
disabled son, but the unit’s dog savaged him. He begged the dog to stop,
using the only language he could access in that moment: “Khalas ya
habibi” (“that’s enough, my dear”). The soldiers then put the injured
man in a separate room, locked the door, and forced the family to leave
at gunpoint. A week later, the family returned home to find Bhar’s
decomposing body.
Bhar’s story was originally documented by Middle East Eye
on July 12, with the headline: “Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome
‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack.” British
newspaper The Independent covered it with the headline:
“Gaza man with Down’s syndrome mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to
die, family says.” Four days later after the first reports, the BBC
published its own version of the story. Its headline: “The lonely death
of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome.”
“There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?”
The
headline did not reflect the hideous circumstances of Bhar’s death and
omitted the specifics of who did what to whom—a recurring theme in
complaints made by BBC reporters and presenters to management regarding
the Corporation’s online coverage. In the original version of the
story, it took 500 words to learn that an Israeli army dog had attacked
Bhar, and a further 339 to discover how he had died.
Berg
was the one to hit publish on the story, according to the edit history
obtained by Drop Site. Optimo, the BBC’s content management system,
shows that Berg made a series of pre-publication edits, before
publishing the story, meaning that Berg himself must have signed off on
its framing and deemed that the headline erasing Israeli responsibility
satisfied the BBC’s editorial standards.
The
article about Bhar sparked an outpouring of fury both internally at the
BBC and on social media. In a post liked by 14,000 users, Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, tweeted: “I don’t think there could be a worst murder in human history, still @BBCWorld headlines this as ‘death of a Gaza man’ to abdicate Israel of responsibility. Abhorrent!” Palestinian-American writer Tariq Kenney-Shawa
mocked the absurdity of the framing. “A ‘lonely death,’ as if he died
after a long battle with cancer or was perhaps swept away by the sea or
lost under the rubble of an earthquake,” he tweeted.
Eventually, the BBC decided to rewrite the story.
It changed the headline to “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by
IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC.” It also inserted two new
paragraphs at the top of the piece informing readers that the Israeli
military had admitted “that a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who
was attacked by an army dog in Gaza was left on his own by soldiers,
after his family had been ordered to leave,” and that he was “found dead
by his family a week later.” Even with the new phrasing, the story
implied that the dog had attacked Bhar of its own volition, not that it
was under the control of IDF personnel.
![]()
In
its updated post, the BBC did not acknowledge that its previous version
of the story omitted or downplayed key facts or explain to readers why
it changed the headline. It did add a note at the bottom of the story:
“This story was updated on 19 July with an IDF response.” The BBC also tweeted the article
under its new headline, writing: “This post replaces an earlier version
in order to update a headline that more accurately represents the
article.”
The
Bhar story symbolizes what the BBC staffers who spoke to Drop Site News
say they want: Stronger assurances that BBC’s Israel and Gaza coverage
upholds the organization’s policies around impartiality. As one BBC
journalist told me: “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And
if this story isn’t it, then what?”
The objections over Berg’s role extend to his own writing. One BBC staffer highlighted Berg’s December 2022 article
“Israel says likely killed Palestinian girl in error,” about Jana
Zakarneh, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli
snipers. The first two paragraphs read:
Israel
says its forces appear to have unintentionally killed a 16-year-old
Palestinian girl amid a gun battle with militants in the occupied West
Bank.
The body of Jana Zakarneh was found on the roof of her house in Jenin after the firefight on Sunday night.
The
story foregrounds the Israeli narrative—that Zakameh had been near
gunmen who’d opened fire at Israeli troops, and that the Israeli
military had been conducting near nightly raids in the West Bank as part
of an operation against militants whose attacks on Israel had left the
country “in shock.” Only in the third paragraph does the story quote the
Palestinian prime minister’s accusation that Israel had killed the
teenager “in cold blood.”
Wafa, the Palestine News Agency, released an image of Zakarneh, which CNN published
with its story on her killing. By contrast, the BBC, in its story on
the killing, used a photo depicting three members of Zakarneh’s family
on the roof of their home.
In
stories reporting attacks against young Israelis, the BBC often adopts a
different approach to photos. A story about Emily Hand, an Israeli
child who had been presumed killed on October 7 but was later released, features her image. A story about a 14-year-old Israeli boy who was killed in the West Bank earlier this year also included a picture of him. Late last year, a story about a 19-year-old British-Israeli IDF soldier—not a civilian—who was killed in combat was accompanied by his photo.
In other cases, facts unfavorable to Israel have been stripped out of Berg’s reports. In a May 2022 story
about an annual march of far-right Israeli extremists through
Palestinian areas celebrating the capture and occupation of East
Jerusalem, Berg’s original copy described the marchers as singing
“patriotic songs,” which traditionally included inflammatory, racist
anti-Arab lyrics that went unmentioned by Berg. Indeed, when the march
took place, the BBC initially reported chants of “death to Arabs!” and
“may your village burn.” A BBC crew came under attack during the march; Israeli
forces stopped the attack but took no further action. But these details
did not appear in a later version of the story. The headline refers
euphemistically to “Israeli nationalists stream through Muslim Quarter.”
All of this caused a huge outcry on social media
and among some BBC staff. These details were later reinstated, with an
update noting they had been restored “to give a fuller picture of
events.”
On
one occasion, the BBC was forced to change Berg’s copy following
external and internal backlash, BBC journalists said. In May 2022, an
Israeli sniper killed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen
Abu Akleh. Israel has diligently tried to cover up her murder.
Berg’s original text about her funeral read:
Violence
broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu
Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West
Bank.
Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.
The
editorial decision not to ascribe responsibility triggered widespread
outrage, including from Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for
Arab British Understanding and a prominent commentator who has
repeatedly appeared on the BBC news channel. He tweeted:
“how…Raffi Berg @bbcnews thinks ‘violence broke out’, ‘jostled’ and
‘clashes’ were appropriate terms I cannot fathom.” After widespread
anger, the BBC updated the text to correctly open with “Israeli police
have hit mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu
Aqla,” adding “Her coffin almost fell as police, some using batons,
waded into a crowd of Palestinians gathered around it.” Nonetheless, the
headline still lacked a sense of causality: “Shireen Abu Aqla: Violence
at Al Jazeera reporter’s funeral in Jerusalem.”
Despite
significant evidence of bias and internal protest, BBC journalists
allege that the network has refused to investigate Berg’s crucial role
in what they see as conduct that imperils the integrity of the BBC. “We
have provided a pretty watertight account about what he’s said and
done,” one journalist told me. The response from management has been
limited to “Tim Davie saying: ‘It’s good you’ve raised this. We’ll look
into it.’”
A Systematic Look at Coverage
Despite
the grave concerns over bias and manipulation present in its coverage
of Israel and Palestine, the fact is that the BBC is a juggernaut in
world journalism. It employs a range of skilled journalists who have
done principled and groundbreaking work, including on the Gaza war.
The site has run articles about British Palestinians grieving loved ones killed by the Israeli military, Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank, and Israel being accused of a “possible war crime” in the killing of children in the West Bank. Berg himself has written articles on South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and the court’s recent ruling, with accurate headlines: “UN top court says Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal.” In addition, the BBC’s seasoned broadcast journalists have produced damning stories about Israel. In such cases, Berg is less likely to push for sweeping edits in such cases, some staff have suggested.
But
an unprecedented analysis of more than 2,900 stories and links on the
BBC news website in the year following October 7, 2023 reveals a
profound imbalance in how the organization has reported Palestinian and
Israeli deaths.
The
total number of Israelis killed on and since October 7 is around 1,410,
while the official Palestinian death toll is conservatively estimated
at 45,000 people, a vast undercount. Yet according to new research by
data journalists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, which builds on their previous work,
the BBC is less likely to use humanizing language to refer to
Palestinians than to Israelis. Najjar and Lietava also found that the
organization refers to Palestinian deaths only slightly more often than
Israeli deaths, despite the fact the Palestinian death toll is now the
higher of the two by a factor of at least 28.
There
is one exception to this latter trend. On April 1, Israeli drones
targeted a three-car convoy belonging to the NGO World Central Kitchen,
which was transferring food to a warehouse in northern Gaza after
coordinating its movements with Israeli military authorities. Because
six of the seven slain aid workers were westerners, their killings
received widespread western media attention. The seventh worker killed
in the attack was a Palestinian driver named Saifeddin Abu Taha. In each
of the numerous BBC articles about the killing of the group, he is
referred to as “their Palestinian colleague” or “the Palestinian driver.”
Because
of this, mentions of Palestinian deaths surged. “It is the
single-largest spike in the whole period in terms of the mentions of the
deaths of Palestinians,” Lietava told me. “Even then, Saifeddin Abu
Taha is very rarely mentioned directly, often only in association with
the Western, majority white, group.”
This analysis is an expansion of Holly Jackson's work analyzing bias in media coverage of Israel and Palestine. Mentions are grouped by week. Death counts for Gaza are from Tech for Palestine and likely vastly undercounted. Death counts for Israel are from the IDF official website. See Github for complete methodology. Najjar
and Lietava also looked at causal versus non-causal headlines that
mentioned death, dying, killing, suffering, starvation, or hunger—that
is, headlines explicitly describing who killed who (e.g. “A was killed
by B” or even “B killed A”), compared to those that did not (e.g. “A was
found dead”). In the first nine months after October 7, just 27% of BBC
news story headlines about Palestinian deaths explicitly mentioned who
killed them. In the case of Israeli deaths, 43% identified the
perpetrator. By contrast, when covering the Russian war against Ukraine,
the BBC identified the killer in 74% of its reports of Ukrainian
deaths.
A
similar disparity emerged when analyzing the use of humanizing and
emotive words to describe the deaths of Palestinians versus those of
Israelis as the researchers found they were used proportionately far
less for Palestinians. It was also present when examining terms such as
“massacre,” “assault,” “slaughter,” “atrocity” and other terms—these
were all applied disproportionately to Palestinian actions when compared
to those committed by Israel. Only Israeli strikes were described as
“retaliatory”—210 times—compared to 0 for Palestinians’ use of weapons
during the period covered by the report.
“Look
at the sheer number of stories about October 7 and the hell individuals
went through—but not Palestinians, despite the disparity of scale,” one
BBC journalist said. “It took until babies started starving to death
[in Gaza] before we stopped focusing on the hostages.” Another is even
more damning. “We’ve never known the racism to be so overt,” the
journalist said.
In
response to the overall findings of the study, the BBC said: “The
algorithm does not provide insight into the context of the usage of
particular words, either in relation to the attacks of 7 October or the
Israeli offensive in Gaza. We do not think coverage can be assessed
solely by counting particular words used and do not believe this
analysis demonstrates bias.”
In
response to the BBC’s statement, the researchers told me “We are not
ascribing bias based on some perfunctory analysis of word frequency
devoid of any other context,” emphasizing the abundance of evidence
pointing towards the same conclusions. “Every word is a choice,” they
said, “and words chosen or omitted repeatedly over the course of a full
year of coverage are very strong indicators of editorial policy and/or
prejudice. Likewise, disproportionately highlighting Israeli suffering
and death when Palestinians are dying in far greater numbers tells us a
great deal about whose lives matter and whose lives don't.”
![]()
Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images.
Deference to Israeli Claims
Since
Israel’s onslaught against Gaza began in October 2023, BBC online’s
deference to Israeli narratives has been apparent. BBC journalists
pointed to specific examples—beginning with the fate of Nasser hospital
in Gaza.
In February, the Israeli army laid siege to the hospital. “The
evidence at our disposal points to deliberate and repeated attacks by
the Israeli forces against Nasser hospital, its patients and its medical
staff,” reads a report by NGO Médecins Sans Frontières that detailed the incident. That evidence includes repeated
sniper attacks causing multiple deaths and injuries, fatal shell
attacks, and the storming of the hospital in February, with the Israeli
military detaining an MSF staff member and refusing to offer details on
his condition until his release two months later.
The original BBC news headline for an article co-authored by Berg had been updated from “Israel special forces enter besieged Nasser hospital” to “Nasser hospital in catastrophic condition as Israeli troops raid.” The article’s framing aligns with Israeli narratives. The first two paragraphs read:
Israel’s
military claims it has captured “dozens” of terror suspects during a
raid on southern Gaza’s main hospital, as staff and patients were forced
to flee under gunfire.
Israel
said it launched a “precise and limited mission” at Nasser hospital in
Khan Younis, adding it had intelligence that Hamas had held hostages
there.
No hostages were ever found in Nasser hospital.
Deference to Israel also surfaced in the BBC’s first story
on the Israeli army massacre of hungry Palestinians waiting for food in
February, an article accompanied with the headline “Israel-Gaza war:
More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.” The next
day, the headline for a second story was “Large number of bullet wounds among those injured in Gaza aid convoy rush—UN.” The language is puzzling: as the article notes, there were multiple eyewitness accounts of the massacre, along
with “the presence of Israeli tanks.” As one BBC journalist said,
“‘Israel accused of firing on civilians’ would be more accurate.”
On March 8, the BBC published a subsequent piece by Berg
with the headline: “Gaza convoy: IDF says it fired at 'suspects' but
not at aid trucks.” The article foregrounds Israeli denials and claims,
noting only fleetingly that a UN team had visited the injured and found
“a large number of people with bullet wounds” (as per the BBC’s own
headline from a few days before). Nowhere in the article is it mentioned
that Israeli accounts were contradictory: Mark Regev, now a special
advisor to Netanyahu, originally claimed Israeli troops were not
involved at all. What makes this even harder to defend on editorial
grounds is that BBC Verify—launched in May 2023 as the BBC’s fact
checking and anti-disinformation department—published a separate piece on March 1 challenging Israeli claims about the massacre. That work was not woven into Berg’s article.
Two days before the publication of the report, the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
had released detailed evidence of Israeli responsibility, including the
apparent use of bullets that matched those in Israeli army weapons. A month later,
CNN published a detailed piece based on video and eyewitness accounts
discrediting Israeli claims, making it clear that the IDF had fired on
crowds without warning, as survivors had said from the start.
In May 2024, far-right
Israeli extremists blocked aid from getting into Gaza, in part by
attacking and destroying the aid; the BBC headlined its story on the
incident: “Israeli activists battle over Gaza-bound aid convoys.” As one BBC journalist said, an accurate headline would have been: “Far-right Israeli activists block aid convoys.” “Aid convoy denied entry to northern Gaza, UN says,” reads another headline from June 2024, neglecting to mention that Israel had been the responsible party.
One
staffer believes the BBC has largely sought to align its journalism
with the UK government’s foreign policy. As far as top brass is
concerned, “Israel is treated like Ukraine, Palestinians like Russia,”
the staffer said. If a journalist tries to challenge the double
standards applied to Russia and Ukraine, managers are baffled, treating
both Ukraine and Israel as British allies. “Look at headlines on what Russia does in Ukraine. But the headlines around Gaza are generally entirely unclear, and are never clear that Israel has been the perpetrator.”
Yet even in cases where the UK government has allowed for dissent, the BBC has largely clung to the Israeli narrative.
In January, the ICJ issued provisional orders
to Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the
provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”
to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide.” But not
only do the BBC online articles about famine fail to mention this—they
also repeatedly fail to detail the actions being taken by Israel to block aid.
This is despite the fact that Lord David Cameron, the then-foreign secretary, wrote a letter
in March to Alicia Kearns, the chair of the House of Commons foreign
affairs committee, outlining multiple ways in which the Israeli state
was preventing aid from entering Gaza. Even the emphatically pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle ran the damning headline: “David Cameron condemns Israel for arbitrarily blocking Gaza aid.” The BBC website did not report on Cameron’s letter.
Earlier that month, the BBC ran an interview
with Cameron on the same subject, with the headline, “David Cameron
urges Israel to fix Gaza aid shortages.” Some, though not all, of the
points Cameron raised in the letter were covered in the interview, but
as one journalist pointed out, examples of Israeli obstructions to aid
should be cited in every article on the subject. “Articles on famine in
Gaza won’t mention the International Court of Justice rulings, or
relevant stuff. The full context is lacking,” another journalist said.
This
is consistent with the BBC news website’s coverage under Berg’s
editorship. “Palestinian sources need to be verified, but Israeli
sources do not,” one journalist said. “There’s red flags if linked to
Hamas, but you can quote the IDF freely.”
The BBC’s Response
In
response to this story’s allegations surrounding BBC’s coverage of
Israel and Palestine and Berg’s role and background, a spokesperson for
the network told Drop Site News: “We reject your attack on an individual
member of staff. Like every journalist at the BBC, they must adhere to
the BBC’s editorial guidelines which ensure that we report impartially
and without fear or favor.” The statement continued:
The allegations you’ve made fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.
More
broadly, we reject any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’ towards either
side in this conflict. The Israel/Gaza conflict is a challenging and
polarising subject to cover, but when asked to choose the one provider
they would turn to for impartial reporting on this story, three times as
many pick the BBC as choose our closest competitor. The BBC remains the
world’s most trusted international news source.
We have transparently set out our approach to reporting the conflict—for example in this blog
from Deborah Turness—and if we make mistakes we correct them. Our
coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.
The
BBC’s defenders point to the fact that the organization is criticized
from “both sides.” But even Turness dismissed this as a defense in a blog post
titled “How the BBC is covering Israel-Gaza,” published on October 25,
2023. “We cannot afford to simply say that if both sides are criticizing
us, we’re getting things right,” she wrote. “That isn’t good enough for
the BBC or for our audiences. At the BBC we hold ourselves to a higher
standard and rightly challenge ourselves to listen to our critics and
consider what changes to make where we think that criticism is fair.”
The
BBC told Drop Site News that it corrects mistakes in its stories. Yet
one BBC journalist has pointed out that the organization has failed to
correct claims in published stories about specific atrocities alleged to
have been committed on October 7 that have since been proven false.
Hamas
fighters and other armed Palestinian militants undoubtedly committed
grave war crimes in the attacks of October 7. But the BBC website
published a number of unverified claims about the attacks, a significant
number of which originated from the accounts of the religious emergency
response team Zaka; many of these claims have since been proven to be
false and discredited, most prominently by Israeli media outlets. Yet BBC news stories still include these disproven claims, including those of multiple babies being killed or the bodies of 20 children being tied together and burned. Other media organizations, including the New York Times,
have printed articles correcting some of the false claims they made
about October 7, though, like the BBC, a staggering number of false
reports remain on the websites of many major news organizations.
Even
if BBC license payers complained about such false claims remaining in
published stories, the organization would be unlikely to act on them:
Their standard complaints process only deals with items broadcast or
published in the last 30 days.
After
14 months of witnessing the BBC’s failures up close, these disenchanted
journalists are divided between believing it is important to stay and
try and make changes and wanting to abandon what feels like an
irreparable systemic feature. But all agree that the gap between BBC
coverage and the gravity of the atrocities committed is indefensible.
As
one concludes: “Most people with a conscience here have found that the
coverage is frankly despicable and certainly not up to our editorial
standards.”
Leave a comment