When British media outlets make editorial decisions which prioritise the media narrative of a terrorist organisation, fail to label the origin of their evidence, fail to report IDF denials and ignore opposing narratives entirely, the reporting process becomes one of laundering a Hamas narrative through sympathetic, or at worst affiliated, Gazan journalists, washing it off with the stain remover of western journalistic credibility, and presenting it, shiny and respectable, to a non expert audience missing half the facts and already primed to assume Israeli guilt.
A serious examination of violence against Palestinian women should be capable of examining both the circumstances which make women vulnerable and the agency, choices and beliefs of those who exploit that vulnerability. The BBC's report overwhelmingly examines the former, Palestinian women deserve journalism willing to examine the latter too.
Gaza’s civilian deaths have become a weapon in the information war, creating a dangerous incentive to put civilians in harm’s way, CAMERA's Leah Benoz writes in The Jerusalem Post.
The BBC appears to be deciding the level of responsibility a child bears for their own actions based not on age, but on ethnicity. When we look at comparable reporting on allegations against Palestinian children, British children and Israeli children, a disturbing pattern emerges around who is responsible, who has agency, who is sympathetic, and who is humanised.
There is a key issue upon which Knell is completely silent; the question as to why such a senior military figure was even present in such a densely populated civilian area in the first place. This illustrates with perfect clarity a key issue the BBC must address, and a new rule which must be added to BBC guidelines, not to protect Israelis, but to protect Palestinians, and any other population which may have the misfortune to discover that their deaths have become politically useful to one party or another in any armed conflict.
A pattern appears to be developing of the BBC deconstructing and re-writing Jewish history, replacing facts with a heavily editorialised reimagining that serves a political purpose.
The BBC has duties to its audience, set down in clear editorial guidelines. The pressing question is why does it continually break them on reporting around Israel, and why do those failures only tend in one direction.
Journalism does not merely report on the battlefield, the information environment is itself part of the battlefield. Reporters can therefore inadvertently find themselves recruited into the information strategies of parties to a conflict. The BBC’s duty of impartiality consequently requires a battlefield level responsibility to guard against the circulation of propaganda on its online platforms.
Rather than investigating whether the United Nations' exceptional scrutiny and condemnation of Israel is justified, the BBC usually simply amplifies it.
There is a line between analysis and opinion, and on the BBC that line must be iron. Analysis presents facts and shows how those facts connect. On the BBC, it cannot be partisan. It must be entirely factual, accurate and impartial. It must be a tool to allow audiences to reach their own conclusions. Jeremy Bowen is not a journalist, he is a public servant, and BBC radio and television is not a Guardian opinion piece. The BBC is not the right forum for offering heavily politicised, carefully cherry picked, deeply biased conclusions born in a very specific political echo chamber.
