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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Honest Reporting has a new report examining the ways, sometimes subtle, in which the BBC slants their news coverage: 6 Month Analysis of the BBC: The Subtle Bias. For instance:

  • Headline selection for stories in relation to violent incidents is inconsistent. 15% of stories about Palestinian violence named the aggressors while 60% of articles about Israeli operations accused Israel directly.
  • Greater attention is paid to Palestinian voices and opinions than Israeli ones. 19 out of 23 articles and picture series capturing the "man on the street" perspective were from the Palestinian viewpoint.

Some detail. For instance, in the section titled "Headlines and Grammatical Style in "Hard News" Articles":

Other headlines that describe Palestinian-initiated violence were either written without naming the aggressor at all, or written in the passive tense: "Gaza unrest gains own momentum" (May 16), "Gaza erupts in renewed violence" (May 17), "Threatened at a Gaza roadblock" (May 18), and "Fresh violence hits Gaza Strip" (May 19). In many cases, passive language described the event in the opening paragraph ("At least 20 people have been killed"). The two reported cases (in May, 2007) of Palestinian attacks against Israelis featured similar headlines: "Israeli dies in Gaza rocket raid" (May 21), "Casualties in Jerusalem shooting" (May 26). Technically, these articles are not incorrect. If an Israeli died after a rocket attack, it is not wrong to use a headline such as the one above.

However, in the vast majority of articles reporting on Israeli actions, the headlines were more direct: "Israel launches raids into Gaza" (May 17), "Fresh Israeli air strike on Gaza" (May 19), "Israel backs tougher Gaza action" (May 20), "Israel hits Hamas politician home" (May 21), "Israel strikes at Hamas in Gaza" (May 23), "Israel renews strikes across Gaza" (May 26), and "Israeli raids follow PM's warning" (May 28). While all these headlines appeared during the month of May (a month in which there was a great deal of reporting on violent attacks), the pattern is consistent.

In fact, during the first six months of 2007, out of 26 articles reporting on violent attacks perpetuated by Palestinian groups (on either Palestinians or Israelis), the group responsible for the violence was mentioned in only 15% of the cases. By contrast, in 38 articles where an operation was carried out by Israel, Israel was directly named in 60% of the headlines.


3 Comments

Let's take another example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6906220.stm

If Israel were involved in this, the headline would have read "refugee camp reduced to rubble" instead of the uninformative "battles continue at lebanon camp".

Obviously HR is limited to examples that can be categorized and quantified, which is a shame. Otherwise the statement could be much stronger.

This ISN'T so subtle - really racist comments about Jews permitted on a BBC message board:

http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/2418_bbc_allows_anti_semi.htm

When you put the whole picture into focus, doesn't it seem that the subtle bias is both feeding and permitting the blatant antisemitic comments?

Or is it the other way around - that what appears to be merely a subtle bias is masking something far worse?

This is so common, so thunderously ubiquitous, that any subtlety is eclipsed by the sheer volume of such editorial and reporting decisions - and that's what is reflected here, editorial decisions, even if they are often so well habituated that thought has been eclipsed by reflex. (To deny such would be similar to a revivified Hitler remonstrating that he wasn't really anti-Semitic, he was rather terribly and tragically misunderstood.) They remain subtle on an individual case-by-case, but in the aggregate one may as well deny the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Normblog comments from a similar perspective in his typically thoughtful and incisive manner, Forcefully Expressed, excerpt:

"Such purely operational language cedes the language of moral judgement to the likes of Ayman al-Zawahri. Instead, he says, we should speak more robustly as part of an effort to educate potential supporters of terrorist politics ..."

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