Sunday, March 23, 2008
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I'm not sure that the BBC is quite there yet. They still don't see the pattern. They probably think that these incidents of anti-Israel bias are isolated cases, that they can continue to get away with simple social Israel-bashing. We will just have to keep on with the intervention: BBC admits inaccuracies in coverage
The BBC has apologized for significant errors in two recent news reports on Israel.
In a news item on March 7, following the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva attack, the BBC showed a bulldozer demolishing a house, while correspondent Nick Miles told viewers: "Hours after the attack, Israeli bulldozers destroyed his family home. Later, mourners set up Hamas and Islamic Jihad banners nearby."
The house, however, was not demolished; the BBC was embarrassed when news reports from other broadcasters showed the east Jerusalem home intact and the family commemorating their son's actions...
...In a second incident, in a news item entitled "Israel jets strike northern Gaza" on March 14 on their News Web site, the BBC reported that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians in an operation targeting Kassam rocket launch sites in Gaza, and claiming that the United Nations secretary-general had described it as an attack on civilians.
"The Israeli air force said it was targeting a rocket firing team... UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned Israel's attacks on Palestinian civilians, calling them inappropriate and disproportionate," the report said.
In a letter to the BBC, Manchester Jewish community member Jonathan Hantman wrote,
"It is one-sided for the report to describe Israel's operations as 'attacks on civilians' while not describing the Palestinian rocket attacks, to which Israel was responding, as 'attacks on civilians' or 'acts of terrorism.'"
Hantman also pointed out that Ban's attributed comments were made weeks earlier to the UN Security Council and not in reference to that particular attack. He added that it was also wrong to mention the UN secretary-general's condemnation of Israel without mentioning his condemnation of Palestinian rocket attacks in the same statement.
"Ban's statement, made some two weeks ago, did not refer to yesterday's attack and did not describe Israel's operations on Gaza as 'attacks on civilians,'" Hantman noted. "He did, however, describe Palestinian rocket attacks as 'acts of terrorism.'"...
Note that these are beyond simple errors in recitation of fact and reveal the existence of a certain mind-set in order to assemble such errors. It is an addiction, and must be faced as such!
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The BBC admitting to "inaccuracies" would be similar to Lee Harvey Oswald admitting to a "mistake."
The BBC already admitted a bias towards the left last year and promised to correct this.
I don't believe that they will ever change.
For the german speakers - here is the link:
http://www.zeit.de/online/2007/30/bbc?page=1
the problem, the real problem is the subtle bias that is hard to catch and prove.
"Hours after the attack, Israeli bulldozers destroyed his family home. "
How can this kind of visual information be termed an "error", or "inaccuracy"? It is a fabrication, and theefore a lie. And someone should be made accountable for disseminating a lie as "information".
Y:
the problem, the real problem is the subtle bias that is hard to catch and prove.
Oh, I disagree.
When (and if) the day comes that BBC errors are as likely to be pro-Israeli as pro-Palestinian, then we'll know we've made serious progress.
Until then -- well, imagine, just for fun, if the BBC were required to release one major pro-Israeli story per day (or else prove that no such stories could be found). Just one per day would be enough... because a few weeks of that, and of the resulting cognitive dissonance (and nausea) in BBC staffers, would show them just how pervasive the bias is.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline