HonestReporting analyses BBC’s ‘biased’ coverage of the Gaza conflict

HonestReporting.com has released its analysis of what it claims to be the BBC’s biased coverage during the Gaza conflict. Biased against Israel, off course.

The report which can be seen here begins with a telling comparison to the conflict in Sri Lanka between government forces and the Tamil Tiger separatists.

During the conflict, the BBC published, on average, 4.5 articles every day dealing with the fighting. In contrast, BBC coverage of the Sri Lankan government’s campaign against the Tamil Tigers group — a conflict that resulted in an estimated 2,000 civilian deaths in January of 2009 — produced barely one article a day.

According to human rights organizations, the conflict in Sri Lanka includes intentional attacks by both sides on civilians, attacks on hospitals (twenty attacks from December through February alone), and the use of human shields. Yet the BBC gives this conflict, estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, less than one quarter the average daily coverage of the Gaza conflict. If the BBC is going to focus this much on  Gaza, it must expect scrutiny of that coverage.

This discrepancy is something that I and many others have pointed out previously and will be the subject of a post I intend to write shortly.

One of the main thrusts of the HonestReporting analysis is the discrepancy between accounts coming from Gaza and those emanating from the Israeli side. The report points out how unsubstantiated claims went either unquestioned or received a token warning of the BBC’s inability to authenticate claims.

Emotive images often accompanied the reports even though these images were often unrelated to the actual events being reported. Unverifiable atrocities were reported unquestioned. 

The reports concluded:

The BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict painted a picture of an Israeli attack that intentionally targeted civilians and may have included war crimes. Specifically: 

• The BBC relied upon Palestinians who were given the opportunity to make dubious accusations without any supporting evidence.
• The BBC published image after image of Palestinians suffering under Israeli attacks while giving readers few views of the impact that the conflict was having on Israeli civilians living under a constant and daily rocket barrage.
• The most damning Palestinian statements about the Israeli operations were highlighted on the side of the articles, while Israeli statements were almost never treated in the same way.

The analysis looked at every report on the BBC and the BBC website during the conflict and various diagrams are produced to back up claims of an extremely skewed coverage which showed Israel in a negative light with little attention given to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis condemned to years of rocket and mortar attacks. Many sources used by the BBC were dubious, to say the least, in that they came directly from or were almost certainly channelled through Hamas or its supporters or those it had most likely intimidated or threatened (although this, too, of course is difficult to prove or assess).

The most egregious ‘lie’ was that of the ‘bombing; of an UNRWA school which made such headlines at the time, especially as John Ging, UNRWA’s head of staff in Gaza first claimed more than 40 civilians had been killed INSIDE the school and later had to recant and admit that the shells fell outside the school. But the damage was done and the BBC continued reporting 40 deaths only for it to be revealed there were ‘only’ 12, of which 9 were Hamas operatives who had used the vicinity of the school to fire at IDF troops. The truth was not reported with the same sensationalism as the initial lie and thus the the smear sticks.

Although the report is an excellent analysis, I must take issue with part of its interpretation of the statistics. Here is a table of the findings I have made:

Now, I do not want to be an apologist for the BBC but most of the action was taking place in Gaza. And even though rockets were falling on Israel throughout the conflict it is undeniable that it was Gaza where there was a huge battle raging and hundreds of people (almost all Palestinians) dying, not Israel. 

For me the statistics are not the key element of the bias; what is key is the quality of the reporting and the lack of concern, especially by Jeremy Bowen, for proper journalistic norms. Hearsay and dubious sourcing, gullibility and a predisposition against the Israeli position, assumptions of guilt without proof, hectoring of Israeli spokespersons; all these were what characterised the BBC’s coverage.

Even now as terrible stories come out of Israel the BBC and others are still making assumptions about the veracity of the reports simply because they are from Israelis without waiting for the full investigations to be carried out. At least Israel takes the accusations seriously; when Hamas is challenged to respond to accusations of abuses it basically sticks two fingers up – hardly surprising; since when did terrorists ever abide by any international laws or conventions? That’s why they are designated terrorists in the first place.