Devastating Bbc Memo in Full

by no means an overview of the situations, but good to give quick excerpts from one of the issues in the report:

This was not the first or last time the BBC has reported stories about starvation in Gaza without telling audiences that the person highlighted has pre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance

... The same programme also featured images of baby Siwar Ashour who suffered from allergies and required specialist formula. She also had a congenital oesophageal condition, which had been reported in The Guardian.

By the time of broadcast, the BBC already knew the story was out of date and that baby Siwar had received the necessary formula a week earlier, she was maintaining weight and had been discharged from hospital. None of that was revealed in the programme - meaning the BBC had broadcast another inaccurate story.

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Former ICJ President Joan Donoghue told BBC’s HardTalk programme the media had widely misinterpreted its findings. She said it was not correct to say the ICJ had ruled there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.

But a report to the EGSC flagged “numerous instances” of the phrase being used on BBC reports, analysis and live two-ways on both television and radio. It was also cited by International Editor Jeremy Bowen and on Newsnight.

The report said there were too many instances of the BBC misrepresenting the ICJ’s ruling to be listed in full.

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The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.

The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.

One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied.

It seems that the most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israel ground forces.

The EGSC was reminded that the BBC had itself reported extensively on Palestinians digging these graves at the time. These reports had topped its bulletins.

How could this then be forgotten in the subsequent BBC coverage that suggested something more sinister had occurred? The EGSC was offered no explanation.

The question becomes even more pressing when you learn the journalists responsible for the first set of stories were the same journalists who wrote the second set of stories suggesting the graves were evidence of Israeli war crimes

Everything here seems to fall in the category of "The BBC should bias their reporting to portray issues from a more conservative lens.", and my favorite criticism "It's biased against conservatives to quote them directly."

Source links in submissions please. Archive links in comments.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869749

It is a proudly proclaimed tenet of U.S. conservatism (Republicans) that liberty includes the freedom of bias and to promote bias for personal, business and political ends. This includes freedom of bigoted policy and exclusion of others on racist principle. There's a hyper-Hegelian ideological gesture made by conservatives that intolerance of their bigotry is a form of discrimination against white Christians which endangers their privilege and majority. This gesture generates a surprisingly high degree political resonance in the U.S.

As to the matter of structural bias in the 4th estate relating establishment political objectives and policy, the national press is a complex instrument of great power, so of course it will play bias to the hilt, and occasionally its management will become roiled by "controversy" over the positions of the levers of machinery of opinion.