I believe I mentioned this faux pas by the BBC earlier today, but here are the hard, cold facts.
On Christmas Eve, BBC radio repeated, six times, a completely false report that Israeli troops had executed 137 Palestinian civilians and buried them in unmarked graves. This of course came from a notice by the ever-reliable Hamas, which loves to fabricate such stuff. Eventually the BBC corrected itself (see below), but this shows the willingness of its journalistic chowderheads to lap up and regurgitate to the public whatever saucer of cream Hamas sets before them. The BBC and the Guardian, it seems, are doing the absolute worst and most biased reporting on the Israel/Hamas war among all mainstream media.
Click below to read the archived report, which of course isn’t in the BBC online but in the Times of London.
The story:
The BBC has apologised for reporting Hamas claims that the Israeli army was responsible for carrying out “summary executions” in the Gaza strip without seeking sufficient corroborating evidence.
The broadcaster has issued an apology via its website for the Christmas Eve report, which is understood to have aired six times on the BBC World Service and Radio 4 before being pulled.The story, which appears to have been based on a report from the news agency AFP [Agence France-Presse], centered on a statement from the Hamas terror group. It accused Israeli troops of illegally killing 137 Palestinian civilians since the war started on October 7 and burying them in a pit in northern Gaza.
The BBC said that it had failed to “make sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence to justify reporting the Hamas claim”.
It added that its accusations were attributed and its story contained a response from the Israeli military saying that it was unaware of the incident and that Hamas was a terrorist organisation that did not value truth.
Some staff considered that by posting the report on its corrections and clarifications web page, the BBC had not gone far enough to rectify its mistake.
“Unless this apology is public and broadcast in the same arena as the original mistake, the damage is done,” said one Jewish employee.
A second staffer added: “They have taken the Hamas line — a terror organisation — at face value, far too much since October 7. And nothing has changed. And again it’s an apology about a very serious accusation against Israel hidden on a corrections page.”
The BBC has previously apologised for a television report that Israeli troops had targeted medical staff during a raid on a hospital in Gaza in November.
The previous month it had admitted that it was wrong of one of its correspondents to speculate that that a rocket that fell outside al-Ahli hospital in Gaza had been fired by Israel.
Well, he finally did, and it’s below (click the link to see it, though I reproduce it in full):
Anyway, here it is in full:
I agree with the Times: this apology has to be broadcast (preferably six times) on the same radio station where the false report appeared. And “they didn’t make sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence”? They appear to have made NO effort! How many people who heard the original radio report will even know about this correction?
Fortunately, the Times did the BBC’s work for them, also mentioning how the Beeb had falsely reported the Hamas line two times before this. In the end, it shows the BBC’s anti-Israel and antisemitic tilt, something that becomes more evident every day.
Along with burying the whisper of a correction, they soften their own confession by pointing out “although the accusations were attributed blah blah.” So, not much harm done, then?
Fully agree that a error of this magnitude deserves a much more robust apology.
…the Beeb had falsely reported the Hamas line two times before this.
As Goldfinger observed, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’
Even in the correction the BBC does not state clearly that the episode reported never happened. Someone could think that there is still debate whether it happened or not.
I agree. It wasn’t much of a correction. The line that begins, “… but although the accusations were attributed…” doesn’t even make sense to me. It is not “journalism” to simply repeat an uncorroborated accusation by a warring party. Send a reporter in there to investigate. Report what your “journalists” discover with their own eyes. Verify first; then run the story.
I couldn’t find the BBC’s apology by searching the organisation’s own website – even searching for “corrections and clarifications” returned irrelevant results, despite that being the name of the webpage they published it on: https://archive.ph/v7I92
If I hadn’t already known that the apology existed and where it was located, thanks to the Times report, I would never have found it.
The fact that the BBC went ahead with this broadcast based on Hamas’s lies speaks volumes about their willingness to assume the worst when it comes to Israel. It’s bad journalism not to verify such reports in advance of airing them *and* it underscores the bias of the BBC editorial staff.
Also, as Ricardo notes above, even the correction is ambiguous. They seem to be apologizing for not verifying the story, but they are not stating that the substance of the report was false or, at least, that there is no evidence for the claim. It’s a weak apology.
What we’re seeing is the result of Western-based international organizations — such as Doctors Without Borders, discussed here recently, as well as the BBC — recruiting, basically, Palestinians to work as their representatives in Gaza (the former BBC journalist Abdallah Mehjez, mentioned in Hillel Neuer’s piece that Jerry posts about at https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/11/five-hard-pieces-on-israel-and-the-war/, is a case in point). One can appreciate the reasons: the organization needs native Arabic speakers, either to report on the situation (BBC) or to communicate with patients (MSF). Palestinian applicants are already there, and no doubt eager for the regular salary. Gaza is also probably a tough sell, recruitment wise, to Arabic speakers from, well, almost anywhere else, unless they already have a strong ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause. So they end up hiring local people who they probably wouldn’t hire anywhere else, or if they had the choice, and are then lumbered with those people’s underdeveloped sense of professional ethics.
Oddly, googling “Abdallah Mehjez” bbc does not produce any hits that do not relate to Hillel Neuer’s piece — i.e. there are no online stories filed by him as a BBC journalist, or in which he is mentioned as one, before the current relevations. Possibly his BBC work was only ever on its Arabic-language radio service, and associated Arabic-language web pages, but even his twitter and LinkedIn pages don’t seem to include the Arabic-language version of his name. Or possibly he made it up to make his experience look more impressive, and he has never worked for the BBC. Nothing would surprise me.
Maybe Owen Jones is working for the BBC now.