Anthony McIntyre ☠ Today's weather is horrible.
It will not deter Drogheda Stands With Palestine later this morning from shivering in solidarity with the besieged of Gaza. Besides, as it is Ireland we are advised not to complain about the weather as it will change in fifteen minutes anyway. This is a country where climate change takes place four times a day.
As wet and windy as it has been, the storm we have possesses nothing of the strength of the hurricane that is currently pounding the BBC whose head of news and director general both resigned this week. Jonathan Cook, if we may borrow the analogy, in a recent weather report, observed that:
The BBC’s now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it’s too ‘leftwing’.
The top flight departures came in the wake of a Daily Telegraph exposé which revealed the 2021 BBC manipulation of camera footage for the purposes of presenting Donald Trump in a negative light. Seriously, if they had left the man now being ridiculed as Donica Lewinsky to his own devices, he would have generated more negative publicity than a child protection conference for rapist reverends.
That the axe fell their way was not down to the crime of manufactured news but because of the powerful figure it was manufactured against. Again, let Jonathan Cook explain:
The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets.
If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.
Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.
When, in May this year, Ramita Navi turned up uninvited to a meeting of BBC executives, they were discombobulated. As explained in the Observer:
They had not invited her because, as it turned out, the point of the meeting was to set her up as the fall guy.
Navi had been one of the executive directors of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. It was a forensic investigation into the Israeli destruction of the Gazan health system. By the time she arrived as an uninvited guest at the meeting the documentary had been delayed for the sixth time. In her words:
the BBC was anxious because it had another Gaza film on its hands: one showing that doctors, medics and hospitals were being targeted and killed by Israel, made by a production company working hand in glove with two of its own journalists . . . An executive called and told us that those at the top of BBC News were ‘very jumpy and paranoid about Gaza’
The documentary was important because, again to cite Navi:
The BBC’s coverage was not showing what people could see on their phones: the killing of children, the targeting of hospitals, the erasing of entire families.
Those in leadership at the BBC trusted neither Amnesty International or The United Nations. Israel was its preferred source for information. As one BBC producer put it: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”
The obstacles encountered by Ramita Navi are emblematic of the malaise of structural and ideological bias that permeates the culture of BBC management.
In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:
In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:
Across the BBC’s coverage, a clear dynamic has emerged: the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives. The data shows that the BBC has consistently failed to report Israel’s war on Gaza with required impartiality.
Of course, the Labour government led by Der Starmer wants no such thing as impartiality or accuracy in reporting the genocide. Culture Secretary, Lousy Liza Nandy, responding in July to the broadcasting of another documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, whined that:
I have been very clear that people must be held accountable for the decisions that were taken . . .I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired?
Hopefully that reference to accountability comes back to haunt her and Der Starmer for their government's role in facilitating and enabling genocide. To conclude with Jonathan Cook:
The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.
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Having watched a lot of BBC output on Gaza, particularly the incisive journalism of veteran Jeremy Bowen, I see little evidence of systemic pro-Israel bias among its reportage. I do accept that it should have shown the Gaza health service destruction doc which did go on out on Channel 4.
ReplyDeleteBarry - there is a great piece by Jonathan Cooke from a few months back which nailed the BBC for its biased coverage. Must see if I can find it again.
DeleteThe BBC has been in the crosshairs of the Right for decades who would like nothing better than to abolish the BBC charter and the licence fee. The latest such reincarnation is the Johnson appointee and past Tory PR cypher Ro bie Gibb who along with the Telegraph seized on the Trump speech faux pas to enable the resignation of the DG and Head of News.
ReplyDeleteBarry - the BBC has only itself to blame for the position it finds itself it. It decided to become a mouthpiece for the Starmer line on the genocide. Because the right might want it to lean even further into its perspective is no reason to excuse its very real failings.
DeleteIn this case they the BBC gave the right a penalty kick which it was never going to refuse to take.
Gibb was a central figure in the murky takeover of the Jewish Chronicle and it's sharp tack to the Right in which his ideological soul mate Jake Walls Simons has been to the fore. As a member of the Board of Governors, Gibb has been the enemy within.
ReplyDeleteBarry, you seem to suggest that the Tories are responsible for the situation at the BBC because of Johnson's right wing agenda. Starmer has a right wing agenda which tends to complicate your attempts to shift it onto the Tories.
DeleteI would not trust Jonathan Cook to tell the truth about anything. On the use of chemical weapons by Assad in Syria, he is an atrocity denier claiming that the Douma attack in April 2017 was committed by rebels despite overwhelming evidence from Bellingcat and IPCW.
ReplyDeleteI never run against Bellingcat. They are too reliable. Cook is hardly an atrocity denier - he has exposed the atrocities in Gaza not properly covered by the BBC.
DeleteOn Dhouma in April 2018 he was citing a report which the West ignored from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons about the gas. He had every reason to doubt the West. They lied to in order to justify the war crime of aggressive war in Iraq. And here they were preparing to bomb another country. It was not as if the OPCW did not speak to enough witnesses about the attack. Cook was concerned, with good reason, that it was going to become a pretext for the West to bomb Syria.
These are all legitimate perspectives to hold. If he continued to hold them after the evidence emerged he can be criticised. Seriously, who should we believe - the award winning journalist or the leader of the British Labour Party?
He attributes Russia's invasion of Ukraine to NATO expansion not to Putin's imperialist aims. He maligns John Ware's Panorama doc detailing the extent of antisemitism in the Labour Party later validated by the EHRC. To talk of a dark Zionist heart in the BBC is loaded conspiracism.
ReplyDeleteBarry - NATO is a malign entity. Its hegemonic components arm and enable the genocide in Gaza. There is no reason to believe it has is behaving out of any altruistic or ethical concerns when it is arming Ukraine. For NATO this is a competition with Russia over spheres of influence. If Israel was perpetrating genocide in Ukraine, what side would NATO be arming? It would not be Ukraine.
DeleteI fully support Ukraine but do not deceive myself about NATO.
The extent of antisemitism under Corbyn was not as bad as it was made out to be. It suited the Labour right to claim it was. And there has been acceptance that the same right obstructed Corbyn's efforts to stem it. There were also attempts to conflate antisemitism with anti-Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.
Antisemitism is wrong in all circumstances and Corbyn should not be given a free pass or pardon where he bears culpability as leader. But whatever Corbyn was culpable for, it is pale in comparison to Starmer's open endorsement of war crimes against the civilian population of Gaza.
Loaded conspiracism - read the Centre For Media Monitoring report and tell me that its findings are wrong.
There is a very dark Zionist heart in the BBC. Its bias has been disgraceful. The fence it fell at was one built by the rich and powerful. Otherwise those two would still be in position. Why were they not sacked after what they oversaw on reporting of Gaza.
The West or indeed the international community had the chance to intervention in Syria with the egregious violation of the prohibition of the use of chemical weapons by Assad's sarin gas massacre of 1,400 civilians in Eastern Ghouta in August 2013. These were Obama's red lines which Assad got away with crossing because the House of Commons vetoed any military action. Thr rest is Russian history.
ReplyDeleteBut isn't that precisely the point? The West and the International community had a chance to intervene and bring a halt to the genocide. They chose to arm and enable it? Why wouldn't any journalists worth their salt have a deep suspicion of or hostility to wards Western governments?
DeleteJonathan Cook's journalism is so reductionist in its anti-Western hostility that like other left wing writers he tends to excuse the Assads, Putins and Hezbollahs of this world. So sorry it is not him that I look up to for proper reportage of Gaza but the brave independent journalists who report from there with all the risks. The BBC has been a constant target for the ire of Mela ie Phillips, David Collier and Jake Simons for its alleged pro-Hamas bias especially in its BBC Arabic output.
ReplyDeletea justified anti-Western hostility. It is not the people of the West he is hostile to but their governments. The West is enabling a genocide to take place in Gaza and he is calling it out. He does not excuse but puts context on matters which the West and the BBC deny us. Now we can argue with that context but unlike Starmer he has not supported war crimes. He worked in Israel for ten years, and has Israeli citizenship. So, I guess he knows as much about the place as the journalists you refer to. What journalists report from Gaza with all the risks? The Israelis have banned them and murdered hundreds of them. The supposedly pro Hamas bias didn't pass the smell test in the Johnson Report.
DeleteAgain, I invite your opinion on the Centre For Media Monitoring report which found that there was a strong pro Israeli bias at the BBC.
I am referring to the Palestinian citizen journalists who supplied the BBC and other media organisations with the content they could not produce due to the Iaraeli ban on journalists enteting Gaza.
DeleteBarry - these Palestinian citizen journalists are to be found writing for Modoweiss. Al Jazeera and Electronic Intifada. They would hardly trust the BBC and have been damning of its coverage.
DeleteBritain and the US failed to intervene to uphold international law in Syria in 2013 because of anti-intervention sentiment that was a legacy of Iraq. Had there been an intervention, the screamers from the Stop the Wsr Coalition would have gone into overdrive.
ReplyDeleteBarry - name one humanitarian military intervention that the US or Britain has made.
Delete