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Just Journalism on the Reporting of the Gaza Conflict

We have spent the last month meticulously reading, watching, listening to and analysing what the UK media had to say about Israel’s operation in Gaza (within the limits of our scope of monitoring). Our objective has been to see whether … Read More

By / February 6, 2009

We have spent the last month meticulously reading, watching, listening to and analysing what the UK media had to say about Israel’s operation in Gaza (within the limits of our scope of monitoring). Our objective has been to see whether the coverage was balanced, impartial and factually accurate. Had any lessons been learnt since Lebanon 2006 when, in the eyes of many, the media got it so wrong?

Here’s a brief selection from our findings.

Our first observation concerns a key failing across the BBC and the broadsheets: a virtual absence of communication to audiences about who Hamas actually are and what they represent. We ran a simple index looking for mentions of facts such as:

· Hamas does not recognise Israel · Hamas calls for Israel’s destruction in its Charter · Hamas refuses to renounce violence against Israelis · Hamas has a history of violence against Israelis · Hamas does not accept previous peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians

The results are startling. Only 5% of news articles in the broadsheet newspapers made any reference to any of these indicators. Of 18 reports on the Today Programme, one made reference to Hamas’ Charter and the rest made no mention of any of the other indicators, and of ten programmes on the BBC Six and Ten O’clock news, only one included an interview excerpt with Tzipi Livni saying that Hamas ‘cannot accept my right to exist’. This was the only mention of any of the indicators by a quoted source or BBC correspondent. These findings indicate that the journalists behind these reports simply did not view these facts as relevant to the conflict.

Looking at the images in the media, only 4% of all the photographs published about the conflict in the first week depicted Hamas militancy and only one photograph of a rocket launcher appeared in the broadsheets. And in cartoons, more than 75% of all editorial cartoons published over the three-week conflict period depicted Israel as the aggressor, whereas only a quarter even featured depictions of armed Hamas fighters.

Another key failure specifically relates to our national broadcaster. The BBC consistently failed to make the crucial distinction between opinion and fact. The source of the confusion, to a significant extent, is the still highly ambiguous role of Jeremy Bowen: the Middle East ‘Editor.’ As an editor, Jeremy Bowen is permitted to ‘editorialise’ the news, which he does by rendering his reports highly personalised. All of which is fine, as long as any kind of editorialisation is clearly marked as an opinion piece. But this is not what the BBC does. In his daily Gaza diary on the BBC website, the Middle East Editor was given free reign to publish his own partial and emotive opinions. These demonstrated a clear sympathy with the Palestinian case and clear hostility towards Israeli perspectives. For example:

‘Back on 6 January I wrote in this diary about one of the most affecting pieces of video I had seen coming out of Gaza. For me, it is still the most memorable single image of the war. It showed a young Palestinian father kissing his dead baby son goodbye. He was murmuring farewells to his boy and I defy anyone to view it and not be profoundly moved. I was frustrated that I did not even know the names of the man and his son…But I wanted to know more about the man, much more. After a couple of days in Gaza I can tell you a great deal about him…And I am glad that I can finally put a name to a face.’ 23rd January 2009.

As well as a preponderance of entries focusing on personal stories of Palestinians, there was an unmistakable cynicism displayed towards Israel running through the series. On numerous occasions, he made reference to the ‘Israeli narrative’ and ‘Israeli message’, but never once referred to a Palestinian ‘narrative’ or ‘message’. The implication here is that Israeli positions are ‘versions’ and Palestinian positions are reality.

‘Israel has been able to put across its narrative, that it is acting in self defence and doing all it can not to kill civilians. But it has been countered by the sheer weight of images of suffering from Gaza, which have inspired protests across the world.’ 12 January 2009

‘I’m struck by the constant Israeli message that ‘any other country in the world would do the same’. Would they?’ 13 January 2009

Not once in all of the TV coverage we monitored did Mr Bowen tell the personal story of an Israeli. And nowhere in his diary was it made clear that this was his personal opinion and not that of the BBC.

The BBC Editor also slipped personal opinion into some of his news reports. For example, in the late night news on 27 December 2008, he made the assertion in the middle of a news report that

‘Hamas has not been part of the last year of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The talks have largely ignored Gaza, which is a fundamental diplomatic failure.’

Whether the exclusion of Hamas (regarded by the EU and US as a terrorist organization) from last year’s negotiations constitutes a ‘fundamental diplomatic failure’ is a matter of opinion and not of fact.

And on the Ten O’Clock News on 5 January 2009:

‘Israel says it tries not to hurt them – all this is the fault of Hamas. Try telling that to the people in Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals.’ Here, the use of the phrase ‘try telling that to’ is a subtle but effective way of conveying to the viewer that Israel’s assertions should be treated with suspicion or indifference.

Both of these examples constitute breaches of the BBC Editorial Guideline on impartiality:

‘Our journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy. Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters.’

To their credit, the BBC’s news journalists did regularly report what life in Sderot was like and show images of rockets falling, one landing perilously close to Jeremy Bowen himself. Paul Wood especially deserves praise for his balance and detached perspective.

However, there was one other area where the BBC did not manage to convey crucial information to audiences: in acknowledging the deaths of Hamas terrorists as part of the overall casualty rate. Despite understandably heavy focus on Israel’s media ban, there was no mention until after the ceasefire of the danger that Hamas might be influencing the statistics and sources coming out of Gaza. And so each night, the BBC reeled off casualty figures sourced from ‘Palestinian medics’. Only on one occasion did the BBC TV evening news programmes break the figure down into civilian versus non-civilian casualties. 11% of broadcasts on the Today Programme broke down the figure. In contrast, of the 48 broadsheet articles which gave a figure for the number of Palestinians reportedly killed, 40% attempted to make the distinction. So the general impression made was that all casualties were civilian, rather than a combination of civilian and Hamas.

Improvements in coverage were certainly detected in some areas: in the amount of time and space allocated to quoting Israeli spokespeople; in the overall stance taken by the UK’s broadsheets in their editorial pieces (34% were classified as ‘neutral’ about Israel’s operation in Gaza, 32% took a ‘less favourable’ stance and 34% were ‘more favourable’) and in the BBC’s coverage of both perspectives of the conflict in its news reports. It was principally in Jeremy Bowen’s opinion pieces that the BBC did not provide balance

However, when it came to arguably some of the more influential areas of reporting, we detected serious shortcomings, particularly at the BBC. We have seen the privileging of reporters’ own opinions at the expense of a full presentation of the facts and issues. As a result, core journalistic principles have been compromised.

To view our full report, go to www.justjournalism.com

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  • Alex Chaihorsky

    I see. Your "moral compass" firmly points to your own tribal preferences. You defend Israel’s atrocities because you are Jewish! So you "moral compass" is just a happenstance in which you had no say, i.e – your genetics. How enlightened!

    BTW, that was the very same reason (genetics) why Nazis claimed their righteousness and their right to gas us and others! Its not that your "compass"  is much different, you just do not see much problem with Judeofascism and prefer to accuse the other side of it. And I am not telling you that Islamofascism does not exist, but the only context in which it makes sense to discuss it, is when you compare it with Judeofascism.But if you claim that throwing old olive cans homemade rockets that killed (sadly and tragically) 18 people in several years is fascism and destroying thousands unarmed people with army ammunition from safe distance is not, your "moral compass" really shines!  Again, how enlightened!

    BTW, as a former militant Zionist I do not blame you that much. Everyone gets his eyes opened in a different way. For me it was a trip to Israel in summer of 1996 to the Virology Congress in Jerusalem and seeing how Palestinian women and children were treated by Israeli military at checkpoints. Just two days before I almost was arrested on the Syrian border because I was about tio initiate a fistfight with a poor American tourist who was talking about land for peace swap. Another couple of monoth earlier (it was 1996, mind you) I was toasting the killing of PM Rabin (ZTL). So I only know too well how that "moaral compass" works. 

    Was guilty of it myself.

     

  • Gil

    Max, your absolutely right that any news report must be put in context. Only reporting on what the journalist can see with their eyes is useless, but putting events in context requires a significantly more sophisticated analysis than the bullet list of facts about Hamas that Elizabeth Jay has declared is the requirement for "just" reporting.  The "facts" that a journalist chooses to report on, or omit, of course have political implications, but my point is that no matter what the background context given by a reporter, the stark reality of destruction in Gaza has been the general focus of most stories that came out of Gaza over the past month, and pro-Israel advocacy groups like "just journalism" are crying foul because they have trouble spinning justifications for that reality to an international audience. 

    My objection to Elizabeth using the word "just" is that it for her, it doesn’t mean doing justice to the story, or putting the violence in a larger context.  For her, "just" means not only telling Israel’s side of the story, but arguing for Israel’s side of the story, and that is not the job of the international media.  

  • Alcove-One

    What’s even more interesting Alex is that it was the very same BBC that sent coded messages to those resistant groups in France and elsewhere. Contrast that to during the Iraq War the BBC broadcast troop movements of UK troops and all the details of their deployment for for the world to see.

    The Beeb was no more unbiased in the 40′s as they are today.

    The difference is that 65 years ago the BBC wanted to defeat Euro-fascsim and today they want to aid and comfort Islamofascism and the UK tax payer gets to foot the bill for their own eventual demise.

    As for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, I can only feel sorry for someone with that warped a moral compass.

  • Alex Chaihorsky

    Gil,

     Excellent point. Reporting is one thing, analysis is another. Too often contemporary reporters are trying to inflate their importance by offering analytics where they just do not belong. Immediately their own and tribal agendas, political views of their bosses and populist views of their readers become an issue. But most of all its their unwise unwillingness to recognize a grandeur of the humble role of observer above that of the interpreter. Of course it is much easier to write a thick book of politically correct interpretations than that of factual observations. 

  • Max Socol

    Gil, I think you might want to back up and consider what you’re asking for.  How is Hamas’s ideological background not part of the "story"?  Accurate reporting requires more than just straight reporting of what has happened in front of the reporter’s face — it requires a certain amount of knowledge of the origins of the story, conveyed clearly to the reader/watcher.  There’s a reason Joe Wurzlebacher made such a laughingstock of himself when he came here: he doesn’t know anything about Israel or the conflict.  He had no background, no information whatsoever.  He was, in other words, about as useful as a video camera traveling the country on its own.

    It certainly is part of a reporter’s duty to be fair, for precisely the reason above.  The consumer has to depend on the reporter to offer a critical portrait of the circumstances surrounding something like the Gaza war.  We tune into news to learn about the full situation, not just the here and now.  We have to be able to trust reporters to explain what’s happening as objectively as they can.

    I don’t set much stock in this study as the "Just Reporting" group openly bills itself as pro-Israel (I’ll get my media criticism from an impartial source; thanks anyway).  But surely you can at least agree that, if it’s true that BBC reporters were omitting any mention of Hamas’s view of Israel, they failed to deliver a complete product to their audience?

  • Gil

    One premise of this argument is that journalists must be "balanced" and provide equal time to two  sides of a conflict, and if there was some symmetry of power and violence in this conflict, that would be a reasonable argument to make, but there is hardly any parity in the levels of power or violence exercised in Gaza.

    Regardless of arguments of who is justified or not, it is the job of journalists to report on the most pressing story, and in this case, it was the hundreds of dead civilians in Gaza.  The fact that the points about Hamas laid out in this article were mentioned less often in the face of a humanitarian crisis, is inconsequential to the job of journalists, which is not to be "just" or fair, but report on the story of what is happening (it is their job to be accurate, and having legit sources is important as noted).  Anyway, in this case the story of what was happening in Gaza (i.e. massive deaths and casualties) outweighed the story of what was happening in southern Israel, or even the story of the political justifications for the use of violence. 

    When you boil it all down, it doesn’t matter who started it, or what one party’s goals and beliefs are.  You just cant kill hundreds of civilians and then complain the media isn’t being fair to your side of the conflict.  The message about justifications and the morality of your cause gets muffled by enormity of the human tragedy.  Somebody who is a specalist in public affairs and runs an organization to hold journalists accountable surely understands this fact and is now just trying to play catch up after the fact. 

  • Alex Chaihorsky

    Interesting. So, BBC is not balanced because they do not repeat ad nauseum that Hamas is anti-Israel? But is it an obligation of the resistance party of an occupied and imprisoned people to be nice and diplomatic toward its opressors and occupiers? Does French anti-Nazi Resistance fighters had an obligation to officially state that Germany has the right to exist while they blew up German military trucks? Or must they have accepted the Vichy Government agreements betweet Nazi Germany and France? Or Russian "partizan" grassroot movement that fought Germans occupiers? Has they had to be reprimanded for violence against German troops?

    Your arguments would only hold water if Hamas would be a party in independant Palestine within its UN defined borders with full access to the world and in control of its resources. 

  • lbjack

    Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, bogus bishop recently unexcommunicated by the church, is a Brit, who lives in the convivial climes of — where else? — Argentina. 

    Whether Muslim or Anglican, Arab or English, it’s about the culture, folks.  And the culture is refected in the media.

    ???? ???

  • Fishman

    I was gravely mistaken

  • lbjack

    BBC is just one of many blatantly anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Arab/Muslim apologist media in UK.  The Guardian is the UK edition of Al-Ahram, while The Independent is anything but.

    Of course, what accounts for these terrorist shills is twofold: 1) the fear of the hordes of restive, violent and virulently anti-Semitic Muslims occupying their cities, who will take to the streets to rampage, murder and terrorize at the least provocation, when they become bored in their idleness; 2) the craven desire to pander to them.

    But far deeper is four centuries of ethnic cleansing and pogroms, reflecting an endemic anti-Semitism which Cromwell, by fiat, couldn’t extirpate from the British mindset.  With the end of Cromwell’s philo-Semitic Puritan regime (a regime which fortuitously spread to America), came the Restoration and, though no restoration of open persecution, restored the anti-Semitic mindset of the royalist élite, which endures today and trickles down to the lower classes, as witness the UK origins of the anti-Semites, masquerading as anti-Zionists, who infest these precincts.

    ???? ???

  • Alcove-One

    I am afraid complaining about the BBC is like shouting at the wind and preaching to the choir and they tax you for the privilage. Stop paying the bloody licence fee. They cannot throw everyone in jail. And if they can then the Beeb can get lectures from Mr. Mugabe who is the only tyrant the BBC does not have respect for since he threw them out of the country.