Four days ago John Simpson of the BBC wrote this article, “Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson”, in which he said, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
It may not be in its job description – it may be contrary to its job description – but the BBC tells people who are the good guys and who are the bad guys all the time. Here is why I know that. For several years I was one of the contributors to the “Biased BBC” blog, which in those days was on Blogspot but now is at https://biasedbbc.tv/. Eventually, I gradually stopped posting there due to a combination of burnout and the political centre of gravity of the blog having moved away from my own views. But before that there was a period of years when I used to post some example of BBC bias almost every day. People would send them in, or I would see them myself. And there was never a day when I could find no example to cite; there were only days when I did not post because I was doing something other than the damn blog.
As an exercise in nostalgia, yesterday morning I clicked on the BBC News website to see what I could see. And, just like the old days, I found something immediately. (I did not post it then because during the day I was doing something other than the damn blog.)
Like John Simpson, Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor, is a veteran BBC journalist who has done much good work. I’m sure she thinks of herself as impartial. I am sure that she genuinely did not see the words I am about to quote as endorsing or condemning any particular view. The article concerned is headlined “Polish election: Expected political earthquake delights Brussels”, and it includes the words:
“In Poland’s case, Brussels withheld billions of euros of funds, pointing at the Polish government taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion, and threatening the independence of the judiciary and press freedom too by taking hold of the state broadcaster.”
The line about Polish politics is expressing an opinion. The line about abortion is expressing an opinion. Can a professional journalist like Ms Adler conceivably be unaware that the phrase “taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion”, assuming as it does that the foetus is merely part of the woman’s body, firmly takes one side in the abortion debate? The answer is yes, she can be unaware of it, because she is a well-connected, well-educated member of the more intellectual segment of the British upper middle class, who spends most of her time with colleagues of a similar background to herself. She joined the BBC in 1998. At that time the only major newspaper that carried BBC job adverts was the Guardian.
It could be worse. The British chattering classes are often silly and vain, but those who rose to prominence in the 1970s, 80s and 90s still have much of the liberal ethos of their parents in them. They want to believe, and so they do believe, that the rest of the world shares their kindly liberal values. They particularly want to believe that all their colleagues in the BBC World Service are “BBC people” in the same sense they are.
This belief is false.
Since John Simpson posted his piece, it has come out that several of the BBC’s Arabic language correspondents felt it was their job to “tell people who to support and who to condemn”, and the answers were “Hamas” and “Israel” respectively: “BBC reporters in the Middle East appear to justify killing of civilians by Hamas”
Mahmoud Sheleib, a BBC News senior broadcast journalist, tweeted suggesting that young Israelis were effectively combatants.
“[I see] In front of me on Al Jazeera, their so-called civilians are standing armed alongside the police and shooting because they basically don’t have any civilians among the youth. This is what the ignorant often don’t know. I am in favour of fighting them with love, yes, this is the solution.” Followed by a laughing emoji.
The Cairo-based journalist also took part in a Twitter conversation in which he joked about a woman whose grandmother was abducted by Hamas receiving an “inheritance”.
Aya Hossam,who describes herself as a broadcast journalist at BBC Arabic, liked a tweet saying: “Every member of the Zionist entity served in the army at some point in his life, whether men or women, and they all had victims of explicit violations… This term “civilians” applies to the animals and pets that live there and they are not seriously at fault.”
She later retweeted a message which included the phrase “the Zionist must know that he will live as a thief and a usurper”.
Hossam is a freelancer, but Sheleib is a senior correspondent.
Those two were not the only ones. Sally Nabil, Salma Khattab, Sanna Khoury and Amr Fekry were four more examples of BBC journalists happy to take the side of Hamas in public. Their BBC colleague Nada Abdelsamad was particularly enthusiastic:
Nada Abdelsamad, a Beirut-based programmes editor at BBC Arabic, retweeted a video of Israelis hiding in fear entitled: “settlers hiding inside a tin container in fear of the Palestinian resistance warriors”. This came with a hashtag translated as “promise of the hereafter”, a quranic reference to killing of the Jews.
I disagree, she knows very well what she is doing.
The most disgusting aspect of Journalist profession is how they reward palestinians for lack of care of their own civilians and punish is Israel for the care it has with their own civilians. That is the most odious aspect of journalism. That makes Journalism an anti-civilization profession.
I am not aware of any journalist asking palestinians and so called palestinian supporters why there are no tunnels for civilians protection verified by UN while Gaza is full of tunnels for military proposes.
BBC News at 10 was execrable yesterday.
See here https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rl1c/bbc-news-at-ten-16102023
from 33 mins
They got BBC Verify to report on the explosions on the safe routes. The second one was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzoB8FC4qz0
They did at least report that IDF denied their involvement, but:
– no other possible explanation was offered
– there was no mention of Hamas at all.
Have a look at that video and the comments below (before YT deep sixes it…)
– the fireball is clearly a gas canister explosion – it’s nothing like High Explosive
– there’s no sign of incoming munition at all – this would be visible in at least a few frames
– Israel is abundantly clear it wants civilians to leave (and everyone is making a fuss about how horrible this is)
– Hamas is abundantly clear it wants civilians to stay
Everything in this video points to Hamas and nothing to IDF, yet if you knew no better, you would come away from that report thinking a) IDF did it and b) they’re lying about not doing it.
The lack of focus on Hamas and what they could do to de-escalate is absolutely mind-blowing.
BBC have been actively supporting Hamas for a long time. This is not new.
Questions that BBC will not make: Will Palestinian Authority pay to the families of Hamas attackers?
From Jerusalem Post.
“BBC have been actively supporting Hamas for a long time. This is not new.”
But we do now have an opportunity to call them out on it – they are ever so slightly on the back foot and we really should be pushing to show this stuff – there’s a chance a wider audience might get red-pilled.
“In Poland’s case, Brussels withheld billions of euros of funds, pointing at the Polish government taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion, and threatening the independence of the judiciary and press freedom too by taking hold of the state broadcaster.”
Devil’s Advocate mode : Ms Adler might claim that she is merely reporting the “Brussels” view, and that these terms are how Brussels folk refer to the sins of the current Polish government.
Returning to reality, it’s worth noting that the rest of Ms Adler’ sentence also expresses standard prog political opinions – ie that the current Polish government has been threatening the independence of the judiciary (you may hunt in vain for the same turn of phrase applied to Democrat politicians urging the expansion of the US Supreme Court); and that the state broadcaster is ipso facto a dispassionate body (like the BBC – natch) off whom the government should keep its grubby political hands. And that the governance of the state broadcaster has something to do with “press freedom.”
But what I like best about Ms Adler’s statement are the “value” words – the one’s which tell you whose side she’s on by nuance rather than assertion of cold hard fact. Specifically “pointing at”, “virtually outlawing” “threatening the independence” and “taking hold of”
“pointing at” (or pointing out”) is an English irregular verb, conjugated thus :
I point at (or out)
You argue
He claims
“Pointing at or out”, of course, imports the notion that what is pointed at is real, whereas “arguing” identifies items which could just as well be fictional. And “claiming”, well that has a scoff built right in.
“virtually outlawing” is a splendid version of the “motte and bailey” qualifier. It allows you to use the banner word “outlawing” while allowing yourself the retreat to “virtually” if pressed.
“threatening the independence” is a twofer. It implies the bad guy is actually threatening – whereas in reality that is the characterisisation put on the bad guy’s acts by critics. But also it allows you to assert the imminence of an actual attack, when you have nothing more to go on than your own scaremongering. You can always up the scare ante with a “threatening.”
and “taking hold of” implies rough handling and seizure, as opposed to passing a couple of laws. Paper becomes metaphorical blood.
You could use all of these very scary expressions writing about government Covid policies, if you were inclined to paint then as deeply troubling. But you wouldn’t. If you worked for the BBC. Instead you would use extremely measured tones, fully in accord with John Simpson’s fantasy BBC.
And then there’s story selection and tone. You would never get a BBC article about the delight of righty folk at the demise of a lefty government. Don’t believe me ? Go and rad the BBC reports on the NZ election.
When the BBC starts cutting out emotional language around supposedly climate change crises, for example, I will take it seriously about its refusal to call a terrorist group by the term conferred on it by the UK as a matter of law.
I know that in some news organisations – such as Reuters – the motto is “show, don’t tell”. The argument goes that if you describe an act clearly, you can let readers draw their conclusions about the moral depravity/heroism involved, rather than have to spell it out. To be fair, some BBC journalists, who are out in Israel and Gaza and have seen other journalists killed, may take this view. But the problem is a lack of consistency. Look at the coverage of vaccines, of BLM, and other topics, and show me a comparable level of fastidiousness of language.
Pedant G: The lack of focus on Hamas and what they could do to de-escalate is absolutely mind-blowing.
This.
The point also speaks to how, at a subconscious level maybe, a lot of BBC and other journalists and commentators assume that Hamas and its deluded followers have no agency, no volition, but are merely impelled by a sort of deterministic force to act and think as they do. It is, in a way, a deeply condescending viewpoint, no different in reality from how an old colonial administrator might smile indulgently at the habits of the poor benighted souls over whom he ruled. The terms change, the mindset doesn’t.
Watching the BBC is bad for mental health. On Monday nights, there is now a docu-drama about the late, unlamented Jimmy Savile. For the love of god.
Why, all the attention on the Israeli border and next to nothing on the Egytian border?
I think they are more deluded than mendacious for the most part (though no doubt there are exceptions.) Obviously they take sides on some issues. For example, they don’t present a balanced view in the debate between whether the world is spherical or flat. They don’t take a balanced view as to whether Russia’s claims to ownership of Crimea is valid or not. They don’t take a balanced view as to whether the holocaust happened. For sure, the latter two do have a constituency advocating the non BBC view (and, since this is public social media subject to misinterpretation, I should say that I believe the earth is round, Russia had no right to invade Crimea and the holocaust most certainly happened, in fact is one of the most shameful blots on the history of humanity.)
There are some things outside of the overton window that they certainly don’t take a balanced view on. Some views are so outrageous, they think, that they don’t deserve the respect of balance. Some ideas are outwith the realm of public discourse. However, it seems that, from the BBC’s perspective, murdering thousands of civilians, beheading babies, raping and torturing parents in front of their children, and moreover, marches from educated western college kids celebrating this atrocity; from their perspective this is not such an outrage.
It seems odd that the BBC was perfectly happy to curtail any non government line of Covid, vaccines, masking, shutdowns and so forth. They certainly didn’t take a balanced view on these issues.
Really the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the BBC don’t want to call them terrorists because they think they might not be, or that, there is some doubt in their mind that the actions on that terrible day were, in fact justified. And I’m not sure how that is measurably different from holocaust denial.
The BBC reporters live in a little bubble, separate from reality, and consequently they can hold these ridiculous views because their echo chamber tells them it is ok, and tells them they are being intellectual and pensive for doing so. How sad that the news, which is supposed to tell us what is actually happening, is so divorced from reality that they are unable to roundly condemn people burning babies and cutting off their heads. Nonetheless, I think they are, for the most part, deluded idiots rather than mendacious. They are generally too stupid to be evil.
I disagree. They know very well what they are doing. Why do you think journalists created the word : Activists
To designate from moderate left to the extremist genocidal left.
It is language washing.
“It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn…”
But they do it every freakin’ minute of every day of the week.
Journalism exists precisely to tells us what is right and wrong. Seeing the News replaces going to the Church. Because politics replaced the religions as the thing most people believe.
Journalists are priests and they proselyte their morals. What is the most common answer of a student to go to journalism? “To Change the World”.
And now we have one more crime abetted by journalists, most of them, the probable Hamas rocket that hit Gaza Hospital.
500 deaths, they say.
Crime supported by most of Western and Arab journalists.
For more than a decade they have known that Palestinian rockets fall in Gaza. They never investigated, they never reported, they never told this NEWS. They CENSORED.
A particularly feeble and hypocritical piece by John Simpson when the BBC constantly makes it clear which side of most controversial issues it supports. I think Michael Deacon writing in the Daily Telegraph yesterday had it right in observing that by not calling Hamas terrorists the BBC is taking sides, the side of people who, in spite of the atrocities they have committed, don’t think they are terrorists.
More disturbing than the language the BBC uses is its uncritical acceptance of enemy propaganda – for example blaming Israel for the Islamic Jihad missile than landed on the hospital (a hospital in Gaza City – a city that was supposed to have been evacuated days ago).
And it is not just the BBC – all the media, including GB News, just uncritically repeat Hamas propaganda on casualty figures and so on.
They would never dream of uncritically repeating what the Russian government says about the war in Ukraine – so why do they uncritically repeat casualty numbers, and so on, from Muslim sources?
Nor is Hamas some sort of space alien group – it reflects the degree of dishonesty of the general culture. If Israel, and the Western powers, fall into the trap of thinking “this is just a war against Hamas” then DEFEAT, at least in the long term, is certain.
Have a look at this mealy-mouthed analysis:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67144061
How anyone could look at:
– the rocket trails
– the IDF radar traces
– the lack of surrounding damage
– the crater that is completely and entirely consistent with a homemade palestinian rocket
– the 30-40% failure rate of palestinian rockets
– *the lack of incriminating shrapnel*
and not conclude that the evidence points almost exclusively in the direction of a palestinian misfire is, as I believe I said above “absolutely mind-blowing”.
“Give them more free stuff – then they will like us”.
That is the position of Western establishment. Mr Biden, or rather the controllers of this unelected puppet, announced another 100 Million Dollars “aid” only today.
No wonder the followers of the Islam despise the modern West.
Richard Landes at Augean Stables has documented very thoroughly how “mainstream” Western news organizations do the bidding of Hamas, PIJ, Fatah, and Hezbollah. These organizations claim that they don’t use terms such as “terrorist” for objectivity and impartiality. But in moments of unintentional candor, they have admitted it is actually out of fear of retaliation against their personnel in the Middle East.
That is also why they uncritically repeat Arab claims and refrain from publishing any material the Arabs object to. For instance, Western news crews filmed crowds of Palestinians dancing in celebration of the 9/11 attacks. Arafat’s goons confronted the crews, confiscated the recordings, and issued warnings that if any video slipped through and was shown, There Would Be Consequences for the offending agency.
In a weird sort of Stockholm Syndrome, Western journalists “in theater” all firmly deny there is any intimidation by the Arabs or imposed censorship – even thought they all know about it and submit to it. And they choose to identify with the Arabs, which I think allows them to justify their collaboration in fraudulent propaganda.
Landes has several new posts up, examining Western responses to the Hamas attack – all worth reading.
Hamas is by any estimation an extreme Right-wing organisation in its aims, policies, agenda, and actions. Interesting that the BBC and the Left support it so unequivocally. Or am I missing something?