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The Layalina Review

VOL. V NO. 4, January 30-February 12, 2009

BBC Under Fire for Gaza Decision; Tit for Tat Politics Between Israelis and Palestinians

Numerous media outlets criticized the BBC for bias during the Gaza conflict. They cited BBC's failure to echo calls for aid to civilians in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli attacks.

Kevin Sullivan for the Washington Post reports that, in addition to a series of recent gaffes unrelated to the region, "Rage at the BBC reached a new level this week after the network decided not to air a humanitarian appeal for victims of the recent violence in Gaza." The Post notes that the uproar includes sit-ins at the network’s offices, a protest letter from 162 members of Parliament, hundreds of cancellations of television licenses by viewers, and individual complaints from over 22,000 people.

BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, excused the decision not to air the humanitarian appeal as their only option to avoid biased reporting. Writing on a BBC blog, Thompson explains, "We concluded that we could not broadcast a free-standing appeal, no matter how carefully constructed, without running the risk of reducing public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in its wider coverage of the story."

Thompson insists that, "Inevitably an appeal would use pictures which are the same or similar to those we would be using in our news program but would do so with the objective of encouraging public donations." He feels that overall, "The danger for the BBC is that this could be interpreted as taking a political stance on an ongoing story."

The Post says that the BBC’s decision incited exactly what Thompson was trying to avoid: the appearance of political bias in its news service. "Virtually every news organization that covers any aspect of the conflict is bombarded by complaints accusing it of bias," reporter Kevin Sullivan writes. "Often, both sides complain that the same story or broadcast is slanted against them. In this case, many accused the BBC of favoring Israel."

Sullivan describes an editorial in The Times newspaper, which pointed out the very reason the news media exists: not for those telling the story, but for those about whom stories are told. The editorial reads, "The BBC is evidently concerned that to show pictures of the suffering, and plead for assistance, is to take sides, presumably against Israel […]Giving aid to Gaza is something that can and should be done, whoever you think is to blame for the conflict."

According to the editorial, Sullivan writes, the BBC "seemed more preoccupied with avoiding another embarrassing dent in its image than with helping people." He adds that other critics pointed out that "showing clips of suffering children and asking for food and medical assistance in an offensive that killed 1,300 people in Gaza and reduced many buildings to rubble does not bias the BBC's news reporting toward either Israel or Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement that governs Gaza."

Diana Mukkaled of Asharq AlAwsat observes that the British press aired calls for the international community to help in the Darfur crisis and the Burma cyclone.

Terry Lacey, an Indonesia-based economist who writes about the Muslim world, condemned the BBC's decision not to broadcast calls for aid. Writing in outlets like the Palestine Chronicle and the Pakistan Times, Lacey declares, "The decision of the BBC to refuse to broadcast a humanitarian appeal for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) made of up British NGOs working in the Gaza Strip to help the wounded and homeless of Gaza is one of the most craven acts of political and legal cowardice in the history of British television broadcasting."

Lacey points out BBC Director General Mark Thompson's as so detrimental to the network's credibility as to risk "cumulative and global" to the corporation, continues Palestine Chronicle.

The DEC includes humanitarian agencies such as the Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam, and Christian Aid. Regardless of the politics at play, Lacey writes, the issue is an overwhelming humanitarian concern. Part of the appeal, broadcast by Britain's Channel 4, ITV, and Channel 5, included a voice-over saying, "Today this is not about the rights and wrongs of the conflict. These people simply need your help".

Lacey calls for a boycott of the BBC, and questions why the network such an "implicitly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab decision" noting that conflicts in Southern Africa and Central America received full attention.

Abu Dhabi's The National explores the broader concern of the BBC’s decision not to air the charity appeal. Muhammad Ayish, professor of communications at the University of Sharjah, writes that the decision was "wrong", and sparked major disappointment regionally. "For many of us in the Arab world who have grown up with a positive view of the BBC Arabic radio service as a balanced and human voice of the region, the decision not to air the Gaza charity appeal has been particularly unpalatable."

For seventy years, Ayish observes, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, BBC’s Arabic reporting was widely acclaimed in the Middle East for listeners who, "disenchanted with their national broadcasting services, found the Arabic Service a promising source of information about their own communities."

Ayish adds, "The BBC's concern that broadcasting the appeal could compromise its impartiality is not only untenable, but also provokes the question of how better to define the grey areas of morality and professionalism in the media." He writes that the media ethics at play here are "an individual management view that may not be shared by BBC managers in the future."

Yet Asharq AlAwsat’s Mukkaled observes that, while the BBC's longstanding reporting history is favorable in the region, BBC Arabic's performance as a year-old news channel has "yet to become part of the Arab viewer's daily life," largely because of decisions like this one. She notes that, while the station has doubled its daily on-air time from 12 to 24 hours, "BBC Arabic didn't seem to have one exclusive story about the events in Gaza. Nor did it have any exclusives on the events in Iraq or Lebanon."

In response to the network’s decision, the Washington Post points out that the network lost its interview with Mohamed El-Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Privately-owned British outlets, like ITV and Channel 5, along with Channel 4 and Welsh S4C, aired the appeal.

Tit for Tat Politics Between Israelis and Palestinians
Arab Media Watch reports that the BBC’s recent decision, which critics have condemned as biased, is the norm for the British media at large.

Shipra Dingare, an advisor with Arab Media Watch (AMW) is the author of a new report entitled, The British Media & 'Retaliation' in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. According to her article for ABC News, the decision by the BBC not to air the aid appeal for Gazan civilians, 56% of whom are children, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, only reflects the larger media bias as a whole.

The report asserts that Israel is portrayed most of the time as acting in "self-defense" while attacks by terrorist groups in Palestinian territory are reported as nationally-based Palestinian offensives.

AMW’s report is the first to examine the use of how "retaliation" and related language is reported in the British press. She writes that AMW’s research of British press coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the last half of 2008 "reveals that when the British press represents one party as retaliating, that party is Israel almost three-quarters of the time" and 100% of the time in Britain’s tabloid press.

Dingare adds that, "While violent actions by Israel -- including airstrikes, raids, assassinations and the Gaza offensive of February 2008 -- were portrayed both as ‘retaliations’ by Israel and as "provocations" to Palestinians, Israeli violence tended to be portrayed as ‘retaliation’ three times more often than it was portrayed as ‘provocation.’ […] The blockade of Gaza, described by U.N. special reporter Richard Falk as a ‘crime against humanity,’ was given comparatively little coverage as a ‘provocation’ to Palestinians."

She cites an Israeli raid on November 4, 2008, which prompted a Hamas rocket attack in response. Such attacks by Hamas had "almost completely ceased by October 2008 (when only one mortar and one rocket were fired." Yet even instances such as these were portrayed as Israeli self-defense, rather than first-strikes.

Dingare also mentioned Robert Fisk’s report in The Independent eight years ago, which described this phenomenon. He noted the verb choice in reports suggesting that Palestinians are the only parties that can be held accountable for violence in the region. They are "responsible for the violence, in which Palestinians ‘die’ in ‘clashes’ while Israelis are ‘killed’ by Palestinian gunmen. Ten years on, the double standards endure, perpetuating the conflict."