Baby Killers Update: BBC Responds to HR Criticism
March 15, 2011 12:41 by Simon Plosker
HonestReporting’s criticism of the BBC’s coverage of the brutal terrorist murders of the Fogel family prompted a huge number of complaints to the BBC as well as attracting coverage in the Jerusalem Post.
Much of our critique was directed towards the BBC’s decision to promote an article concerning the Israeli decision to build new homes in settlements, an article that paid mere lip service to the shocking terrorist attack by a baby killer and demonstrated the BBC’s obsession with the settlement issue at the expense of all others.
Our criticism stands as does the charge that the BBC buried the story of the terrorist attack. While the BBC did cover the story immediately following the attack, the coverage disappeared from the BBC News homepage, the Middle East news page and nowhere in the story of the settlement building did any links to the existing BBC piece on the murders appear.
Below is the related story section from the BBC’s settlement article as it appeared on the morning of March 13.
The BBC usually links to related materials on later stories such as the settlement one critiqued above. Instead, the story of the terror attack disappeared from the main news pages, including that of the Middle East news where such items usually stay visible online for a period of at least a few days.
We issued an update to our original critique, also taking issue with the problematic nature of the BBC’s initial coverage of the terrorist attack – note the use of quotations in the headline below.
The BBC later removed the quotation marks, which had cast doubt on the veracity of the terror attack itself. Incredibly, however, those quotation marks reappeared around the word “Palestinian” so moving the doubt from the attack itself on to the identity of the attacker. Such is the BBC’s habitual need to eliminate all responsibility for Palestinian terror.
In addition, a photo of a soldier standing by a signpost pointing towards the settlement of Itamar still remains. Would it have pained the BBC that much to replace this with a photo of the slain family? Or is humanizing the Israeli victims of Palestinian terror too much for the BBC to contemplate?
Even when the BBC does cover the murders, the visual emphasis remains firmly fixed on the location of the event on a West Bank settlement and the portrayal of Israel in militaristic terms.
The BBC Response
This is the standard response sent by the BBC to many of your complaints:
Thank you for your e-mail. We initially covered the murders here on Saturday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12721170
On Sunday, the announcement about new settlers’ homes was made. Our West Bank correspondent offered analysis saying that it was “hard not to see the timing of the announcement as linked to the killings”. We felt it was appropriate therefore to recount the events at Itamar in this context, and the photograph on the page highlighted the importance of the killings.
However, this was not, as you suggest, our only coverage of the deaths, but the latest version of developments, a normal practice in 24-hour online journalism.
Indeed, whether to deflect criticism from its overall coverage or to avoid admitting burying the story of the murders in the first place, the BBC has quietly updated its settlement story page to include links to the initial story of the terrorist attack.
This may be the closest we will get to seeing the BBC acknowledge a serious error. Regarding the BBC’s overall coverage of the horrific terror attack, the BBC was not the only media outlet guilty of bias. By its actions and focus on the settlement issue at the expense of the murder of a three-month old infant, two small children and their parents, it demonstrated a level of callousness that was not seen elsewhere.
Don’t let the BBC and other major media players downplay the murders by dismissing them as “settlers”. Ensure that the media honors the humanity of the victims. Join the more than 1,400 people who shared the initial communique on Facebook.
The BBC’s response is utterly inadequate and deserves a redoubling of your efforts to hold this media monster to account. Keep sending those complaints to the BBC and demand that it addresses the issues that we have raised above. We cannot bring back the victims of terror but we can at least make every effort to see that the international media, including the BBC, treats them with the respect they deserve and not as anything less than the human beings they were.
Steven Kalka
4:07 pm
Mar 15, 2011
We’ll make a deal with the BBC. The Jews will surrender Israel if the UK agrees to leave their occupied territories of Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, and return them to Ireland and Spain respectively.
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Igor
6:07 pm
Mar 15, 2011
No deal, unless they also return Scotland, Wells and England to Celts and accept minority status, and agree to be killed from time to time for being second class citizens
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roger radford
4:29 pm
Mar 15, 2011
And not forgetting the Falklands (Malvinas)!!
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G K
4:29 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Maybe the BBC put ‘Palestinian’ in quote marks as it is finally recognising there is no such people!
… haha…
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David
4:32 pm
Mar 15, 2011
sounds very reeasonable
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elzeide
4:43 pm
Mar 15, 2011
And they are also stealing the money that US pays to UK for the rent of a base in Mauritius Island. Mauritius is now a free country however the UK never pays to them the rent collected from US.
Great job HonestReporting !
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David Star
4:49 pm
Mar 15, 2011
If this was the first time that the Brits had lied, cheated, stolen, jailed, beaten or in any other way done their best to display their inborn hatred of Jews, I could have accepted it.
However the oxymoron, “British Integrity” has a long history.
From the Balfour Lie of 1917, to the Churchill rape of 70% of Israel as a gift to the Husseini nobodies, to the 1929 massacre of the Jews of Hebron along with every attempt to stop the Birth of the Jewish nation the crowd of despicables called Great Britain never waivered.
Even after the successful establishment of the state, they did their best to kill us. During the Yom Kippur war they would not allow US supply aircraft carrying desperately needed ammunition to Israel to refuel at US airbases in England.
And so I say to hell with the never ending “Slimey Limeys”,and their “Royal Parasites”.
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James Robertson
7:44 pm
Mar 15, 2011
“If this was the first time that the Brits had lied, cheated, stolen, jailed, beaten or in any other way done their best to display their inborn hatred of Jews, I could have accepted it.”
Do you even know what you’re writing? Reverse the words Jews and Brits in that sentence to see what I mean.
General prejudice is the root of discrimination and hatred. You display it here in spades, you quote dates and things a century past to somehow justify your hate filled diatribe at a people rather than an organisation that they have little to no control over. You however have control over your actions. You, not your religion, not your nationality, not your family but you, Yourself are despicable.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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» Baby Killers Update: BBC Responds to HR Criticism Freedom Alert!: Defending American Freedom by exposing Radical Islam, Socialist, Liberals, and all the Enemies of Freedom, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness!
4:50 pm
Mar 15, 2011
[...] article can be viewed at Baby Killers Update: BBC Responds to HR Criticism on [...]
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Sam Richmond
4:56 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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maurice
5:26 pm
Mar 15, 2011
how easy brits forget terrorism, or is it alresdy a surrender to islam that invaded England.
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sandra
5:35 pm
Mar 15, 2011
They should resettle all these “Palestinians” in Arab countries where they threw out almost a million Jews from their homes and confiscated their land and money.
Israel is a Jewish State and Jordan is the home of the “Palestinian people”. If Israel hadn’t absorbed all the Jewish refugees from all the Arab countries, they would be in refugee camps today. The Arabs have done nothing but use the “Palestinian cause” as a way to focus on Israel when their intent is to destroy the Jewish people. None of the Arab countries give a hoot about what happens to other Arabs especially the ones in Gaza and on the West Bank. Look at how miserable they are treated by their own leaders. They continue to kill millions of their own people throughout the world. Israel has to protect its people and if the world doesn’t like it, they can all go to hell. The massacre of the Fogel Family had nothing to do with settlers or Jewish settlements. Jews were blown up in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, Petach Tikvah and in numerous other cities in Israel, because they were Jews and that is the truth.
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Madelyn Freeman
5:48 pm
Mar 15, 2011
BBC tilts its bias heavily in favour of Arabs for one reason – finance. It ain’t rocket science to understand why the British continue to allow, for example, sharia banking to seize such a powerful stronghold in the city and sharia law to undermine the British justice system albeit by virtue of ‘stealth’ so as to establish Moslem society a powerful stronghold here. This ideology creeps deeper and deeper, further and further into the rather delicate fabric of British society notwithstanding the British refer to this historical course of action as ‘appeasement’ but in truth they, the British, are two-face in nature – that is to say whilst pretending to protect their British national interest, at the very same time they will continue to allow islamic extremest idealogies to flourish and extend deeper and deeper into establishing a power base for monetary benefits for an otherwise impoverished nation. So much for Rule Britannia.
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Bernstein
5:51 pm
Mar 15, 2011
The BBC is biased against Israel. This fact is well known. BBC instigated the Balen report into their bias, paid for with licence-payers’ money, but have consistently refused to publish it. If they had nothing to hide, they would have published the report. The movers and shakers at the BBC are people who were at university in the 1970′s and 1980′s when anti-Israel sentiment was rife, as it still is. Sadly, these people have not matured since they left university and joined the BBC, where they spread their pernicious distortions of the truth to the entire world. They all read the anti-Zionistic Guardian, a once great newspaper but now no more than a worthless rag. That paper carries all the job advertisements for public service jobs. No wonder the BBC is so biased against Israel.
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Sabba Hillel
5:56 pm
Mar 15, 2011
The English Supreme Court has ruled that religious people are “not fit” to be parents when they ruled that a religious couple were properly forced to stop being foster parents because of their religious beliefs. The BBC is just making a similar decision with regard to the Fogels who obviously were not viable parents because of their religious beliefs. Thus, according to the BBC, the murderers were only preventing an even worse crime when they stopped the AFogels from raising religious children.
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Frank Adam
6:15 pm
Mar 15, 2011
I am not surprised at how the Itamar case has been glossed over despite the British ghoulish taste in murder reports. If British media had made half as much hoo hah about British Moslem honour killings as they did about the West case or Shipman, you can be sure the embarrassment would have stopped the nonsense years ago; but of course “Auntie” is perpetually trying to get into satellite deals with Saudi and other Gulf sheikhs and Beeb staff can not even bear the thought of moving to chilly Salford from a nice warm posting between the Ocean and the Gulf.
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Simon
6:35 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Time had a similarly disguisting article. It mentions the murder at the beginning, with few details mentioned much later in the article, with a long discussion about the settlements:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2058660,00.html
As usual, some people are promoting the idea of a conspiracy, that the Israeli government fabricated this to gather support. It seems quotations around ‘Palestinian’ in the BBC article help promote such ideas.
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BARRIE HURWITZ
6:59 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Fortunately we have other news media which counter the BBC’s biased reporting. I suggest everyone read Bret Stephens’ -”Are Israeli Settlers Human?” on the Opinion page of todays(march 15) Wall Street Journal.
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Steven Kalka
7:08 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Maybe BBC and the British establishment resent Israel because it’s a reminder of an expansive empire that no longer exists.
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SBSteelers
7:11 pm
Mar 15, 2011
Using the BBC logic then it must’ve been reasonable for the IRA to bomb Britain & shoot British soldiers. And, those civilians in England, at the wrong place at the wrong time, were killed – and not murdered.
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Marie
8:05 pm
Mar 15, 2011
As I understand from the LA Times and BBC the murder of an Israeli family has been blamed on the fact that they live in a settlement that Palestinian’s object to on what they feel should be their territory.
So please tell me if I understand you correctly. Should African American’s move into what folks consider a traditionally white neighborhood are you saying it would be justifiable for some Klu Klux Klan members to break into their homes and butcher mom, dad and their babies just because the KKK folks consider the neighborhood “their terriroty”?
If I use your rationale then you must finally admit that Israel surely is justified in defensive, offensive and retaliatory bombing of those who are daily lobbing bombs on the heads and homes of innocents living in Israeli neighborhoods. These Palestinian/Hammas murderers do so just because they wish to own and occupy all of Israel and push its Jewish occupants into the sea.
How dare you blame the deliberate murderous attacks by cowardly Palestinian/Hammas terrorists on an innocent family including babies and legitimize the murders by saying it is justifiable revenge for the occupation of land owned by Israel that the murderers covet.
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S. Kehela
8:17 pm
Mar 15, 2011
When there were no settlements, all the Arab Countries surrounding Israel, attacked Israel with the intention of driving the Jews into the Sea, despite the UN division of the land into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Arabs lost territory to Israel after every war they started in order to eliminate Israel. The Arabs continue to expand their hatred of the Jews. To say that the Arabs will stop attacking Jewish people, whenever and wherever they see an opportunity, if there were no settlements, is rubbish. The question of the settlements can only be solved by negotiation and not by murder of innocent people even if they are settlers on territory controlled by Israel as a result of Arab wars of aggression against Israel.
History has shown that Israel is willing to give up occupied territory for what Israel believes will bring peace with the Arabs. E.g. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula for peace with Egypt. Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in order to try and make peace with the “Palestinian” Arabs. In the last case, this seems to have encouraged more attacks against Israel, finally resulting in the recent Gaza incursion.
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