The BBC In Its Own Words: “We Made a Mistake”
June 26, 2012 15:47 by Simon Plosker
In March 2011, the BBC’s coverage or, rather, lack of coverage of the brutal murders of the Fogel family generated outrage as well as shock and grief that an Israeli family, including a three-month old baby girl, could have been butchered in such an appalling way.
The BBC’s indifference to the murders also grabbed the attention of British politician Louise Bagshawe, now Louise Mensch who slammed the BBC in an opinion piece. Mensch eventually elicited a less than satisfactory response from the BBC’s Head of News blaming “a remarkably busy weekend” of news for the low priority given to the Itamar murders.
To her credit, Mensch has continued to use her position to hold the BBC to account by questioning the BBC’s outgoing Director-General Mark Thompson at a parliamentary hearing of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Thompson was forced to admit “very straightforwardly, we got it wrong.” The Jewish Chronicle reports on Louise Mensch’s questioning of Thompson:
“I was overwhelmed by response from the Jewish community both here and abroad. There was a feeling the BBC just didn’t care and that, if a settler had entered the home of a Palestinian family, slit the throat of their children, that the BBC would have covered that.”
Mrs Mensch had subsequently received an apology from BBC News’s Helen Boaden but wanted Mr Thompson’s reassurance about the BBC’s “even-handedness” on the Middle East conflict.
Mr Thompson said the story had come during a “very busy news period” including the fighting in Libya and the tsunami in Japan.
“News editors were under a lot of pressure,” he said. “Having said that, it was certainly an atrocity which should have been covered across our news bulletins that day.”
But he added: “I don’t believe that should be taken as systemic bias. We try very, very hard… to reflect suffering on both sides of that conflict. When there has been a humanitarian incident in Gaza, we try to show the effects of rockets in Sderot.” . . .
“But I do want to say, to all our audience including our Jewish and Israeli audiences here and around the world, we do want to make sure we are fair and impartial. We made a mistake in this instance.”
While this rare acknowledgment on the part of the BBC is welcome, Thompson’s denial of BBC bias is laughable. In those rare occasions where the BBC has mentioned the effects of Gaza rockets on Israeli civilians, they have more often than not been buried near the bottom of a story focused on Israeli air strikes on Gaza, promoting the “cycle of violence“.
Recent headlines such as Gaza: New Israeli air strikes leave several dead are illustrative of the systemic problem of the BBC’s reporting.
Is this Mark Thompson’s idea of fairness and impartiality?
In addition, what has not been picked up in news reports are some of Thompson’s other statements to the Select Committee. For example:
Josephine Bacon
5:02 pm
Jun 26, 2012
In the World Service News, the BBC regularly demonstrates a strong anti-Israel bias. Two recent examples were its reporting of contamination of the water supply in Gaza which in the headlines it blamed on the “Israeli blockade” and maladministration but in the news item itself, a person claiming to represent the Save the Children Fund who had an Arab name and who, of course, entirely blamed the “Israeli blockade”.
The other item was when Israel retaliated for the recent rocket attacks that killed one man and injured several others. The report said that Israel retaliated and injured 17 people. It went on to say that this was in retaliation for rocket attacks from Gaza THAT HAD HARMED NO ONE!
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dorothy
5:04 pm
Jun 26, 2012
LATELY THEY R MAKING SO MANY MISTAKES BUT THEIR ADDMITION IS NO LONGER WORTH WHILE.
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The BBC In Its Own Words: “We Made a Mistake” | Blogs about Israel aggregation
5:06 pm
Jun 26, 2012
[...] Continued on Page 2 [...]
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Oleg
5:20 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Great piece! Thank you
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emes
5:22 pm
Jun 26, 2012
As the BBC favours the Arab populous so highly, I am surprised they didn’t issue a report on the man who beat to death his pregnant wife because she didn’t vote for the new Muslim leader. Neither mention the fact that in the past two years 13,000 rockets have been blasted into Israel.
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steve mann
5:23 pm
Jun 26, 2012
You can take BBC apologies wrap them neaten in toilet paper and dispose of them where toilet paper belongs-
When they publish the Malcolm Balen Report in its entirety, then and only then I might find some respect for their administration and only then with suspicion!
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Josephine Bacon
5:29 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Re the Balen Report: I made exactly this point to Michael Grade when he came to speak to the British-Israel Business Group. He claimed that the Balen Report was an editorial report and was not for publication! So he has become an apologist for the BBC! I wonder what his grandmother, Rose Winogradsky, would have said.
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emes
5:35 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Josephine, she would have said “vatever you do bubelah, is alright mit me!”
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Sylvie Schapira
5:47 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Thank goodness for Louise Mensch. We need more like her. People who will stand up and speak out for the terrible tide of anti-Zionism/Israel/Semitism that is on the rise again. No matter how they dress it up, the BBC is biased against Israel.
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Simon Shiels
5:57 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Systemic bias from the BBC is just a reflection of anti Israel bias in some of the higher pro Arabist echelons of the UK Establishment and Government. By all means draw attention to it but every time you do it only serves to entrench their position even further.
Ironic that the same Islamists that they idealise (maybe idolize) despise them in turn for their liberal western tendencies!!
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Edward Bow
6:00 pm
Jun 26, 2012
I try hard to understand why the constant rocket attacks into Israel are not reported although they are happening daily.
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Giora
11:04 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Edward, there is far worse. Take Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian this week. She tells her readers that over a 100 rockets have landed on southern Israel this week and then, (and here is where you need to sit down) she tells us these are the first rockets to hit Israel for over a year…despite the count for 2012 being around almost 500 (which is of course an average of about 3.5 for every day of the year so far. As she is based in Jerusalem she MUST know her statement is totally wrong, but then, she probably doesnt much care about the facts…and why hasnt HR picked up on this and demanded an accurate statement? My friends in Ashkelon would appreciate the world knowing the truth.
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Jayson Rex
6:04 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Trying to detail BBC’s pro-Arab and anti-Israeli stance (including the notorious antisemitism of its staff), seems to me a totally useless effort by Honest Reporting. Once a reputation is established, it tends to become a permanent fixture unless violently destroyed. This will eventually happen but first UK needs to clean its current act and, in the process, overcome its shameful colonial past replete of double dealings, treason and broken promises.
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velvel in sandy springs
6:06 pm
Jun 26, 2012
This is a pathetic “nonapology” apology by the Beeb. It sounds more like a “we are so sorry we got caught rewriting the truth and if our lack of professionalism and deceit offended you we apologize.”
Were they to fire the persons responsible for their deceitful practices there would be few folks left to collect a paycheck at the BBC.
But it should not be much of a surprise that when institutions go “native” and have more friends among the terrorists and their sponsors than among the free Israelis, Brits, or Americans, they will look for ways to embrace the nether regions of their “friends.”
It is sad that they do not remember that their “friends” will turn on them when it is expedient.
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Barbara Stone
6:29 pm
Jun 26, 2012
For a change the BBC’s Mark Thompson is correct when he says, ‘Israel/Palestine, I think, is particularly an example of a story where what the story looks like depends partly on what geographical lens you apply to it and the broader you get the more you understand why things happen the way they do.’
Quite clearly the ‘lens’ Jeremy Bowen (or ‘Al Bowen’, as the foreign Press corps in the Middle East refers to him for obvious reasons) applies has a rosy, Palestinian tint to it and anything he reports ought to carry a ‘bias warning’.
And how reassuring it is to learn that Lord Patten let it be known to a House of Commons select committee that he would give up his membership of a Palestinian aid organisation – in the interests of political neutrality – on assuming his appointment as chairman of the BBC Trust (a.k.a. ‘Jobs for the boys’).
If the BBC had any scruples it would an ‘I’ to its title…and be more accurately renamed the Israel-Bashing Broadcasting Corporation.
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elihu
7:34 pm
Jun 26, 2012
dog eats man – is that a headline? Nor is moslem butchers non-moslem..
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Nathan Zafran
7:50 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Face the facts! Like the British hypocrites, and like the leopard, the BBC isn’t going to change it’s spots. Facts are a nuisance! Don’t, but don’t annoy the Arabs and the Muslims, or their sanctimonious supporters. What a silly but deadly situation! Britain has definitely, but as predicted, gone to the dogs.
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Marilyn
10:58 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Hey Nathan & Gilead, go easy! Just because the BBC p*** you off, dont take it out on all us Britons – the BBC p***** us off, too! I am just one of many Britons who stand up for Israel every chance we get. Like many of my friends, I have had many happy trips to Israel and only wish I could afford to go live there. Yes, putting our heads above the parapet means we frequently get shot at – but we consider it a risk worth taking to stand up for what is right. I wouldn’t dream of judging all Israelis on the ignorant behaviour of an Isaeli Post Office worker I had the misfortune to meet, so don’t judge all us Britons on the behaviour of some of our lunatics – please.
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Jack Kessler
9:41 pm
Jun 26, 2012
Velvel, above, is exactly right. BBC is apologizing for getting caught, not for their persistent anti-Israel bias. They are too corrupt and dishonest and to much sham journalists to have any shame about their bias, slant, abusive pretense of journalism.
Real journalists often risk arrest and death to find and publish the truth. These cowards are not willing to risk even being thought politically incorrect.
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Gilead
10:27 pm
Jun 26, 2012
As an Israeli citizen brought up in post war London in the 50′s to Israeli parents, I am ashamed of my British upbringing. Common sense has completely flown out the window. The Brits turn out to be a bored and drunken nation, with nothing better to do than fill their time with childish deeds such as boarding boats to “end the blockade”, and rallying against a democratic nation that has a problematic political situation on its hands, as well as crazy rouge nations declaring the holocaust is a fiction, and calling as well as striving for the annihilation of Israel.
The BBC which used to be a reliable source of information, is teaming with enthusiastic Israel haters for some odd reason.
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Okey
12:19 am
Jun 27, 2012
It was a deliberate omission, consistent with BBC policy. Its consistent record proves that.
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Ruth
4:03 am
Jun 27, 2012
Is there any way you can implement petitions so we can sign them and get them delivered to, for example, the BBC and try to get rid of Jeremy Bowen? Please look at the NumbersUSA.com site and see if that type of thing could be used by you. Thank you.
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gary ashton
4:58 am
Jun 27, 2012
thank you Louise Mensch, what a brave journalist to have the integrity to stand up to the obvious anti semitic institution that the bbc has become.
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Victor
7:31 am
Jun 27, 2012
Join her website/chat room http://www.menschn.com ….I did
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