Thanks to the response of HonestReporting subscribers, Reuters removed an anti-Israel blog posting from its website within hours of our communique being published.
Many of you will have returned from your holiday break expecting to read the posting that referred to Israel as the “Zionist regime,” and to Israel’s West Bank security barrier as “The Apartheid Wall.” The blog also failed to attribute its claim that Israeli soldiers were instructed to “kill peaceful Palestinian protestors.”
Instead, a click to the original hyperlink reveals a blank space where Reuters has erased all trace of the offending content.
We do not wish to send unnecessary traffic to the original blog posting “Israeli Troops Given the Go-Ahead to Kill Peaceful Palestinian Protesters” but it is still available to view on The Largest Minority blog site.
Reuters, despite its disclaimer, has evidently recognized that hosting such material is inappropriate if the news organization hopes to maintain its credibility.
REPORT ACCUSES BBC ARABIC OF ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS
Attorney Trevor Asserson has released a new report, The BBC Goes Native (downloadable PDF format), arguing that the Arabic-language BBC radio’s coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War was biased against Israel and even supported Iran. Speaking exclusively to HonestReporting, Asserson commented:
On the basis of my analysis it appears that the BBC is providing a platform and a cloak of respectability to people whose views are both extreme in nature and also antithetical to the internal values and to the foreign policy aims of the West in general and the UK in particular. You will note that the BBC allows its program guests to spout quite extreme anti-American statements, incites all Arab countries to acquire nuclear weapons, refers to terrorist organizations as martyrs and suggests that it is US foreign policy to crush the Palestinians and to steal all their land.
The fact that these extreme views are expressed at all on the BBC is questionable. The fact that they should go almost entirely uncontradicted by BBC program hosts is deplorable. The fact that the number of people expressing views antithetical to the West vastly outweighs the number of people expressing pro-Western values indicates, yet again, a fundamental failure by the BBC to adhere to its legal obligations to be fair and impartial.
Asserson has also made available for the first time a second report – Pictures of Prejudice (downloadable PDF format) – which was originally placed before the BBC Independent Panel on Middle East Reporting, at which Asserson was one of only two individuals invited to give evidence.
This report analyzes one small section of the BBC Website World in Pictures which consists of a series of pictures put on the website each day to give a rough outline of news and interesting events. Asserson told HonestReporting:
The editor of the site, who I interviewed, seemed surprised when I suggested that the pictures should have been monitored for bias. He told me that he had not ever attempted to monitor them. Thus the selection of pictures constitutes a subconscious window into the thinking of the journalists doing the selection. What is revealed is an attitude overwhelmingly sympathetic to Palestinians and antithetical to Israel, by a ratio of more than 4:1. Yet again the BBC appears to be in breach of its obligations of impartiality.
Trevor Asserson has previously released other detailed reports on the BBC which can be found at his BBCWatch site and HonestReporting’s Media Bias Research page. HonestReporting’s own Long-Term Analysis of the BBC can be found here.
AFP’S INCITEFUL PHOTO
An AFP article entitled “Secret tunnel unearths new Jerusalem conflict” includes this photo with the accompanying caption:
“File photo shows a trench being dug as part of an archaeological dig in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.“
Except it isn’t. The trench shown is, in fact, the results of the Palestinian Waqf’s continuing unsupervised building works and destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount in contravention of all archaeological norms.
AFP thus falsely gives the impression that Israel is conducting digging on this most sensitive of religious sites – a charge that has previously been used by extremists to incite Muslim violence against Israel.
Read the JCPA’s recent report on how the Waqf is damaging Temple Mount antiquities and demand that the AFP correct its error by selecting to contact the photo department on the drop-down menu.
