On 5 November, we questioned why Sky’s report on clashes between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip included a 50 image photo gallery. Why had Sky chosen such an excessive number of photos to include in what was a fair and balanced report? Particularly as the vast majority of the images bore no relation to the story in question.
We also suspected that old file photos had been used as the first two images depicted Palestinians killed or wounded on October 4, a whole month before the latest incident reported in Sky’s accompanying article.
Thanks to your e-mails to Sky News, the offending photo montage was hastily removed within hours of our communique. One of our subscribers received the following from an executive producer at Sky:
The picture gallery you saw is created by a tool which automatically pulls in agency photos with a pre-determined search term (in this case Gaza).
The captions to the photos make it clear the attack depicted is from October 4th, so not contemporaneous.
Having said that I acknowledge your concerns. On a story as sensitive as this we should have been stricter about the relevance of material we added as related content. So I have removed the picture gallery from the article.
Credit to Sky News for acknowledging the issue and taking the appropriate action. We are, however, concerned to hear that such a picture gallery was generated automatically, apparently without proper editorial supervision.
Just when we hoped that Sky News had realised the dangers of leaving picture gallery choices in the hands of a computer, yet again a new 50 image picture gallery entitled “Jerusalem” appears at Sky’s coverage of a brawl between Christian clergy in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Only twelve out of the 50 images actually relate to the aforementioned brawl. To demonstrate the random nature of the picture gallery, five out of the first six images are taken at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
Other images include the eviction of a Palestinian family from a house in eastern Jerusalem and images of a newly reopened synagogue in the Old City from as far back as 12 October. This includes a caption claiming that the synagogue “has worried Arab neighbours and Palestinian leaders who accuse Israel of using its political power to push them out and shift the city’s religious balance toward the Jews.”
Just this example of an image and one-sided caption missing any context or story behind it is enough to demonstrate the dangers of employing automatically generated picture galleries.
Please write again to Sky News – [email protected] – stressing that this practice should be stopped.
SHIP OF FOOLS
Do journalists covering the Free Gaza showboaters have an obligation to cover what they see fairly and objectively? If so, The Independent’s Rob Sharp, who sailed on the Free Gaza Movement’s latest voyage “to break the siege” of Gaza along with British politicians Clare Short, Baroness Jenny Tonge and Lord Nazir Ahmed, certainly failed in his duties.
As HR UK has already detailed, the Free Gaza Movement is a coalition of extreme and anti-Israel non-governmental organisations. Despite this, Rob Sharp describes Free Gaza as a “human rights organisation” founded by “peace activists”.
In addition, the presence of Tonge on board is enough to shipwreck Free Gaza’s credibility as a peace movement. Tonge infamously stated in 2006: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western World, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party.”
Tonge was previously removed from her parliamentary position in 2004 after saying that if she had been a Palestinian, she might have supported a political programme of murdering Jewish civilians, by herself becoming a suicide bomber: “I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one myself.”
Clare Short also has a history of anti-Israel comments including stating that Israel is actually “much worse than the original apartheid state” and accusing it of “killing (Palestinian) political leaders.” Bizarrely, she also claims that Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
Adding to the discredited publicity seeking circus that is the Free Gaza Movement is the stated fact in The Independent’s own article that these politicians were forced to “break Israel’s siege” by sea because they were not allowed to cross Gaza’s land border… by the Egyptians.
Please write to The Independent pointing out the real nature of the Free Gaza Movement and those on board its ship of fools – [email protected]
