The BBC has long faced accusations of being ‘woke,’ of favouring news reporting that represents the left-of-centre political stance of many of its reporters.
Journalists tend to favour those they see themselves as discriminated against or unrepresented, such as members of the LGBT+ communities and the gender-fluid, while so-called conservative values such as the belief that killing unborn children is morally wrong are dismissed as being horribly out of step with women’s rights and the sanctity of ‘choice.’
However, the BBC has come under sustained attack, too, for showing a lack of objectivity in its reporting of atrocities in Gaza, which we note, took a long time to deserve the designation genocide in other media. To this day the BBC does not refer to a genocide in Gaza, instead using terms like war or conflict.
The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) claims that BBC presenters have, on over 100 occasions, shut down or challenged guests, including international law experts, for using the term “genocide”.
The BBC claims to cover the Gaza situation impartially, reporting on the devastating human cost to civilians. But internal and external critics have described the coverage as failing to meet standards of impartiality, saying it prioritises Israeli narratives and dehumanises Palestinians. There has been very little coverage of the widespread abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, but intense coverage of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Ironically, it has been a mainstay of liberal journalism to describe as a falsehood or a ‘trope’ the simple claim that much of the world’s media is heavily controlled by pro-Israeli owners. However, the genocide in Gaza and the slow motion ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank have most certainly been under-reported, and this fact has meant a lot of eyes have been opened, albeit late in the day, to the fact that Israel-friendly narratives dominate the mainstream media.
And this is not just about the ownership.
One pro-Israel individual performs the role of gatekeeper in Middle East reporting at the BBC. Raffi Berg. Described on LinkedIn as a BBC journalist and writer specialising in the Middle East, he is also the Middle East editor of the BBC News website.
His editing of on the ground reports from Gaza and the West Bank, insofar as they are permitted by Israel, is intended to reduce their impact, a scandalous fact exposed by Guardian writer Owen Jones. Now Jones, a knee-jerk card-carrying member of the woke brigade, is being sued by Berg at London’s High Court.
Berg claims he received death threats after Jones authored an article on his activities. He is suing Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year. There are claims in the article, which Berg denies, that BBC staff told Jones that Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”. Jones also claims that reporters at the BBC said that Berg “reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images” and “repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity”.
In court documents seen by the PA news agency, John Stables, for Berg, said the claims in the article “strike at the claimant’s professional reputation as a journalist and editor”, and had caused Berg to suffer “an onslaught of hatred, intimidation and threats”, including death threats.
It will be more than interesting to see how this plays out, in the courts at the BBC.
PHOTO: Raffi Berg. In the photo over his shoulder he is standing with the former Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev.
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