MEDIA PSYOPS, BIAS & CENSORSHIP: The BBC's Internal Civil War Over Gaza Spills Out
“So, bluntly, this is my message to you fellow Western journalists: pull yourselves together. Stop being cowards. Stop being complicit in genocide."
BBC Internal CIVIL WAR Over Gaza
Time for real journalists to step up
By Owen Jones (12/20/24)
“So, bluntly, this is my message to you fellow Western journalists: pull yourselves together. Stop being cowards. Stop being complicit in genocide. Time is running out before you're damned forever as someone who helped facilitate one of the worst crimes of our age.
“Do something. Do something, but do it now, please.”
12-minute video
TWISTED MEDIA BIAS: The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza
Today Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. Jones’s investigation of the BBC has three main components: a deeply reported look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative assessment of how the BBC characterizes the year-long siege on Gaza, and a review of the histories of the people behind the coverage—and, in particular, one editor, Raffi Berg.
Appropriately, when Jones began this reporting as an independent journalist and reached out to Berg for comment, Berg at first hired the famous defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, who is also former Director of UK Lawyers for Israel. Jones is a Guardian columnist and hosts his own searing independent news coverage on YouTube. If you have the means to help pay for Jones’s $24,000 in initial legal bills in vetting the story, you can do so here.
We are living in an era where many people expect the news to be delivered in 280 characters or less. But investigative journalism often necessitates a careful peeling back of layers, an examination of background and context, and incorporating the insights of many sources. This is a long read, and may take you a couple of sittings to get through, but it’s well worth our attention given the global influence of the BBC, which hails itself as “the world’s most trusted international news provider.” As Jones notes, the BBC website is the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits.
At Drop Site News, we believe in holding powerful people and institutions accountable, particularly when their actions — or what they publish and how — mean life or death. It is in that spirit that we are publishing Jones’s investigation.
Please subscribe (our journalism is all free) and consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work:
—Nausicaa Renner, founding editor
The BBC’s Civil War Over Biased Gaza Coverage & Deceptions
Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images
By Owen Jones
Drop Site News (12/19/24)
The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.
Their primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.
The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.
Betraying own standards
In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza” across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the BBC make a series of specific changes:
reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims, highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023, use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.
One BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went “way beyond” the signatories.
BBC management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and “external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another called it “very patronizing.” …
It is difficult to overstate the influence of the BBC’s online operation. According to media watchdog Press Gazette, the BBC news website, which includes both news and non-news content, is the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits, dwarfing second-place finisher msn.com, which had 686 million visits.
EXPOSED: Damning New Report Shows Meta, Facebook & Instagram Silencing Palestinians
By Owen Jones (12/18/24)
10-minute video
Guardian Columnist Wins ‘Most Obscene Headline Of The Year’ Award
‘Joe Biden is going out quietly but with trademark decency’
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (12/21/24)
Having worked as a print journalist, I can affirm writers ultimately have little to no power over the headlines to their stories and columns. That is the work of editors. But in the case of the December 20 column “Joe Biden is going out quietly but with trademark decency” by The Guardian American columnist Margaret Sullivan, the ludicrously obscene headline was drawn directly from wording in her column, where she claims: “His accomplishments are real, and his decency as a human being is, too.”
Even for Sullivan — who writes of the Democrats with all the integrity, enthusiasm and deception of their PR department — associating “Genocide” Joe with the word “decency” calls for another ‘d’ word: delusional.
The Biden record
In four years, Biden led us into a completely preventable, devastating European land war, resulting in the deaths of a million and thrown the world to the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. He was responsible for the largest act of eco-terrorism in history with the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which has crippled the European economy. And, finally, on the direction of the Isr*el and Z^onist lobby, Biden has been the chief defender, funder and weapons supplier of the obscene US/Isr*ael genocide in Gaza, which has now spread to the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria and has the region primed for war on Iran.
Biden is neither “decent” nor humane. He is a racist, lying mass murderer and war criminal.
One thing we do have to be thankful to Biden for is that with his vacuous cognitive decline, he has shown who is president matters little. The corporate/criminal/Intel agency Deep State — which has never won a vote — is the force in charge of the country. As I have said before, the president is to the corporate power structure as the manager of your local Walmart is to Wall Street.
I do appreciate Biden making that perfectly obvious to anyone with a pulse and a double-digit IQ.
As for Sullivan, she is the embodiment of what is wrong with so much of the corporate mainstream media and why their credibility shrinks by the day. She is best defined as what she is: just another shameless hack.
“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”
— Albert Camus
Best column yet! Biden is a vile, cruel and remarkably stupid dotard. I was sure we were through with this laughable piece of garbage when, in the 90s he was nailed plagiarizing the speeches of a British Parliamentarian. But no, we Americans easily forget and forgive the pathetic antics of our laughable, idiotic politicians. I realize you weren't doing a comprehensive list of Biden disasters but I would like to add two other too infrequently noted items: first, he very deliberately let
DeJoy, the USPS Director stay in office the entirety of his 4 year term and second, he not only kept Trump's cruel sanctions against Cuba in place, he made them even worse. Biden is unquestionably the worst President in US history!!
I don't know if I'd call that headline obscene, but it's just plain insane... I'm just totally flabbergasted by how much these neolibs will butt-lick and kiss-up to the zy-0-nists like Genocide Joe Biden. If only one of these mainstream media outlets were truthful, this genocide would have been exposed and ended months ago.