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I am running the whole megillah from Honest Reporting because it's that important;
Unfortunately, problematic
coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued. We couldn't address all the news services or
journalists who were nominated by HonestReporting subscribers, but we thank
readers for sharing their thoughts about 2005 and for making our fight for
honest reporting your fight too. So without further ado, we proceed with our
Dishonest Reporter of the Year Award. We begin with the
runner-ups:
Big media was clearly on the defensive in 2005. Dan Rather left
the CBS News anchor desk under a heavy cloud while other executives were fired
in the wake of Memogate.
The use of anonymous sources put journalists like Judith
Miller and the NY Times in an uncomfortable spotlight. Newsweek's
erroneous report that US Marines desecrated a Koran touched off a firestorm of
deadly protests around the world. CNN news chief Eason
Jordan was forced to resign over comments
at an international forum. And an Al-Jazeera
reporter was even convicted for his links to Al-Qaida. In each controversy, bloggers
successfully pressured the news services for accuracy and
accountability.
Reuters
The [Gaza] closure will give about 8,500 settlers a
taste of some of the military restrictions and bureaucracy endured by
Palestinians living under occupation. The wire service also remained
consistent to its warped principles during the London terror attacks too,
refusing to describe the bombings as "terror."
To understand the logic behind Reuters' vocabulary gymnastics, see here.
Of all the coverage we
saw of the Gaza pullout, nothing stood out more than this odious comment by Reuters
in the lead-up days:
Palestinian Stringers
Western news services rely on
Palestinian stringers for reporting, photographs and video footage. They also
rely on "fixers" who provide all kinds of other support: arranging interviews,
navigating through difficult areas, translating and more. But how reliable and
objective are these stringers? The Jerusalem
Post exposed a number of AP and AFP stringers who were also on the Palestinian
Authority payroll, including Majida al-Batsh,
who was a candidate for PA president. (Nobody protested the use of AFP office
supplies for her candidacy.) The revelations brought to mind a related special report on the
influence of Palestinian organizations on foreign news. But unlike a similar scandal in
the White House press corps, the stringers' conflict of interest met deafening
silence.
C-Span
The notion that there are 'two sides to every story' is
simplistic, fuzzy thinking at best, and far more dangerous than that at
worst. Now jailed in Austria, where
Holocaust denial is a crime, Irving awaits a
February trial.
C-Span
executives took the idea of "balanced coverage" to an illogical extreme in
March, deciding that a talk by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt needed to be
balanced out with a talk by Holocaust denier David Irving. Lipstadt told
HonestReporting:
The Guardian
The Guardian found itself red-faced by what became known
as Sassygate:
As exposed by blogger Scott Burgess, the
Manchester-based paper hired trainee journalist Dilpazier Aslam, whose coverage
of July's London terror attacks included a commentary
sympathizing with the bombers. It turned out that Aslam was a member of
Hizb Ut
Tahrir, an Islamist organization which calls for the destruction of Israel
and the rule of a world-wide caliphate. When the dust settled, Aslam was fired
and the paper's executive editor for news, Albert Scardino resigned. Aslam is
now suing
The Guardian for "racial and religious
discrimination."
Eric Margolis
* *
*
The February assassination of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri shocked even the most cynical Mideast experts. Syrian
propaganda, predictably blaming Israel, was echoed by the North American
syndicated columnist Eric
Margolis. Ironically, the same week that the Mehlis report to the UN
on Hariri's murder was released, Margolis gave a soapbox to unsubstantiated
claims that Israel had a hand in the 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistani
dictator Zia
Ul-Haq.
But one news service's skewed coverage stood out the most, "winning" the award in a landslide. From the first day votes came in, it wasn't close, which may explain the dearth of nominations for perennial runner-ups like the NY Times, Associated Press and The Independent. The 2005 Dishonest Reporter of the Year Award goes to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The impact of BBC coverage cannot be understated. A Google study found that for breaking news, internet users around the world were more likely to turn to the BBC than CNN. More than 270 million TV viewers around the world watch BBC World. Even more people listen to BBC World Service, which broadcasts in 42 languages.
Readers provided a full laundry list of complaints and we found the most effective way to condense the biggest offenses was in a simple list form. The examples of bias from the year past indicates a pattern of naivete, dishonesty, forcing facts conform to a narrow worldview and, arguably, a desire to inappropriately influence events - all paid for by British television viewers through the TV License Fee, which costs the typical household 126.50 GB Pounds per year.
Here are the top 10 reasons (listed in chronological order) why the BBC is HonestReporting's Dishonest Reporter of the Year.
10. In January, Palestinian presidential candidate Dr.
Mustafa Barghouti (not to be confused with his better-known distant
relative, Marwan) tried to use Israel and the Western media to get some free
publicity for his campaign by getting himself arrested at the Temple Mount. The
Independent's
Donald Macintyre saw straight through Barghouti's ploy, but the BBC's Martin Asser
proved more gullible:
A large crowd of journalists has gathered at an East Jerusalem hotel to hear him, and there is some excitement because a rumour is going round he will go to the al-Aqsa mosque later for Friday prayers...
It is meant to be the photo-opportunity highlight of the day - but the Israeli security services have other ideas...
In truth, Mr Barghouti's programme was not unduly affected by the detention, because his next engagement was not scheduled until 1330.
I could be wrong, but that - rather conveniently - left ample time for his headline-grabbing brush with the Israelis before moving on to meet the voters.
9. Every morning, listeners can tune into BBC for an uplifting "Thought of the Day." One February morning, Rev. Dr. John Bell used the feature to describe an Arab-Israeli acquaintance only identified as "Adam." According to Rev. Dr. Bell, this acquaintance was "conscripted" into the Israeli army, where "he was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren." See the full transcript here.
After HonestReporting pointed out that Israeli-Arabs aren't required to serve in the IDF and that the allegations that soldiers have orders to shoot unarmed kids are wholly unfounded, the BBC apologized - but only for not fact-checking Adam's age and the issue of conscription. We still await a retraction about the non-existent orders to shoot kids.
8. In March, the BBC apologized
to Israel for reporter Simon Wilson's handling of an interview with Mordechai
Vanunu. A former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant, Vanunu is prohibited
from talking to foreign reporters, but Wilson, in 2004, was caught trying to
smuggle tapes of his interview out of the country. Although the apology - which
paved the way for Wilson to return to Israel - was supposed to remain
confidential, it was inexplicably posted on the BBC's own web site for several
hours. The BBC once intended to rent out a luxury
apartment for Vanunu paid for by British television viewers.
7. He retired from the BBC, but former
Mideast correspondent Tim
Llewellyn (now an executive member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British
Understanding) makes this list for an interview he gave to Electronic
Intifada. We are concerned Llewellyn's views are shared by colleagues within
the BBC:
[BBC] are adopting what they see as an even handed attitude. To me this is a cowardly attitude, it is an attitude which confuses occupier with occupied...
6. In May, BBC correspondent Orla
Guerin reported that construction linking Maale Adumim to Jerusalem would
split the West Bank in two, destroying any possibility of a viable Palestinian
state. HonestReporting
noted that construction in the area known as E-1 doesn't take away territorial
contiguity. A map produced by our colleagues at CAMERA highlights
how the Palestinians would have continuous territory, which, at its narrowest,
would be nine miles (or 15 km) wide - which also happens to be the width of
Israel's "waistline" between the Green Line and the
Mediterranean.
5. When members of the British Association of University Teachers considered a boycott of Israel's Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities, BBC radio tried to influence the vote with a report by correspondent John Reynolds from the College of Judea and Samaria. As Melanie Phillips wrote in May:
Not a word about the fact that more than 300 students at this college are Arabs, and that the Arab mayors of local towns have enthusiastically welcomed the opportunities it gives their students...
The BBC might as well have had a block vote at today's AUT conference. So much for its supposed objectivity, which once again stands exposed as a charade.
4. When terrorists linked to Al-Qaida struck the London
transportation system in July, many thought the BBC would finally use the word
"terror" to describe the wanton attacks on civilians. To their credit, a small
handful of initial reports did. But appearances of the "t-word" in initial
coverage were soon removed
from the BBC's web site (but not before Tom Gross
documented the inconsistencies). Yet Roger Mosey, the head of BBC's television
news, contradicted BBC
policy when he wrote in The
Guardian that there was no ban in the first place!
Then there has been a controversy about our use of language - particularly the question of whether the BBC banned the word "terrorist". There is no ban. It's true the word is contentious in some contexts on our international services, hence the recommendation that it be employed with care. But we have used and will continue to use the words terror, terrorism and terrorist - as we did in all our flagship bulletins from Thursday.
Not surprisingly, subsequent coverage of the London bombings and their aftermath remained "terror free." At the end of the year, however, The Guardian reported that BBC journalists received new "guidance" discouraging - but not banning - the "t-word." Time will tell if this will have a positive impact in 2006.
3. Following the London terror attacks, the BBC admitted
loading
the studio audience with a disproportionate number of Muslims for Questions of Security:
A BBC News Special. (See Biased
BBC for links to video of the show.) Among the complaints, one viewer wrote
angrily:
I do not pay my license fee to watch an unrepresentative Muslim audience like this.
The BBC's response?
In order to ensure a range of voices on these issues, the studio audience contained a higher proportion of Muslims in the audience than in the population as a whole - around 15% of the audience as opposed to 2.7% of the country as a whole...
This isn't the first time the BBC got in hot water for loading the audience. In 2001, anti-American invective from a Question Time audience discussing the 9/11 attacks got so out of hand that news director Greg Dyke had to apologize to US ambassador Philip Lader, who participated in the show.
Can anyone imagine a BBC program on Israel loaded with Israelis and Jews?
2. Within hours after Israel completed its pull-out from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians wasted no time desecrating synagogues and looting greenhouses. BBC's Orla Guerin was one of several journalists who actually justified the sad, senseless destruction:
Palestinians came streaming to the settlements that caused them so much pain, to sightsee and to loot. Israel stole thirty-eight years from them; today, many were ready to take back anything they could.
1. Whatever happened to Malcolm
Balen, who was appointed to help improve the BBC's Mideast reporting? Back
in November, 2003, the BBC hired him as a "senior editorial advisor," or, as
some put it, "a Middle East policeman." Some HonestReporting readers were
hopeful when Haaretz
reported that Balen was supposed to present a "conclusive and comprehensive
report" to BBC executives. Balen even told Haaretz:
What I do is a long-term editorial review, and by definition, the review is retrospective, rather than a look at day-to-day output. The truth is, in any editorial job, you are so tied up with your program and deadline, that you simply do not have the time to stand back and look at the coverage as a whole," says Balen.
"Nobody has the time in a journalistic job to trace the course of a single story in an organization as large as the BBC, which is what I was appointed to do. I can concentrate on a single story and look at all sorts of angles and aspects. I can join the dots together, [determine] what the coverage feels like, what the tone is like - crucially, what the content is like, what the balance is like."
Yet with all the resources of the BBC at his disposal, Balen, to
our knowledge, has not presented any report. In contrast, Trevor Asserson, a
British lawyer working on his own initiative, put together several exhaustive critiques.
HonestReporting readers, who also chose the BBC as Dishonest Reporter of the
Year in 2001,
connected the dots.
Has Balen?
* * *
By October, the
deteriorating coverage reached a point where the Board of Governors requested
Sir Quentin Thomas to lead an independent
panel to investigate its Mideast reporting. (See here
for more details.) The panel is supposed to release its findings in the spring.
When the Board of Governors released its Programme
Complaints: Appeals to the Governors, the forward by the chairman of the
complaints committee noted that the majority of the complaints (20 out of 27 in
fact) dealt with Mideast coverage. Only one - against Barbara
Plett -
was upheld.
Yet even in December, former director-general Greg Dyke, a casualty of the Hutton Report, insists that the network's Mideast reporting continues to be fair:
We investigated many of the complaints and most of the time found our reporting had been totally fair. Of course the pro-Israeli lobby didn't accept that but then they had a different agenda.
The stakes are certainly high. News services skewing reports from the Mideast are just as capable of warping other important areas of coverage. For the BBC, that's most notably Iraq. The BBC's royal charter expires at the end of 2006 - one year from now -- and officials must explain how it spends income from the TV License Fee. In 2003, this TV tax brought the BBC nearly 2.4 billion GB Pounds in income. Simply put, the British public is subsidizing lousy news.
As far as we're concerned, the excuses and apologies have worn thin. The BBC must be held accountable.
HonestReporting covered a lot of ground in 2005 and will continue monitoring
the media in the coming year. We hope 2006 proves to be a better year of honest
reporting. Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the battle against media bias. More widly Biased reporting; MOSQUE AND STATE: Charles Jacobs, President of the David
Society, in the Boston Globe, Dec. 25:
The story on the lawsuit filed against us by the Islamic Society of Boston ("Praised by beacon, mosque project stalls amid rancor," Page A1, Dec. 18) did mention that the society's founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, raised money for Al Qaeda and is in jail (in connection with a plot to assassinate a Saudi prince). But the story omitted even more worrisome facts.
The society's leaders have praised suicide bombers and called for attacks on Americans. A website in Qatar associated with society trustee Yousef al-Qaradawi, an internationally known leader of extremists, calls for gays to be executed by either stoning or burning. Al-Qaradawi has been barred from the United States. The society website praises as "very good" a book that refers to the women's liberation movement as a "Jewish plot" to corrupt society and argues that wife-beating is at times necessary. The library of the society's current Cambridge mosque contains literature containing vitriol directed against Christians, Jews, and Americans. While mosque spokesmen speak of "dialogue" and tolerance, Qaradawi says "there is no dialogue between us [and the Jews] except by the sword and the rifle."
Another interesting piece from Pipes "Winning the P
ropaganda War"
Unlike the Soviet bloc, the Muslim world lacks not access to reliable information but interest in it. The reasons are many but perhaps the most salient of them are a disposition to believe in conspiracy theories and an attraction to totalitarian solutions. Rather than try to purvey information to Muslims, State (and its counterparts elsewhere) should instead assert the case for liberal, secular, and humane values. More than facts, the Muslim world needs to understand the basics of what makes the West thrive - and thereby be inspired to emulate it.
