British media coverage of Operation Cast Lead: Biased as usual
British media watchdog Just Journalism has produced a comprehensive report on the British media's coverage of Operation Cast Lead. The verdict: Biased against Israel (35-page pdf) as usual. This is from the executive summary: • The BBC failed to make a crucial distinction between opinion and fact in their coverage of the conflict.None of this should be surprising to anyone who looks at the British media. As a rule, the only British print media in which Israel stands a chance of getting a fair shake are the Telegraph and the Times of London. Occasionally we get treated fairly by the Financial Times. Almost never by Al-Guardian or the Independent (on Sunday it's known as the Observer). Al-Beeb rarely treats Israel fairly either.
• The BBC’s Middle East Editor’s Gaza diary on the BBC website contained highly partial and often emotional commentary but was not identified as opinion.
• The Middle East Editor demonstrated a preoccupation with humanizing Palestinian perspectives, impacting negatively on the impartiality of his coverage. Not one of his TV reports contained the personal story of an Israeli.
• The BBC did not sufficiently differentiate between civilian and Hamas casualties. Only 11% of monitored radio broadcasts and 10% of monitored TV broadcasts made this distinction. However, 40% of broadsheet press articles made the distinction.
• 75% of the Financial Times’ editorials and 71% of The Guardian’s editorials were ‘less favourable’ towards Israel’s operation. Neither paper published a ‘favourable’ editorial. The Times was the daily broadsheet that published the greatest proportion of ‘neutral’ editorials – 50% of their editorials on the conflict.
• The Guardian and The Independent published five times as many opinion pieces critical of Israel’s occupation than supportive.
• Hamas was also under-represented in cartoons about the conflict. The group was only featured in one quarter of all cartoons. More than 75% depicted Israel as the primary aggressor.
...
• The UK media significantly under-represented the nature of Hamas and its policies towards Israel, particularly its use of violence and rejection of Israel’s right to exist. In the first week of the conflict, only 5% of broadsheet news articles, 6% of monitored radio reports and 10% of monitored TV reports mentioned any aspects of Hamas’ stance towards Israel.
• There was an absence of imagery depicting Hamas’ militancy throughout coverage of the conflict. Only 4% of broadsheet photographs in the first week depicted Hamas’ militancy. Only one photograph appeared of a Palestinian firing a rocket towards Israel. However, BBC TV did feature frequent footage of rocket attacks into Israel.
• Two crucial aspects of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas were widely under-reported: that Hamas had been attacking areas of southern Israel since 2001 - mentioned in no monitored BBC TV reports and in only 10% of all broadsheet news articles - and that Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza in 2005 – not mentioned in any BBC TV reports and just 8% of all broadsheet news articles.
• Considerable attention was placed on Israel’s restriction on media access to Gaza. However, there was a widespread failure to acknowledge Hamas’ influence on the media environment inside Gaza and its impact on sources and statistics from the territory.
The inability to distinguish fact from opinion is endemic to British and European media coverage. It's a problem in Israel as well. The US used to be much more meticulous about the distinction but has become much less so in recent years. To read articles in the media critically you must be attuned to these nuances. For example, every time you see a reference to 'illegal Israeli settlements,' that's opinion, not fact. But those references crop up thousands of times in articles you probably read every day. While the media is no longer careful about that distinction, we must be careful in order to evaluate what the media is feeding us.
What's most important about this report is that it illustrates how systemic the media bias problem is in the UK and how it is allowing the enemy to define the terms of the media battle. From what I could gather from their web site, Just Journalism is quite new. We hope to hear more from them in the future.
If you can, read it all.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:39 AM
1 Comments:
This is nothing new. In addition to HonestReporting and CAMERA, there's been regular reports by BBC Watch. Also, BBC's internal report was shamelessly hushed away. It is not a secret that UK is European center of anti-Semitism, which is an achievement in itself in that neighborhood. Of course, media plays a major role in that ignominy. Where are all those human rights NGOs and courts when it comes to hold someone responsible for incitement?
Post a Comment
<< Home