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Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

theguardian.com

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Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#181

Post by gruez »

hn-shithole wrote: post #157
gruez wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra ... The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising…

> How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias? Yes.

Yet, when was the last time 100+ concerned journalists penned a open letter saying that we needed more coverage of the genocide in Sudan? It's all good if it's some sort of principle that's being applied evenly, but it's pretty clear in the case of the Israel vs Palestine conflict, most people are invoking that principle are doing it only when it suits them.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#182

Post by WaxProlix »

gruez wrote: post #175
WaxProlix wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass. 2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates ba…

>1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass. This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with. If they're biased to be anti-israel, then arguably the top brass telling them to tone it down a notch would make the coverage more neutral. >3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually t…

> This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with

I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.

> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?

I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#183

Post by nandomrumber »

jaek wrote: post #69
nandomrumber wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's possible to believe that both October 7th and the subsequent genocide of Palestinians are horrific. It's the duty of the press to report on these horrors in an unbiased and impartial manner. > You few bleeding heart lefties Ad hominems aren't arguments, fyi

Sorry, that was supposed to say “a few” not “you few”, dunno how I managed that.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#184

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

billy99k wrote: post #81
crystal_revenge wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this flamebait? Is there another way to report on this topic that would be less inflammatory? Or should media manipulation by foreign governments simply not be discussed and we should just keep quiet less someone get upset? Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?

[flagged]

This rhetoric is delusional. If you’re a real person arguing in good faith, I beg you to stop pretending that American politics is a two-team sport. This is not a tactic worth employing.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#185

Post by gruez »

t-3 wrote: post #154
gruez wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra ... The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising…

>>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles. > Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't…

>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine.

They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government".

>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.

So if the BBC was covering the election in Venezuela, would it be "biased" to point out that the election results were from the "government controlled" electoral commission, and that it was packed with Maduro's cronies? After all, the electoral commission is probably the "legitimate" authority for counting votes, so why point out it's staffed by government cronies? Just say that the opposition claims that their guy won, but the electoral authority said Maduro won. End of story. Or is it only biased if the journalist thinks something fishy is going on (ie. the vote was rigged in favor of Maduro)? How would we adjudicate this? This just inevitably devolves into "if you support Israel then saying anything bad about them is bias, and if you oppose Israel then saying anything good about them is bias".

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#186

Post by atmavatar »

notpushkin wrote: post #133
molteanu wrote: post #75

I still cannot get over the fact that we, in Europe, have banned RT on the grounds that it is a publication sponsored by a "foreign" government and, as such, it cannot be trusted. For one, so many publications here in Europe are financed by the local governments and we have no problem allowing them to function and act in the interest or said governments. Two, it flies in the face of an independent, free individual wh…

As a Russian, I wouldn’t trust anything that comes out on RT. Banning it though is a really bad move – something I would expect from the Russian government itself, not Europe. One of the reasons I’ve become disillusioned in EU recently.

> Banning it though is a really bad move

Why? With how confidently you state that, I'm rather curious what reasons you have.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#188

Post by somenameforme »

topspin wrote: post #99

Recent BBC World headlines: Gaza doctor whose nine children were killed in Israeli strike dies from injuries (June 2) Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC (June 4) Three journalists among five killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital (June 5) Four killed near Gaza aid centre, health workers say (June 8) Dozens of Palestinians killed while seeking aid in Gaza, hospitals say (June 11) More t…

Imagine China started doing to the Uyghurs exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and on the exact same scale. For that matter you can even say for the exact same justification - there have indeed been multiple mass death terrorist style incidents carried out by Uyghurs. Would you expect remotely similar framing?

The entire population of Gaza was only ~2 million and Israel has now killed/wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians directly, and it's likely some multiple of that have been killed indirectly (starvation, disease, deaths of despair, etc). If this was China, we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide, done all we could to economically sanction them out of existence, and perhaps even flirted with direct invasions which would entail risking not only WW3 but global nuclear warfare.

But because it's Israel, we're instead shipping them weapons to keep carrying out this "war" and the media continues framing it as just a regrettable conflict with unfortunate collateral damage.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#190

Post by t-3 »

YZF wrote: post #122
forgotoldacc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Prime Minister of the UK recently said he supported Israel's attacks on Iran. The UK even helps arm Israel. [1] Not sure what the basis of your claims are but they're quite different from reality. And I apologize in advance to any Egyptian readers out there, but Egypt has a very low reputation these days. I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years. Nobody is flooding in to defe…

Iran is not the Palestinians. Iran supplies Russia and the UK considers it a threat but it is not acting in any way as an "ally" to Israel here. "UK defends partial Israel arm sales ban" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2np2l5mlko Partial arms sales ban is not an ally in my book. Many countries sell arms to other countries they are not even close to being allied with. EDIT: Also count for me how many anti-Egypt st…

A sales ban would simply be in compliance with international law, and the UK is a member of the ICC, so even a partial ban is failing to live up to their obligations. The US is not currently a signatory but it's own laws make it illegal to export arms to Israel, so I guess we're "more" of an ally, as we're willing to more flagrantly break the rules in this regard, but the UK is still pretty far in favor of Israel with their current stance.
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