One year into Israel’s war on Gaza, journalists at CNN and BBC have pointed to systematic double standards and repeated violations of journalistic principles by the leading global media outlets, allegedly in favour of Israel.
Speaking to The Listening Post, Al Jazeera’s weekly media analysis, 10 journalists who have covered the war for the two outlets have accused their senior colleagues of interfering in reporting to downplay Israeli atrocities and failing to hold Israeli authorities to account.
This is just the latest in a series of similar claims by many journalists and experts, who have increasingly accused top Western media outlets of maintaining a pro-Israel bias while minimising Palestinian suffering.
Craig Mokhiber, a UN human rights official who quit last year over the global outfit’s response to the war in Gaza, had earlier told Al Jazeera that the Western media has “actually become a part of the mechanism of genocide” at a time when Western governments have been “complicit”.
“This is a moment in history that we don’t often see where we actually see genocide being perpetrated as it’s happening…In a situation where Western governments like the United States, the UK and others have been complicit, you’ve got Western media that have actually become a part of the mechanism of genocide. That’s what’s different. That’s what’s frightening.”
The BBC and CNN have denied allegations of bias.
At CNN, warnings ignored to trumpet Israeli propaganda
In one instance at CNN, false Israeli propaganda was put on air despite advance warnings from staff members, according to The Listening Post.
In November, CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson reportedly embedded with the Israeli army to visit the pounded al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza.
Once inside, military spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed to have found proof Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Hagari allegedly showed Robertson a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas members watching over the captives.
“It was a calendar, and written in Arabic were the days of the week. But the report that came out from Nic Robertson just swallowed up Israel’s claim,” a journalist at CNN told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli claim had already been debunked on social media. Additionally, a WhatsApp chat and several CNN journalists suggested that Robertson had already been alerted of the false claim by Hagari. One CNN producer tried to get it corrected before the report was posted online, according to Al Jazeera.
“And apparently, Nic said, ‘Are you meaning to say that Hagari is lying to us?..Nic was adamant, and it went out. He’s a very experienced correspondent. If you are trusting the Israeli government over your own colleagues, then you need to have your wrist slapped at the very least because your reporting has given cover to the Israeli operation,” one of the journalists told Al Jazeera.
There has been no evidence of captives being held at the hospital.
The CNN journalist told the channel that there was a time when his colleagues “couldn’t call air strikes in Gaza air strikes unless we had confirmation from the Israelis”.
Recently, when health officials in Gaza announced that Israeli attacks had killed more than 40,000 people, CNN managing editor Mike McCarthy allegedly ordered his team to “contextualise and hold Hamas accountable”.
“That was reflected in the framing from the shows.”
At BBC, ‘free rein to Israeli spokespersons’
A journalist who quit BBC – partially due to a “sort of unwillingness among the executive” to address concerns around editorial bias – pointed to a lack of balance in the screening of potential interviews.
Al Jazeera saw messages from an internal chat which suggested that producers were screening interviews based on their online footprint.
“It was overwhelmingly guests on the Palestinian side of things who were being looked into…Palestinians [were] being flagged up for using the word Zionist, which isn’t something to flag necessarily,” the former BBC journalist told Al Jazeera.
“But there was no balance in what was going on. Israeli spokespeople who we did have on were given a lot of free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback,” she said, referring to unchallenged and unprobed claims by Israeli voices about babies being set on fire and babies being shot in the head during the Hamas incursion into southern Israel.
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