Good evening and welcome to this week's Media Watch.
There have been more big developments and reaction over the last week to the BBC’s decision to remove a key documentary on Gaza from its iPlayer streaming service, including an exclusive chat we secured with former BBC journalist Karishma Patel.
Tim Davie on Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone
Early last week BBC director-general Tim Davie spoke to MPs about the BBC’s decision to remove the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from iPlayer.
The corporation apologised for “serious flaws” in the making of the programme after it emerged its 13-year-old narrator Abdullah was the son of a Hamas official.
Davie said he removed the film while concerns raised about the boy's connections to Hamas were investigated.
He said the documentary was removed because he “lost trust” in it but interestingly he mentioned he had received a lot more complaints about it being taken down (1800) than he had about it being “biased against Israel”.
Concerns were raised when it aired last month because it centred on a boy called Abdullah, who it later transpired is the son of Hamas's deputy minister of agriculture.
Davie said: “At the end of the day, as editor in chief, I have to be secure, not only editorially where the film was at, but the making of that film.
"I lost trust in that film and therefore I took decision to take it off iPlayer while we do this deep dive."
Narrator hits out at BBC
A couple of days after Davie’s comments, it emerged Abdullah had spoken with Middle East Eye about how disappointed he was with the backlash against him and his family.
He said he holds the corporation responsible for his fate, adding he now fears for his safety.
He spoke out about the “mental pressure” he is under and his sadness he could not “spread the message of the suffering that children in Gaza witness” after working for nine months on the programme.
“I’ve been working for over nine months on this documentary for it to just get wiped and deleted… it was very sad to me,” he said.
“It was pretty disappointing and sad to see this backlash against me and my family, and this harassment.”
‘Shocking abdication of responsibility’
Following Abdullah’s comments, former BBC journalist Karishma Patel spoke to the Sunday National about her concerns over the removal of the documentary.
She decided to leave her role as a newsreader for BBC Radio 5 Live last October, citing its Gaza coverage as the reason for her decision.
Patel argued the documentary did not need to be removed and could have just stayed online with some key added context about Abdullah’s family connections.
This was something the BBC decided to do initially but then went a step further and removed the programme altogether.
“Child safeguarding is a massive part of BBC training. It’s in editorial policy and it’s something BBC journalists are taught to take very seriously,” she told the Sunday National.
“If a child is part of your journalistic work, you are responsible for them, you should be checking in on them.
“In this case, all those rules have fallen by the wayside very clearly.”
Patel said her decision to leave the BBC came after she gradually began to feel a “massive disjunct” between the evidence she was seeing and gathering on what was happening in Gaza and what the BBC was “choosing to do editorially”.
She said: “For example, Israel has been consistently presented as a reliable source [by the BBC].
“It’s a bizarre thing to do considering how many times Israel has lied. But also, there's no reason to just take for granted that a certain source is reliable. The BBC should be regularly questioning that but also making it transparent to the public when a source isn't reliable or they're not sure if a source is reliable.”
Patel said she became frustrated with what she felt were differences in language the BBC was using when talking about Palestinians and Israelis, referring to her view that Palestinians were often "passively" described as having “died” rather than having been “killed by Israel” on a regular basis.
“Talking about Palestinians dying rather than Palestinians being killed by Israel, leaving accountability out of it entirely, is incredibly editorially inconsistent because there are plenty of headlines about Ukraine and Russia that use very different language,” she said.
You can read more from our interview with Patel here.
