The Gaza hospital attack and the BBC
John Ware was a distinguished reporter for the BBC for almost thirty years and on Saturday wrote an excellent piece for The Article on the problems the BBC got itself into over impartiality, especially over is refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Since then the BBC has got itself into another, much more serious, mess over Tuesday’s missile attack on the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City.
The chief culprit, surprisingly, was The Context on the BBC’s News Channel. Presented by Christian Fraser, a fine broadcaster who has been at the BBC for more than twenty years, The Context runs from 8.00-9.50 pm every weekday evening. Fraser and the programme are both particularly strong on American politics and The Context will be a must-watch programme next year in the run-up to the US Elections.
However, last night’s programme highlighted all the problems BBC News has had with its coverage of the current crisis in the Middle East. First, too often BBC programmes have relied on spokesmen and women for NGOs and UN organisations, assuming that they are impartial observers. In fact, they rarely are. They emote about Palestinian civilians, but rarely mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad and are never asked about what has happened to the huge sums of humanitarian aid which have ended up in the pockets of Hamas leaders or have been spent by Hamas on weapons used to kill Israeli civilians.
Second, there is an obvious problem with finding impartial Palestinian eyewitnesses in Gaza who speak good English. The producers of The Context presumably thought they had solved the problem by arranging interviews with two Palestinian doctors. Both were understandably emotional but not especially impartial, with the first speaking of Palestinian “martyrs”, a clearly loaded term.
As Mark Regev, former ambassador to the UK and Israel’s most articulate spokesman, pointed out: there is no civil society in Gaza, so academics and senior doctors are unlikely to take an independent view and criticise Hamas. To compound matters, one of the Palestinian doctors was not in fact an eyewitness and had merely spoken to a fellow-doctor on the phone.
Amazingly, Regev was the only Israeli spokesman during the programme, but there were quite a few spokespeople for humanitarian relief organisations as well as the two Palestinian doctors: all blamed Israel for the attack, despite the lack of evidence.
Thirdly, there was a problem with video footage throughout the programme. There was a running loop of emotive images of wounded Palestinians being rushed into hospital. The footage looked fake and at no point did anyone explain where it came from. Anyone who has had to take a child to A&E will know the terrible expressions of anxiety on people’s faces. There was just one woman in this footage. The rest were Palestinian men who looked very casual and unemotional. None of the “wounded” Palestinian civilians looked particularly troubled, none were bleeding profusely, none of the bystanders looked concerned or took urgent action to help the victims. It was not until The Ten O’Clock News that there was more realistic footage from inside the hospital, though again it was not clear what the source of this footage was.
Fourth, Fraser relied heavily on the testimony of his colleague Jon Donnison, a BBC reporter in Gaza. The problem here was that Donnison had leapt to the conclusion that Israel was responsible for the attack, without any clear evidence, and that the numbers of dead and wounded reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry were accurate, again with no evidence. Donnison said, “it is hard to see what else this could be … other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes.” Perhaps it would have been less “hard” if he had waited for more evidence and analysis to come in. Donnison insisted this attack “was a gamechanger” — though since he didn’t actually know who was responsible, it is not clear how it could have been.
The BBC and Sky News both assumed that Hamas’s reports, blaming Israel, were reliable and because the BBC didn’t interview any dissenting Israeli voices, apart from Regev, it was hard for viewers to take an independent view. It was Regev who pointed out that Hamas has a history of firing missiles into Gaza by mistake and asked the essential question, cui bono? Who did this attack benefit? Israel? Hardly. It was a PR disaster for Israel. Hamas? Obviously. It achieved its effect. British and other Western news networks all bought the story hook, line and sinker, Sky News no less than the BBC. Arab leaders all blamed Israel for a “war crime” and cancelled their meetings with the visiting Joe Biden, presumably for fear of Arab uprisings in their own cities.
Finally, BBC reporters all accepted Hamas estimates of the numbers killed. At the beginning of The Ten O’Clock News Clive Myrie announced solemnly, “Hundreds are killed.” He did not say “Palestinian sources say that hundreds are killed” but neither the BBC nor anyone else has yet been able to verify these figures.
The only reasonable voices on The Context were an American former regional analyst and Mark Regev, both of whom pointed out that it was too early to speculate because there wasn’t enough evidence yet. On Wednesday morning’s Today programme Colonel Peter Lerner, a spokesman for Israel’s IDF, told Mishal Husain, “You are willing to accept at face value what a terrorist organisation tells you.” She replied, “I don’t think we have done that.” She was wrong. That is exactly what The Context did on Tuesday evening. It accepted Hamas’s version at face value. The BBC didn’t wait for verification because they were so excited to have a breaking news story and perhaps because some BBC News producers and reporters have historically been biased against Israel. Lerner went on, “You have a huge responsibility in these times, as the BBC. Your listeners are dependent on you for their information and when you ran for several hours broadcasting an Israeli strike on a hospital, you were doing them a huge disservice.”
Despite his over-emotional tone, Lerner was right. The BBC did run “for several hours” a story about “an Israeli strike on a hospital” and therefore did indeed do us all “a huge disservice”. Regev was also right. It would have been better to wait for proper evidence to be assessed.
But The Context didn’t want to wait. They didn’t want to do the basic things BBC news programmes should always do: have a balanced selection of interviewees when there are two conflicting accounts of the conflict in Gaza; don’t leap to conclusions; question the footage that you have; ask yourselves whether your eyewitnesses are actually eyewitnesses and whether they are properly impartial.
As I write, Joe Biden has been speaking about the hospital attack in Israel. Based on US military intelligence from the Pentagon, the President has concluded that the attack came from Gaza, not Israel. Many expert commentators have pointed out that the absence of a crater also points to Hamas rather than the IDF. British ministers are being more cautious and waiting for more evidence. It will take time for the truth to emerge, but it is already clear that the rush by some sections of the media to blame Israel was premature and irresponsible.
This has been a catastrophic few days for BBC News. The reputation of the BBC and of some of its most distinguished reporters and presenters may not recover. It is worth noting that YouGov produced a poll asking people whether they trust BBC journalists to tell the truth. In 2003 81% said they did. In 2008 it was 61%, in 2018 50% and in 2020 it was down to 47%. It is time for the Director-General or the Chairman and Governors to call for an independent inquiry into the coverage of the Gaza conflict by BBC News.
I would recommend that such an inquiry should be led by either Mark Damazer, a former controller of Radio 4, David Elstein, former Director of Programmes at Thames, or Roger Mosey, previously the Head of BBC Television News. Finally, they should ensure that such an inquiry doesn’t suffer the fate of the Balen Report. This was a 20,000-word document written by the senior broadcast journalist Malcolm Balen in 2004, following complaints from the public and the Israeli government of allegations of anti-Israel bias. Almost twenty years later, it has still not been published by the BBC.
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