The BBC Is Afraid to Report the Facts About Israel’s War
A BBC journalist writes that editors at the broadcaster are afraid of reprimand from their bosses for reporting that displeases the Israeli government, leading to the BBC’s consistently holding back from reporting the full horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza.
A protester holds a banner reading ‘’Biased Based Censorship‘’ at a Media Workers for Palestine event outside BBC Broadcasting House on February 7, 2024 in London, United Kingdom. (Mark Kerrison / In Pictures via Getty Images)
A few months ago, as Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attacks was beginning to unfold, I wrote a piece for Jacobin about the BBC’s sorry coverage of events. Not long after, eight of the corporation’s journalists published an open letter to Qatari-based broadcaster Al Jazeera (now banned from broadcasting in Israel) in which they expressed similar dissatisfaction.
The letter accused the BBC of excluding decades of crucial historical context and privileging Israel’s narrative of events, allowing its brutal retributive assault to be understood on its own terms as “self-defence.” As the authors put it:
For Israel’s bombardment to be considered “self-defence”, events must begin with the Hamas-led attack. News updates and articles neglect to include a line or two of critical historical context — on 75 years of occupation, the Nakba, or the asymmetric death toll across decades.
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