Is there a media bias against Israel?
Lionel Barber and Alan Rusbridger analyse the way that the massacre of 7th October and subsequent war have been covered, including explosion at Al-Ahli hospital, which some media outlets initially blamed on Israeli strikes. Jake Wallis Simons, editor of the Jewish Chronicle explains how damaging it is to the British Jewish population when errors are made, and former BBC editor and Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer defends the role of the war reporters on the ground.
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Transcript
Alan Rusbridger:
Hello and welcome to Media Confidential, Prospect Magazine's weekly deep dive into the stories beyond the click bait and what you need to know. I'm Alan Rusbridger, and Lionel, you're back.
Lionel Barber:
Yes.
It's hello from me, Lionel Barber. I'm back from my travels. Took me first to New York and then to Tokyo.
By the way, the jet lag was terrible, but I did get to walk in the sun in Tokyo. It was above 75 degrees and that's good for jet lag.
Rusbridger:
I'll take your word for it. Do you have any miracle cures for jet lag that you want to share with the listeners?
Barber:
Open air swimming, walking, and then one sleeping pill.
Rusbridger:
Anyway, it's good to see you back in the studio because we've got a busy show this week.
Barber:
There's a lot been happening in the Israel-Hamas war, and so today we are looking at the way the conflict is being reported.
Rusbridger:
Media Confidential brings you expert analysis from within the industry, talking to key names in global media.
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Barber:
Don't forget, Media Confidential is on X/Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Rusbridger:
The risk of drawing other nations into the crisis is growing with gunfire being exchanged between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, on the northern border of Israel. There's a real fear that this war is going to reach boiling point in the coming days and weeks as Israel continues to prepare to put troops into Gaza.
Barber:
It's now been nearly three weeks since the horrific attacks by Hamas on Israel.
Everybody from President Biden down is watching closely to see how Israel reacts. A full ground invasion has been threatened or rather promised.
Now, trying to find out the facts of what is actually happening on the ground is why war reporting is so vital and in every conflict the BBC finds itself in the crosshairs. This time they face criticism about the way in which they've covered the war.
Some have said that the BBC did not report the full extent of the brutality suffered by the Jewish people attacked. In the days that followed, it declined to use the word terrorist when referring to those same Hamas attackers.
The death toll from the Hamas attacks has now risen to more than 1,400 Jewish victims, according to the United Nations. The UN also, at the time of this recording, claims that 5,000 people have died in Gaza.
Then this happened. On the 17th of October, a hospital in Gaza City was hit by what appeared to be a missile. The BBC ran the story.
Clip:
Let's return to those live pictures coming into us from Gaza, following reports of an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in central Gaza.
The health ministry in Gaza is reporting that there have been 500 casualties in that Israeli airstrike. We don't have those figures verified, but they are reporting that 300 people have been killed. This is pictures that we've had which have been verified of this hospital, the Al-Ahli Hospital in the centre of the Gaza Strip.
Following that airstrike. Hamas have released a statement calling the attack on the hospital in the Gaza Strip a war crime. It said the hospital was housing hundreds of sick and wounded and people forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of other strikes.
The statement says hundreds of victims are still under the rubble. Obviously we just have their words at the moment. We are waiting for any kind of response from Israel who have just said that they will look into it.
Rusbridger:
Truly horrific times.
But the perception of what the reality of the story is seem to outweigh the facts. The way the story unfolded, in particular on the evening of Tuesday, the 17th of October, was of course for concern. We have to emphasise that it's not just the BBC that's come in for criticism here, but the way that a number of outlets, including some major newswires, reported the explosion at the hospital in Gaza.
Barber:
Just because Hamas claimed that it was an Israeli strike, one does have to consider as an editor what are the ethics of reporting that claim unchallenged and crucially unverified.
Al Jazeera reported this as genocide, but whilst the BBC reporting was more nuanced, the initial report wasn't always perfectly judged. How do you fact check in a war, when one side accuses the other of an atrocity and the other denies it? If we're talking about Russia, for example, denying a missile attack, would we believe them?
Rusbridger:
The BBC has also come under fire due to the actions of some of its BBC news Arabic reporters, mainly for social media posts that were in support of Palestine, or criticising Israel's position.
The FT reported last week that the BBC has taken six reporters in the Middle East off-air and is investigating a number of posts and likes on social media that seem to support the activities of Hamas against Israel.
So what are the lessons for news organisations in this incredibly difficult conflict and how it's to be reported? And what impact is the way that it's representing the two sides? We're joined first by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, who has himself experienced his fair share of reporting from war zones.
So Jake, thank you for joining us. These past couple of weeks must have been extraordinary ones for you. Do you want to just tell us what it's been like editing this paper at this time?
Jake Wallis Simons:
Well, I think from the point of view of the Jewish community in Britain, it's been a double trauma.
The first trauma is obviously the one that emanates from Israel, which is still playing out and we're still feeling the ripples day by day. But the second trauma has been the response in Britain to those events. I think that people were living previously in the sense that there would be more solidarity with events like this than there has been.
Certainly nobody dreamed that before the blood was dry in southern Israel, people would be raising Palestinian flags. Now there's nothing wrong with raising a Palestinian flag, it's the context.
Added to that, the support for Hamas that we have seen on Britain streets, which is a problem that we in the Jewish community knew was there. We knew there were Hamas people in London and elsewhere in Britain.
To see that all erupting all at once has left Jews feeling very isolated, feeling in many cases, anxious and afraid about attacks. Security has been beefed up around Jewish schools and places of worship. Overall, I think there's a great sense of isolation in the Jewish community.
For me personally, I've been trying to reflect all of those feelings, while at the same time trying to make the argument to the world, on behalf of the Jewish community, that Israel is a liberal democracy simply trying to defend itself and its way of life on the same side as us in that fight. So, it's been quite an intense couple of weeks.
Barber:
In that light, Jake, how do you think the BBC has reported this story in general, not just on the ground in Gaza, in Israel, in the Arab world, but also in Britain?
Wallis Simons:
I'm always reluctant to jump on the BBC because understand I've worked for the BBC in different ways and I know the demands of 24 hour news and I know that people get things wrong. But it's become too difficult to ignore that whenever there's an error at the BBC in covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, it always goes in the same direction.
I think that speaking to people I know at the BBC, there is a sense of an underlying lack of diversity, to use that word, in terms of worldview, in terms of class, in terms of level of education. How you solve that? I don't know.
But what it produces in cases like this is something that feels very malevolent even though it might not always be in the mind of the journalists who are producing it.
Barber:
That's a big word, malevolent. That implies intent.
Wallis Simons:
It does. I used it with a caveat that it might not be that way from the inside, from the point of view of journalists.
I don't think that a single BBC journalist goes to work thinking I'm going to put impartiality aside for this morning and be biased. Nobody thinks that. But what I'm saying is that there's a group think, there's a worldview that comes through that feels malevolent when you're on the receiving end of it.
The alacrity with which the BBC jumped to information from Hamas that the hospital had been bombed by Israel, not by any misfiring rocket from the Palestinians, that felt bad to us, that felt bad.
It's astonishing that the BBC would turn to the same people who beheaded the babies and take their word for it, that this was an Israeli strike. They wouldn't have taken that same line with such credulity from Islamic State officials. Yet we've seen the same techniques, the same barbarism meted out by both groups.
So it has felt bad from my point of view, and from the point of view of the Jewish community and indeed I think from a lot of people in Britain.
Rusbridger:
Can we just unpack that a bit because a lot of the criticism of the BBC has been around the events of October the 17th in the evening when the news of the explosion at the hospital happened. So that broken way in which the Gazan health ministry, run by Hamas, was announced that this had happened and attributed it, put yourself in the shoes of a news editor that evening. Isn't it inevitable that you have to report that that has happened and that Hamas has attributed it?
Would it not be odd not to report that attribution? So, how would you ideally handle that?
Wallis Simons:
Well, I think there's various different strata to how you would report that, as you know as well as anybody else. The first is that it has happened, that has to be reported, obviously, it doesn't even need to be questioned that it has happened.
But then the next level down from that is Hamas has blamed it on Israel. I think anybody with a sense of proportion about the whole thing, who's not allowing their bias to take over, would put that in context with the Israeli side and would make very clear that it's unexplained. That the jury is still out on this, investigation pending.
But if you look at the phrasing with which the BBC reported this, it seemed to almost get as close to confirming it as you could get without actually confirming it.
So it reported as fact the hospital was bombed by the Israelis and at the end it said according to Palestinian officials. In fact, those officials were from the same group, as I said, who beheaded the babies. They didn't appear to have gone to the Israelis to contest that claim first.
The way in which that reporter had a very strong geopolitical knock-on effect. It put the kibosh on diplomatic projects by President Biden in Israel. Various meetings were called off, various negotiations were stalled.
Barber:
Well, that wasn't just the BBC though.
Wallis Simons:
It wasn't just the BBC, but we're talking about the BBC.
It wasn't the only one who got this wrong, there were others as well. So I think that you raise a good point about that it has to be reported, of course it does. But some more circumspection about Hamas' account of it would've been very welcome I think.
Rusbridger:
So there was one BBC error that I think we would all conceive was error, which was a reporter saying, "It's difficult to see how else you could explain that." That was obviously a lapse of judgement .
But in comparison with the wider way that the media reported it, do you think the BBC was especially negligent? The New York Times has come out and apologise for its coverage. I've looked at various other reports in that timeframe.
Do you think the BBC stands out as being especially bad? Or do you think the BBC because of its global role has a special duty to be different, better?
Wallis Simons:
I think there have been failures across the board in many different outlets, not just the BBC. That's certainly true.
As you said, the New York Times has apologised, for example. The BBC feels particularly close to home because it's British and because it's our national broadcaster in the way that the New York Times isn't. The BBC has a history as well of which we've reported on at the Jewish Chronicle extensively, particularly BBC Arabic, which produces some egregious stuff.
In addition, the BBC has a special obligation towards impartiality that's in its charter. That isn't the case with many other outlets. So I'm not saying that the BBC has failed more than any other outlet in this particular case, but there's a history there and it cuts particularly deep I think when it's the BBC.
Rusbridger:
One of the biggest critics of the BBC has been the Daily Mail.
I'm just handing you out some screenshots which has twice gone with BBC criticism on its front page. I just looked at the Daily Mail coverage during those two hours and I've got, whatever it is, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 screenshots. Hamas claimed 500 killed after the Israeli strike.
Palestinian president declares three days of mourning after 500 dead in hospital hit by Israeli airstrike. Egypt denounces in strongest terms alleged Israeli strike on Palestinian. Justin Trudeau condemns alleged Israeli strike.
IDF may have hit the hospital by mistake. People gather around the bodies of Palestinians Hamas claim were killed in Israeli airstrike. World Health Organisation condemns alleged Israeli strike.
European Council President says the alleged attack on Gaza Hospital seems to be confirmed.
It was a very febrile couple of hours. I suppose the only point I'm making is the one that a lot of people were getting it wrong at that time. You've explained why you think the BBC has a particular duty, but do you accept that this was a very febrile couple of hours before the Israelis really got their act together and said, well, hold on a minute?
Wallis Simons:
Yeah, I entirely accept this was a very febrile couple of hours and a lot of people got it wrong.
I note that all these examples are from, if I'm correct, Mail Online. Having worked Mail Online, I know how it works. It's really an absorber of the news and it produces it then in real time almost.
It absorbs what's coming out and it produces it without the same kind of editorial consideration that you would get for the paper or indeed at the BBC. I would say that one of the reasons why the Mail Online absorbed the narrative and replicated it was because of the BBC. The European Council President again made some very inopportune and hasty statements, which again was absorbed by Mail Online and produced-
Barber:
Well hold on Jake, are you seriously saying that Mail Online, all these stories were influenced by the BBC?
Wallis Simons:
No.
Barber:
Well, that's what you appeared to be saying.
Wallis Simons:
No, I said that's one of-
Barber:
Absorbed.
Wallis Simons:
It's one of the factors.
It's one of the factors. Listen, the BBC, its voice is so powerful, it's so influential. It's our national broadcaster.
It has a duty in its charter to be impartial. If the BBC reports in this way, that influences the narrative greatly. Now, it's not the only factor.
I don't believe I said it was the only factor, and if I did, I didn't mean it. It's one factor amongst this general group think, and that general group think is much worse when it comes from people like the BBC, our national broadcaster, because its impact is so much greater.
Rusbridger:
We should say, according to the Washington Post, the Reuters, the AP, MSNBC, Politico, the New York Times all initially indicated that the blast came from in Israeli airstrike. More generally, Jake, the BBC has been criticised for its reluctance to use the word terrorism or terrorist.
Can you talk a bit about that? Can you understand the logic that would lead the organisation to be cautious about using that word?
Wallis Simons:
Yes. Just setting that aside just for a moment, I think I should point out that I feel that underlying some of these debates is a sense in which this could be part of some culture war against the BBC.
I get that. From my point of view, I was very clear for that reason to preface all of my comments by saying that I'm hesitant to jump on the BBC because I don't want to be misconstrued as being part of that culture war. So, I just want to make that very clear that I'm coming from a moral point of view as editor of the and so forth of the Jewish Chronicle
Now, with regard to your question about the use of the word terrorist.
Now, the BBC's rules have always been for a long time that the word terrorist shouldn't be used, instead the words militants and so forth should be used for any terrorist group. But as I said before, when the BBC tends to fail, it always fails in the same direction. So nobody complained, the BBC didn't pull up its staff when they reported that the IRA, that ISIS, that Al-Qaeda were terrorists.
It only seems to really rigidly adhere to that rule and demand that that rule is adhered to rigidly by its staff when it comes to Hamas. So what is it about Hamas that's different to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State? They all come from a similar ideological route in the Muslim Brotherhood, despite their theological differences over time.
They employ the same or very similar techniques, if you can call them techniques, measures of savagery and brutality. What is it that's different? It seems to me that the difference, the main difference, is the victims.
Barber:
One of the differences of course, and I'm not speaking on behalf of the BBC and I certainly acknowledge that they're reporting was flawed, but one of the differences of course is that Hamas did win an election back in 2007.
It is a government of sorts in Gaza. That makes it a different type of organisation than Al-Qaeda. In no way am I defending in any way the horrendous mutilation attacks that went on, but I'm just making the point it is a political entity.
Wallis Simons:
I accept that, you're right.
It won the election in 2005, which then precipitated a brutal civil war. It then seized control of Gaza. We know all that, that's true.
And it has officials, you are right, as you said, Alan, it was the health officials in Gaza who were from Hamas who told the BBC. I accept all of that, but it doesn't mean that the BBC needs to treat Hamas as it would treat the British authorities or a Parisian official. We're talking about a brutal terrorist group that's authoritarian, that's Islamofascist, and that meets out the worst savagery that we have seen in a long, long time.
Rusbridger:
Jake, so I understand what you're saying.
Are you saying that the BBC should have used the word terrorist, of the IRA, or are you saying if they're going to have that rule, they should just be consistent?
Wallis Simons:
I think I'm saying both. If they have a rule, then fine, they should uphold the rule. Then if they had upheld that rule and used the word militant alone rather than the word terrorist in the last 10, 20 years about all terrorist groups, then they'd have a much stronger defence.
Then people who wanted to argue that they should call Hamas terrorists would've a much weaker case and they probably still would be calling them militants. But the fact that they departed from that rule with such regularity in the past belies the fact there's something more that's going on here. It's not simply an error.
It's not simply a question of editorial judgement . There's a culture there that's breaking through the rules, that's causing a subjectivity to impose itself upon what's supposed to be impartiality. That's a problem.
Barber:
Jake, you're an experienced journalist, you are an editor.
Just imagine that you were appointed head of news at the BBC. What would be the two or three things that you would do from the outset, regarding coverage of this conflict?
Wallis Simons:
I think the first thing I would do would be to send out a memo with some very clear guidelines, which wouldn't actually need to depart very much from the existing BBC guidelines. It's more a question as we've seen of enforcing those guidelines.
I would then make sure that nobody reporting on the conflict had prior history of lapses. I think there would need to be a review, particularly of the output in BBC Arabic, which has been absolutely egregious. In fact, I don't have the figures to hand, but the number of upheld complaints is in the hundreds over the last two or three years.
The BBC is continually receiving complaints saying, yes, we got that wrong and obviously the way in which we got it wrong was against Israel and we uphold that and remove it, but then do the same thing again and again and again. We've seen horrendous things on BBC Arabic over the last couple of years, including people singing terrorist songs, asserting that Israel has no culture of its own, that it only appropriates other cultures and those sorts of things. So, that would need to be seriously reformed.
Then I think I would probably go on a recruitment drive for people who are perhaps outside of the ordinary BBC talent pool.
There are a lot of voices inside Broadcasting House who acknowledge the problem and who would like to see something done about it, who give me tips, story tips, who are desperate to see the BBC change, and that change would need to happen from the very top.
Rusbridger:
One final question on the use of language. There has been a suggestion that because the British government uses the word terrorists, the BBC should be bound by what the British government says. Do you agree with that?
Because I'm trying to think of a time, say, when the British government regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, do you think that BBC is bound to follow the labelling that the British government uses?
Wallis Simons:
I wouldn't say so, no. The BBC is our national broadcaster, but it's not an organ of government. There's an important distinction there and a valuable journalistic distinction in terms of our integrity and reporting.
So I wouldn't say that it has to slavishly follow those things. But I think that if the BBC was only consistent in its rules, that would be a very good step in the right direction.
Barber:
Every editor knows that when it's such a big story, this is when you find out how good your journalists are, maybe how good you are as a leader of the newsroom. Have you made any mistakes?
Have you found any mistakes from your own reporters in this story?
Wallis Simons:
Yes, I've made mistakes myself. The main mistake I've made, I think, is to have been drawn away from the newsroom too much to do media appearances.
Barber:
Well, that's a hanging offence.
Wallis Simons:
Getting the balance right between being in the newsroom and leading the team and the demands of going outside and trying to make the arguments is quite a hard thing. In terms of reporting errors, there was one, I probably shouldn't say this, but there's funnily enough, there was one young report who mistakenly wrote the word militant rather than terrorist at one point.
So we had to jump on that pretty quickly. Like in other newsrooms, but maybe particularly so, we are a small team and there's a lot of fatigue, there's a lot of trauma. It's been difficult for people.
The team is pulling together and doing their very, very best. Human error notwithstanding, I think we're doing a good job.
Rusbridger:
You are editing a paper for a particular community in this country, but we know that the story is now changing and that there are hundreds, thousands of Palestinians who are now dying and likely to die. Can you talk about how difficult that's going to be in terms of the balance and the empathy that's going to be required from your team?
Wallis Simons:
That question really cuts to the heart of this for me because from a humanitarian point of view, it's disastrous.
There's no softening that at all. From my time as a foreign correspondent, I've got one or two former colleagues in Gaza who I've spoken to over the past few days, and it's heartbreaking. Any person with any kind of conscience has got to accept that and try to assimilate it and make sense of it.
Yet taking a step back, what we are looking at is the hell of war.
We're also looking at how a liberal democracy behaves when it's under existential threat. If we look at how Britain has behaved in the past, and the United States, if we go back to 9/11, that precipitated, among other things, an invasion of Iraq which claimed 200,000 lives in three years. Up until this month, the number of lives claimed in all of Israel's conflicts in 75 years was 86,000.
In 75 years. So, that was our response partly to 9/11. We weren't under existential threat at that time, really, in Britain.
The last time we were under existential threat was in the Second World War and we firebombed Dresden, burning alive 25,000 civilians.
So fast-forward to now, Israel is taking measures to protect civilian life as far as it can. I would just end by saying that the sorts of demands that are being placed on Israel now to protect civilian life are not those that we see placed on any other democratic country with that level of intensity. It feels to me often that the words of Saul Bellow have been ringing in my ears these past couple of days, that Israel is being called upon to assume the moral burden that everybody else has dumped.
Barber:
Jake made some powerful points there.
Interesting. He really does believe that there is a cultural problem inside the BBC newsroom, which is pointing towards almost an endemic bias against Israel. That's a big claim.
I thought he went light on Mail Online, suggesting that somehow, he gave him a free pass really, they just pump out news and overly influenced by the BBC. I think I would find that contentious.
Rusbridger:
He went out of his way to distance himself from the culture wars about the BBC, but I think the agenda behind a lot of the attacks on the BBC is people who just can't stand the BBC. The point of raising the Mail performance on that evening was that the Mail has published two front page articles and other full page criticisms of the BBC at a time when thousands are dying.
It seems to be losing a sense of proportion about the BBC, however egregious some of the BBC mistakes have been. The Mail would do well to look in its own mirror and look at the eight stories that they published based on the words of Hamas during that two hour time gap. I haven't seen any rowing back or apology or retraction from the Mail, and I haven't seen criticism of Reuters or the Associated Press or the other majors.
So I think that two hour timeframe when a lot of news organisations made mistakes and could have performed better, to lay it all at the door of the BBC seems to me it is part of the culture war.
I'm not saying that of Jake, but I think generally there is a culture war against the BBC and it's being held to unreasonable expectations of the standards that it should abide by.
Barber:
We did ask the BBC to come on the show, but they were unable to find a suitable spokesperson. So instead we've invited Mark Damazer, a BBC veteran. He's a former head of current affairs and a former controller of Radio 4.
We'll be back after this short break.
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Rusbridger:
This is Media Confidential with me, Alan Rusbridger.
Barber:
And me Lionel Barber.
Rusbridger:
We're joined now by Mark Damazer, who, as we've already heard, has occupied many of the top jobs at the BBC. So Mark, you've got at least three relevant pieces of background that we might want to mention.
One is a BBC lifer, if that's not an unfair way of describing you, you went back to the BBC to serve on its board at one point, and you're also the son of Jewish refugees who came to this country. I think in the last couple of weeks you've felt that identity in ways that may have surprised even you.
Mark Damazer:
Yeah, I'm delighted to have been at the BBC for many years and passionately believe in it, [inaudible 00:32:15] as it is, as a civilising force in British public life. I'm Jewish, I'm very, very pleased to be Jewish, and I'm British because my father fought with the British army as part of the Polish army in World War II and he ended up in Britain.
He could have done an awful lot worse. I'm very, very grateful to be British as well. All of these identities come into play and you can't really be Jewish without feeling that what happened on October the seventh has echoes with a long, miserable thousands of years past of brutal antisemitism.
At the same time, I've looked at both what the BBC and others have done and various newspapers.
I've looked at the discussion around what those newspapers and what the BBC has done. I think some of it is overcooked or plain wrong and unfair and not doing the nation as a whole much service by piling in with sets of analyses about what the media is doing and what the good media is doing. I very much include the BBC in that, which I don't think are helpful in public understanding of what's going on.
So, all of those things are in play at the same time.
Barber:
How do you judge the BBC's record so far though, Mark? Looking at the individual stories, the tone and the quality of reporting?
Damazer:
Well, I take the unfashionable view that most of it has been extremely good, the Jeremy Bowens and [inaudible 00:33:49] of this world and [inaudible 00:33:51] are very good and that the questions that I've heard asked principally on Radio 4, a bit on Newsnight, a lot on Channel 4 News have been good. There are times when I scream and think you should have asked that and you've missed out this particular bit of context.
But I think that it's been compassionate, and compassionate in more than one geographical location, by which I mean both as regarding the massacre on October the seventh and the subsequent bombing in Gaza. It's been insightful and it has attempted, as much as it can do, picking its way through this enormously complicated and obviously incredibly distressing story to bring in multiple angles.
You've got errors, most famously the hospital last week and what happened there and did the BBC retract quickly enough? I think it got back from a position pretty quickly, and it was one report and it was wrong.
The BBC was very, very far from alone in making the mistake about assuming in its language that it was an Israeli strike. The BBC is responsible for massive amounts of output. The vast majority of what I've listened to and seen has been extremely good.
One of the reasons why I'm very pleased to be talking to both of you is because I think that the really good correspondents on the ground working in very difficult conditions who are bound themselves to be affected by this story because they're human beings, for heaven's sake, are doing remarkably well. The reporters are the essential lifeblood of what makes a news organisation work. The BBC has some extremely, extremely good people.
I'm here to say that they're very, very good and I'm here to defend them.
Rusbridger:
Mark, when you started at BBC, you lived a life where you were aiming at a number of bulletins per day. But the BBC is now a rolling news operation, and you remember a time when an unscripted remark early in the morning led to the decapitation of the BBC, the director general and the chair. Can you talk a bit about the dangers, the perils, the challenges, the opportunities of these unscripted two ways where a reporter is having to ad lib, there's no form of words in front of them and how that can go wrong?
Damazer:
Of course.
This is now of course not a new phenomenon. It starts with 24 hour news before we even get to websites and social media. So, the idea that you're having to spread your resources, even if you expanded them somewhat, you were never really able to expand them quite enough to ensure that you had perfect quality control in the way that you could have done when you were just dealing with three fixed point bulletins.
What you have to do is to apply your standards and make certain that you are aware of the dangers of going in too fast and put the premium on accuracy and sources and verification all the time.
But, the pressure is enormous. There comes a point where if you're not prepared to say anything at all because you're waiting for 24 hours, I exaggerate to make the point, in order to have perfect verification of something, you'll end up as it were not just being relevant to your audience.
None of it is an excuse at all for inaccuracy, sloppiness and all the rest of it. But it is to recognise your point, which is that the pressure that these journalists are under both to get it right and not to be slow makes it a very, very different business.
I think they also largely do a good job, the people on the continuous news channels, in making these quick judgements. But of course, you bring in an extra potential for significant inaccuracy and there's no doubt about that.
Barber:
Mark, BBC came under a lot of criticism, including from senior ministers, for not calling Hamas a terrorist movement or describing the acts as terrorist acts. But they have changed.
There's been a decision by the director general to stop calling Hamas just militants. Do you think that was the right call? Do you think it was belated?
A broader linked question is, given the magnitude of this event, it's been likened to Israel's 9/11, was there not a case for calling a top level meeting and saying, well actually, we need to review some of our labelling?
Damazer:
Do I broadly support the BBC's guideline, which needless to say is not only the BBC's guideline, but the BBC being the biggest fish in the sea, is going to attract the most attention about it, do I approve of the BBC's line of thought about its reluctance to label individual groups as terrorist groups? Yes, I do. Do I think that militant is a good substitute for it?
No, I don't. Do I think the BBC was late getting to that position? Possibly.
Do I think the BBC is right to hang on to the broad thrust of its guideline? Yes, I do.
Now, all of that is, to compress, quite a lot of thought. What those people are, at least some of them, who criticise the BBC for not saying outright Hamas is a terrorist group.
It's a cypher for saying that the BBC's coverage is weak or lacking sufficient impartiality because it's morally making equivalent Hamas and Israel. I don't think that's what I hear and see. When I listen to and see reports of the absolute carnage and brutality and butchery of what happened October the seventh, I don't hear reporters trying to bend over backwards to soften it in order that they maintain their credibility in the Arab street or that they are in some way legitimising what Hamas did.
I listened and saw quite a lot of it, as did all of you and the people listening to this, and it's sickening stuff. I don't think that the BBC pulled a punch in doing it.
So this is about one particular aspect of it, which is about the labelling. The BBC's argument, and not only the BBCs is it's a tricky word and if you look it up in the dictionary, it has multiple uses.
If you apply it backwards in time and across various events that have gone on in the world in the last few years and stick the label on to any group that attacks civilians in the hope of furthering their political interest, you run into an awful lot of difficulties. What I don't want to do in this podcast, as it were, is to pars all of that case by case. If you can report on the ground what you see, what they've done, pull no punches, you're doing an important journalistic job.
So when Hamas is introduced into a conversation or a script or an interview reminding the audience that this is a group deemed not only by the UK government or the US government by the European Union too as a terrorist group, I'm perfectly happy with that, and that works better than simply describing them as militants.
Rusbridger:
We've talked about the rolling coverage across at least two radio channels, TV, a website, constant updates, notifications, dealing with how this is all playing out on social media. It's a vast organisation. I am sure you have pondered the role of the director general in all this because his title as director general, he is editor in chief, but he's also looking at all the corporate side of the BBC.
This sprawling vast amount of output, is it possible for one person who is also looking at the corporate side of the BBC, to stay across all this and maintain the standards?
Damazer:
The person who runs the news division at the moment, Deborah Turness, occupies an extremely powerful position in the BBC on a day-to-day basis, and is expected by successive director generals over a long period of time to be responsible for making these day-to-day decisions and supervising this very large number of journalists and keeping across all these outlets. To expect the director general, whoever the director general is or has been, to be able to be across this as well as all the other stuff is not the way that it operates. Everybody within the BBC more or less understands that.
But when it gets really, really big and there's a kind of policy dilemma in the middle of it, and we've just talked of one, which is how to describe Hamas. Yeah, the BBC's reputation is absolutely at stake and the director general has to come to a view and at some point has to articulate it and be accountable for it.
But no, not if Alan and Lionel, as two of the most distinguished editors of recent times, not in the way that you've understood it, even with your own very successful digital footprints that you both produce for your newspapers, the BBC is bigger and wider than that and is very obviously broadcasting 24/7 on multiple channels in multiple ways. It's not the direct line accountability on a day-to-day basis with the editor in chief when she or he feels like it wading into a newsroom and saying, "I think the coverage is all askew today and we badly contributions from X, Y, and Z.
I'm commissioning it. By the way, I thought this piece wasn't really quite up to scratch, but this one was really exemplary and I want more of this." It just doesn't work like that.
Barber:
Thank you.
Rusbridger:
Thank you so much for joining us.
Barber:
Well, I thought that was really a very insightful contribution from a BBC veteran, really reminding us though how important it is to stick in the heat of conflict and the fog of war to basic reporting rules, which are be very careful about reporting unverified claims.
Rusbridger:
Yes, you can't keep getting ahead of yourself and reacting in the seconds. You just have to remind yourself that you have to stop, consider yourself what you know and what you don't know.
That generation of executives represented by Mark, I think we're at the forefront of moving the BBC into this new age of perpetual news.
Barber:
But the problem with perpetual news is it's harder to monitor and control the standards. I think the other point, which you alluded to, is the danger of the rush to judgement . It's a rush to judgement in terms of news, but also making a judgement on the story itself.
So for example, the way people were saying that President Biden's trip to Israel was a failure just because the meeting in Jordan was cancelled because of the missile attack in Gaza. This rush to judgement wanting to be first is very dangerous.
Rusbridger:
My fear is slightly the other way around. I watched the BBC in the trauma of the post Gilligan era, so a reporter makes a mistake at six minutes past six in the morning, it leads to a public inquiry costing millions of pounds.
The director general goes. That can only have the effect of making a news organisation much more self-censoring, much more cautious. My worry is that if you pounce on the BBC for every single little mistake that it makes, and I'm not saying this was a little mistake, it was clearly a significant mistake the ad lib by the reporter, then you breed, I think, the danger that the organisation becomes terrified of saying and doing anything courageous.
Barber:
Yeah, but what Mark also said is you are a public broadcaster.
I certainly think right now that the editors, all the way up to the director general, are feeling tremendous pressure and they're getting pressure from the government that, in my view, are taking advantage in the run-up to election to just hammer the BBC. They think it's a vote winner.
Rusbridger:
If you have any questions for us about the media, how it works now, whether it should be regulated differently, who controls what you see and hear, and who might grab that control in the future, email them to [email protected], repeat, [email protected], and we'll answer a few of them in a special episode in the future.
Barber:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
Rusbridger:
Remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, with new episodes every Thursday.
Barber:
We're on Twitter/X too, @mediaconfpod.
Rusbridger:
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Just head to the podcast description and follow the link to give your views on the series.
Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next week.
References
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