Today Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza, by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. Jones’s investigation of the BBC has three main components: a deeply reported look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative assessment of how the BBC characterizes the year-long siege on Gaza, and a review of the histories of the people behind the coverage—and, in particular, one editor, Raffi Berg.

Appropriately, when Jones began this reporting as an independent journalist and reached out to Berg for comment, Berg at first hired the famous defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, who is also former Director of UK Lawyers for Israel. Jones is a Guardian columnist and hosts his own searing independent news coverage on YouTube. If you have the means to help pay for Jones’s $24,000 in initial legal bills in vetting the story, you can do so here.

Story by Owen Jones

The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Their primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.

The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza” across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the BBC make a series of specific changes:

reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims, highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023, use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.

One BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went “way beyond” the signatories.

BBC management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and “external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another called it “very patronizing.”

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-biased-coverage

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

THE BAD NEWS IS THAT MOST JOURNALISTS ARE CONTROLLED BY MEDIA OWNERS... EVEN MANY INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS HAVE TO FOLLOW THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE IN ORDER TO "SURVIVE"... THE FEW INDEPENDENT MEDIA OUTLETS ARE ALWAYS BEGGING FOR CASH BECAUSE MOST OF THE TIME THEY HAVE TO AVOID ADVERTISING WHICH IS A COVERT MECHANISM THAT CONTROLS NEWS. SURROUNDED BY (RETIRED) JOURNALISTS AND TV PERSONALITIES, GUS HAS BEEN ABLE TO EXPLORE HOW NEWS HAS BECOME SWEETLY TOXIC...

We need to break the billionaires’ grip on our democracy — and that starts with loosening their hold over local media. 

By

 

Alex Frandsen, 

TRUTHOUT

As we feel our way through the political haze following Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House, one underlying reality is clear: In the fight for control over our political system and economy, the ultrarich are winning — and they’re winning by a lot.

The day after the election, the 10 richest people in the world increased their wealth by roughly $64 billion, the largest daily increase since Bloomberg started tracking these figures in 2012. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. While working- and middle-class people struggle to pay rent or buy a home, private equity firms are snatching up houses and apartment buildings. While families turn to food stamps and parents are forced to skip meals, conglomerates like Kroger are raising grocery prices and reaping the profits.

To create a just and sustainable future for the working and middle classes, we need to break the billionaires’ tightening grip over our democracy and economy — and that should start with loosening their hold over our local media system.

Creating strong structures for local news and civic information isn’t usually at the top of the list for progressive movement leaders, but it’s a crucial part of the work that lies ahead. When the actions laid out in Project 2025 come to our towns and cities — mass deportation, eviscerated environmental protections, and cuts to education and housing programs — our ability to weather the storm and lay the groundwork for what comes next will depend on how organized and connected we are. Whether it’s tenant unions, labor unions, mutual-aid networks or any other kind of community organizing, we’ll need to create strong multiracial coalitions at the local level that bridge the interests of the working and middle classes.

It will be exceptionally difficult to pull this off if we don’t know what’s happening in our neighborhoods and in the halls of power. The future of our democracy requires a media system that speaks to people’s needs and serves those who are organizing for the safety and prosperity of their communities.

This is not the local media system that we currently have. The same forces that are breaking our democracy have decimated our local news environment. Corporate chains and hedge funds have taken over thousands of community media outlets, hollowing out their newsrooms. The collapse of commercial newspapers has been expedited by the relentless growth of giant tech platforms, whose owners have established a firm grip over the information economy. For all their promises of connection and democratized debate, these platforms are instead conduits for misinformation and polarization.

Pair these developments with an ongoing legacy of racism and harm — within both our media institutions and the governmental bodies charged with overseeing them — and what are we left with? A news system focused on profits instead of community needs, and a nationwide media landscape that too often pushes fear instead of hope, disengagement instead of connection, and national headlines instead of actionable local information.

Critically, we’re left with a severe deficit of the kind of information we need most: relevant, verifiable, and trusted news that empowers us to improve our lives and strengthen our communities. Research has shown that this deficit most acutely impacts communities of color, rural communities, Spanish-speaking communities and impoverished communities — in other words, the backbone of the working-class United States.

As movement leaders assemble a blueprint for the coming Trump years — both to protect people in the short term and to rebuild our democracy over the long haul — it is absolutely essential that this planning include a structural reimagining of our local media system.

Most immediately, that means bolstering state and local protections for journalists. The incoming administration has signaled its intention to undermine long-held press freedoms, and of particular concern are Trump’s repeated threats on the campaign trail to jail reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources. We must prepare for the likelihood that journalists will be targeted — especially those who engage with and are a part of Black, immigrant and queer communities. As policy makers work to shore up civil liberty defenses, ensuring that local media workers can do their job safely should be a priority. This should include the enactment of strong anti-SLAPP statutes, which protect journalists (and especially those who work with smaller outlets) from costly lawsuits aimed at chilling investigation and First Amendment-protected speech. State lawmakers should also codify protections for journalists’ work material and their sources — a strong template can be found in the PRESS Act at the federal level.

More broadly, we must build a grassroots movement of civic media leaders and community leaders who can work together to structurally transform our local media system. Significant federal policy action is almost certainly off the table for at least the next four years. But there is immense opportunity at the local and state levels to build a framework for the media system of the future, particularly in places where policy makers are able to hold the line effectively against authoritarian pressures.

That could mean the creation of independent grantmaking bodies for local news at the state and local levels, firewalled from the government and potentially funded by small fees on the immense revenues of tech platforms. It could mean incentivizing local ownership and local investment in media outlets. It could (and should) mean supporting media workers’ efforts to unionize, an essential protection for newsroom staff who are working to hold wealthy owners accountable. It could even look like increased funding for libraries, community colleges, community media centers, and other trusted local institutions that can serve as hubs for civic education and media literacy.

The policy outcomes will vary. The important thing is for community leaders and media workers to coalesce behind a shared vision that treats local news and civic information like the public goods they are. In doing so, we can reclaim our local news from giant platforms, corporate chains and hedge funds. We can put media power into the hands of our communities and weaken the firm grip that billionaires like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (owner of The Washington Post), the Murdochs (who control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), the Sinclairs (of the Sinclair Broadcast Group) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (owner and executive chair of the Los Angeles Times) have over our information ecosystem.

Our collective well-being depends on our ability to work with our neighbors and hold power to account. If we can build a transformed local media system that serves this country’s working- and middle-class communities, we might just be on our way to creating a democracy that serves all of us, not just the richest of the rich.

https://truthout.org/articles/without-transformative-local-media-our-communities-are-vulnerable/

------------------------

BY Des Freedman

“Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy” proclaimed prime minister Keir Starmer in a comment piece for the Guardian at the end of October. “Just because journalists are brave does not mean they should ever suffer intimidation”, he wrote.

Yet 11 days before his article was published, officers from the counter-terrorism unit of the Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under provisions of the UK’s Terrorism Act.

Winstanley was presented with a letter indicating that the raid was part of ‘Operation Incessantness’, a counter-terror initiative about which little is known.

This is not the first use of anti-terror laws to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices in recent months. 

It follows the detention at Heathrow Airport of Richard Medhurst and the arrest of Sarah Wilkinson in August 2024, both of whom are independent journalists prominently associated with reporting Israel’s war on Palestinians.

The attacks on journalists are part of a wider pattern of harassment of pro-Palestine activists. 

This includes the arrest on 1 November of the Jewish academic Haim Bresheeth for alleged support of a ‘proscribed organisation’ after making a speech outside the London residence of the Israeli ambassador to the UK. 

Bresheeth noted the achievements of the Israeli government: “Murder, mayhem, genocide, racism, destruction, this is what they’re good at”.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of direct action group Palestine Action, is set to stand trial in April on charges of criminal damage and supporting a proscribed organisation.

A further 16 members of Palestine Action are currently detained, only five of whom have been sentenced with the others held on remand.

In response to these outrageous infringements of journalists’ ability to do their jobs, Declassified UK noted back in September that “they are part of a sinister development that has serious implications for civil liberties and freedom of speech, yet it has been ignored by the mainstream media”.

This continues to be the case. Not a single national news outlet in the UK has reported on the policing of British pro-Palestinian journalists. Not one of them has thought to investigate what ‘Operation Incessantness’ might mean for press freedom. 

Not one of them has reflected on the precedent set by the use of anti-terror laws for reporting on Gaza.

Mainstream news outlets, however, are perfectly prepared to report on police raids where they happen outside the UK. The Guardian, for example, has published many articles on arrests of journalists overseas, for example inRussia, China, Somalia and India while the BBC has reported on harassment of journalists in Cambodia, Venezuela and Iran.

One recent exception to this was widespread coverage in November 2023 of a High Court decision criticising the Metropolitan Police for carrying out a counter-terrorism raid on a freelance journalist in July of that year. 

The judgment found that the anonymous reporter, who was covering issues of national security, including allegations concerning “failures to crack down on Chinese influence and issues of defence procurement”, had had their human rights breached. 

In this particular case, national newspapers were prepared to back ‘one of their own’. This was evidenced by the support provided to the journalist,according to their solicitor, by not only the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Free Speech Union but also the Sun, Associated Newspapers, Telegraph Media Group and Jewish Chronicle.

No such backing has been forthcoming from news organisations for pro-Palestinian journalists who have faced similar police action. 

The press’ interest in the use of the Terrorism Act is far more likely to focuson the conviction of pro-Palestine protesters displaying allegedly pro-Hamas symbols on a march (despite the judge’s finding that there was no evidence of support for Hamas) than it is to call out unwarranted state harassment of independent journalists.

Instead, it has been left to activists, trade unions and journalism NGOs to publicise the raids and arrests of pro-Palestinian journalists. 

The NUJ has condemned “the rising use of counter-terrorism legislation against journalists as an intimidatory measure harmful to public interest journalism and press freedom”. And the Committee for the Protection of Journalists reacted to the raid on Asa Winstanley by demanding that all his devices be immediately returned to him. 

“Instead of endangering the confidentiality of journalistic sources, authorities should implement safeguards to prevent the unlawful investigation of journalists and ensure they can do their work without interference”, it wrote.

Meanwhile, there is silence from a journalism establishment whose motto, as a Daily Mail comment piece once put it, is that “free expression is the cornerstone of a free society”. It seems that free expression is reserved for some journalists but certainly not all of them.

While it is obviously true that the media in the UK do not face the same level of restrictions and violence meted out to journalists in authoritarian countries, harassment by the state – both formal and informal – poses a genuine threat to journalists challenging the status quo, particularly on foreign policy issues.

“This is a country where police routinely spy on ‘troublemaker journalists’”

This is, after all, a country that jailed Julian Assange for more than five years for the crime of being a journalist who didn’t play by the rules. This is a country that runs a ‘voluntary’ system of press censorship on military issues through the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee (DSMA) that most editors are all too happy to comply with. 

This is a country with a news media either owned by billionaires and tech moguls or run by a public service broadcaster with extensive links to the government of the day. 

This is a country where police routinely spy on ‘troublemaker journalists’ as we saw with the revelations that the Police Service of Northern Ireland engaged in covert surveillance and cover-up for over ten years before being found out only thanks to dogged work by rank and file journalists.

So when Keir Starmer proclaims that “there is no direct threat to press freedoms in our country”, take this with more than a pinch of salt. As we have seen, the ‘indirect’ threats of the DSMA and the concentrated nature of media ownership are significant enough. 

There is little room for complacency when it comes to the actions that the state is prepared to take to muzzle the journalists who it perceives as posing a ‘direct threat’ to a foreign policy that has facilitated Israel’s assault on Gaza and the wider conflagration in the Middle East.

Yet the state’s job does not look like it will get any easier. A letter published in the Independent from 230 members of the media industry, including over 101 anonymous BBC staff members, complaining about biased media coverage of Israel suggests that the opposition to the genocide is growing and includes a significant number of journalists. 

The pro-Palestine movement can be threatened but it does not seem that it will be quashed any time soon.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/journalism-is-not-a-crime-tell-that-to-the-british-state/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…