Where's Timmy?

Q; Is Tim Davie still there? I understood that the remit - the principal raison d’être for installing a fresh DG  was to address, (and rectify) the BBC’s bias. Or the public’s perception of the BBC’s bias.

Oh, I think I’ve answered my own question.

A; The public doesn’t have much of a perception of the BBC’s bias because where certain topics are concerned (e.g., Middle East politics) the ‘perception’ in question is largely gleaned via (Through the lens of) the BBC. A self-fulfilling, circular chicken-and-egg scenario.

(Sorry for all the parentheses.) (It’s because of  the heat)

Now, let’s begin with our old friend (Well, the BBC’s old friend) Abdel Bari Atwan. (On Dateline they like to call him ‘Barry’ - a sign of affection.  (For some reason) 

He was temporarily cancelled (allegedly) for saying some pretty nasty things while accidentally using English rather than Arabic, the language in which he expresses his real feelings about the Jews. 

As Craig mentioned, I’ve speculated about this temporary absence already. 

“Oh yes, and has anyone noted the recent absence of the BBC’s most ubiquitous guest on Dateline London recently?   One of his rants has apparently been removed from YouTube but does anyone know if his recent (semi) withdrawal from our BBC screens is a coincidence or part of Tim Davie’s nascent decontamination project? Yes, I’m talking about “Barry Atwan or ‘arry Batwan.

 

 Haven’t seen Mr Atwan lately. Did he creep away quietly, or was there a showdown? (Asking for a few million friends.)"

This is getting just like that post all over again. I seem to have just regurgitated (from the same post) the following:

This is almost unbelievable when you consider that Tim Davie was supposed to be addressing the bias. I understood that the BBC’s entire raison d’être for co-opting Tim Davie to the maelstrom  — bringing him aboard - was to iron out the bias once and for all!  But when? This year, next year, sometime never?  

Never mind. We are as repetitive as needs be. And it seems my speculation was nowt but wishful thinking. Barry hasn’t been cancelled.

Neither has our old friend (Well, the BBC’s old friend) Jeremy Bowen. One might also call him ‘friend of this blog’ in the sense that typing Jezza’s name into our search box brings up pages and pages of content. 

Nothing changes. Nothing is ever properly “addressed”. 

Jeremy Bowen is widely known for his pro-Palestinian take on everything connected with the topic. His well-documented grudge against Israel after the killing of his Palestinian driver, which came about largely because of Bowen’s recklessness. (Are there echoes of a similar recklessness in Shireen Abu Ackleh’s “wrong place at the wrong time” shooting?)

It was probably wishful thinking on my part that gave Bowen’s transfer to Ukraine a benefit-of-the doubt-like passing fancy, namely that he’s been whisked away from one (metaphorical) potential danger zone (sullying the BBC’s reputation with his dreadful bias against Israel) to another (physical) one. A fresh start with a comparatively clean slate. 

But no. He’s back, yet again in the same old danger zone, stirring up antisemitism for all he’s worth.  Tim Davie, what are you thinking?

David Collier and Hadar Sela have gone into detail about this particular report of Bowen’s. 

Ostensibly covering Joe Biden’s visit to the region, Bowen’s communiqué shamelessly manipulates language while sidestepping the actual news (The Jerusalem U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration) to reiterate what -  in his own words- “has all been said before”.

Here we are. Blatantly biased images, highly selective and misleading film clips, and the same old distortions - they’re all back - with a vengeance!

Tim Davie, are you there? Wake up! 

Of course, writing this is a complete waste of time. Take the killing of Shireen Abu Ackleh, who is fast turning into the new Mohammad al-Dura. Even the Guardian’s forced retraction, following the same breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice (importance of distinguishing between fact and opinion), couldn’t deter Bowen from boldly repeating the same violation. 

He’s becoming increasingly audacious because he knows he can get away with it. The public (new generation) 'doesn’t know any better, and it’s not hard to see the BBC’s cavalier 'free pass' to disinformation as a contributing factor to the news that antisemitism is on the rise.

I wanted to make a nod to Harry’s Place. I don’t think many (any) of the regulars over there are aware of this blog, but we’re aware of theirs. (Nods) 

Helping Hamas?

The Israel-bashing Independent columnist Mira Bar-Hillel has been gloating this weekend:

...a YouGov poll this week found that only 15 per cent of Britons support Israel’s actions in Gaza. The credit for that goes to brilliant, brave reporters who have brought graphic images of the Gaza atrocities to our newspapers and television screens.

Mira forgets to mention that those those YouGov results show even less support for Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel (with 7% taking the David Ward line) and that more British people blame Hamas than Israel for the civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.

Mira B-H, presumably, has the likes of Jeremy Bowen, Paul Adams, Yolande Knell, (etc) in mind when praising those "brilliant, brave reporters" for helping to turn the British public against Israel here.

If so, I think she's spot on. Their reporting, including their use of distressing images, must surely have had a - and, probably, the - major impact on the British public's apparent lack of support for Israel's actions, given that the British public still tends to see the news through their eyes.

On their use of graphic images and distressing stories, are they actually doing more harm than good though?

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill certainly thinks so:

The message that all this morally pornographic promotion of images and reports of Palestinian death sends to Hamas is this: victimhood works. The feverish Western marshalling of emotive imagery of Palestinian corpses to the political end of seeking sanctions against Israel or greater international protection for the Palestinian territories surely has the effect of encouraging Hamas to try to provide more of the same, more ‘telegenically dead’ Palestinians. There is a logic to Hamas’s alleged encouragement of great risk among the Gazan civilian population and certainly to its ‘parading’ of dead bodies before the press: it’s a response to the grotesque Western fashion for looking at, sharing and using as political tools images of dead Palestinians. Hamas is best seen as a kind of drug pusher to those in the West who have developed a very ugly habit of exploiting images of brutalised Palestinians both for their own needs (to advertise their emotional awareness) and for political purposes (to exert pressure on our leaders to condemn Israel).

And so does BBC Watch's Hadar Sela.

She appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live's Breakfast Show this morning (from about 1hr 51m in):  

I think one of the most significant factors has actually been what we aren't seeing. There's been dozens of Western reporters in the Gaza Strip for the last two weeks and more now, and yet we haven't seen one picture...I haven't seen one picture...of armed terrorists. I haven't seen one picture of terrorists shooting up RPGs, anti-tank missiles or mortars. 2,300 missiles fired. We haven't seen one picture of that in action in the Western media. Around 10-15% of those missiles fall short and actually land in the Gaza Strip and often, unfortunately, injure civilians there. We've seen no pictures of that. We've seen no pictures of injuries caused by shortfall missiles. There's been at least four summary executions taken place by Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the last week or two. We've seen no pictures of that. We've seen no pictures of Hamas people at all, even at the Shifa Hospital where they hide out, and yet we've seen journalists attending news conferences there, but nobody's actually talking about why these people are hiding and what's going on...

At which point the presenter, Rachel Burden, interrupted, putting the BBC/Mira Bar-Hillel point :

I suppose the story really is though the story of the 700+ people in Gaza, most of them civilians, many of them children, who've lost their lives and some of those pictures of children some people will find uncomfortable, others will find distasteful, others will say "That's very powerful and those are pictures that have to be brought to the world".

Hadar replied,

They are certainly very powerful pictures, and they're obviously very tragic and very sad pictures. I think there's a question here as well, you know...we've seen a lot of..as you say..a lot of pictures of dead people, dead children, injured people. We've seen at least one BBC crew actually filming in a morgue! Now, one of the things that struck me is, would the BBC go and film in a morgue in the UK? I'm not sure they would. Would they show pictures of blood on the floor in a morgue in the UK? I'm not sure they would, and so you have to ask yourself, why the different standard and what does that actually say about the journalism?

Now, as you quite rightly said in the beginning, at lot of these pictures are actually intended to influence world opinion, and this is a very big factor in this conflict because Hamas and terrorist organisations know they can't win this war militarily...they just can't...so they seek to win it on the public opinion field - and on what we call the 'lawfare' field - and so pictures like this obviously, beyond the fact that they are obviously a terrible documentation of what is happening, but they also serve a purpose and...

And which point Rachel Burden interrupted again and brought Hadar's short but important appearance to an abrupt halt in order to talk to a Palestinian journalist.

This is a genuine moral dilemma, isn't it, though? Do you not show such powerful images in your reports and, therefore, risk being accused of censorship (and bias), or do you show them and help a terrorist organisation like Hamas win the battle for public opinion by putting their own people in harm's way?