Rachel Burden, Jeremy Corbyn & antisemitism

A Survation poll back in 2018 found that 85% of British Jews believed that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic. And as Tam Heinitz writes:

Now it might feasibly be argued that such evidence as there is does not constitute conclusive proof that Corbyn himself is antisemitic. Certainly it would be right to acknowledge that he strongly disputes such an assertion.

But given the Mural, the Wreath, his comments about Hamas and Raed Saleh, his associations with Paul Eisen, his glowing Foreword to an antisemitic book, his comments about British Zionists lacking a sense of ‘English irony… despite having lived here a long time, probably all their lives’, not to mention the Labour Party under his leadership being found guilty of harassing and discriminating against Jewish members, there is, to say the least, a feasible case for the prosecution.

And that is why the Campaign Against Antisemitism has complained to the BBC because on 12 January, Breakfast presenter Rachel Burden interviewed businessman John Caudwell, who called Mr Corbyn  “a Marxist and antisemite”.  Later, towards the end of the programme, she apologised to 5 Live listeners:

I should have challenged him on the particular allegation of antisemite [sic] because there is absolutely no evidence that the leader of the Labour Party at that time, Jeremy Corbyn, was or is antisemitic. He had to deal with allegations of that within his party but there is nothing to suggest that he himself as an individual was. So I apologise for not challenging more directly, I should have done, and I want to emphasise there is no evidence for that at all.

Au contraire, Rachel. Au contraire. 

Kerching!

The Sunday Times reports that the BBC has "quietly" paid out more than £3m  (from the licence fee) to its staff - including over £1m to a single individual - in an attempt to avoid Samira Ahmed-style employment tribunals. Many of the payouts have been "modest payments" of over £5-10k, but others have been in six figures. Apparently, around 50 further cases remain unresolved, including grievance cases involving Naga Munchetty, Rachel Burden and Louise Minchin. Money, money, money, must be funny, in a £3.83 billion licence fee-funded world. 

"It is impossible to keep track"

The Papers

Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump and his fitness to be President of the United States of America, it's surely beyond reasonable doubt that "a full-scale Corporation attack on him is now in full spate" - as News-watch's David Keighley put it the other day.

Yes, that may also be said of most other mainstream media outlets, but the BBC is the only one that people are forced (by law) to pay a compulsory licence fee to watch.

I've not seen much of the BBC News Channel overnight or today, but I did watch three short segments (about half an hour's viewing in total).

There was last night's edition of The Papers with its very cosy consensus between the BBC presenter and her two journalist guests from the Times and the FT on Trump and Brexit-related matters (biased in all the expected ways), with Martine Croxall adopting a special, slightly derisive tone when talking about Nigel Farage.

Then there was BBC Breakfast's paper review where the BBC's Rachel Burden shared a sneer, at Donald Trump's expense, with David Davies (formerly of the FA and the BBC).

Then I switched on (at around 10:10) and witnessed Gavin Esler interviewing an anti-Trump author and cosily reinforcing everything that anti-Trump author was saying in criticism of Mr Trump, with very little (if any) attempt at playing devil's advocate on Gavin's part.

As I say, those are just snapshots, yet all three contained varying degrees of bias - and all in the same direction.

Goodness knows what listening to hours of it would have yielded (other than a blogpost half a mile long)

As David said, "It is impossible to keep track", so why even try? The bias is all across the BBC. It's there for all to see and hear. I shall just resign myself from now on to just dipping in at random every so often and sampling (as above). That's all anyone can do.

Besides....

Though there's always the 'echo chamber' danger of seeing more and more people sharing your view and thinking that amounts to something significant, it really does seem to be the case that many, many more people are becoming seriously angry at BBC bias these days - and especially over the course of this year.

It seems to have gone way beyond 'the usual suspects'. Is it an explosion yet?

Complaints about BBC bias are certainly spreading like wildfire onto the BBC website, as anyone who regularly clicks on BBC Have Your Say threads will know.

Is this gentleman Catholic?

I just clicked on a few minutes ago - on another of their 'Fake News' pieces - and where I might have seen the odd anti-BBC comment at most a few years ago it can now almost be guaranteed now that there will be legions of such comments.

(Of course, it could be that 'the usual suspects' have colonised there too, but I don't think that's the explanation).

On this typical piece all of the top-rated comments are critical of the BBC. Here are the Top 5:

13. IWANTTOBREAKFREE: Dancer you are spot on. BBC has been ranting about this "fake news" issue all week with the inference that it affected the vote in the USA. This is despite it publishing its own "fake news" in the form of a supposed leaked Govt document saying there was no strategy for Brexit which turned out to be nothing to do with the Govt. Sadly BBC news can no longer be considered reliable. Look elsewhere.

11. Raskilnikov: The BBC and their ilk like to imagine that Brexit and Trump won because the people listened to the wrong advice, Murdoch etc as opposed to our moral guardians the BBC, the truth is people aren't stupid, they voted for Trump/Brexit because it was what's best for them, whats best for the BBC isn't what's best for the working class

3. BBCLeftWingBias: Facebook is cobblers, the BBC News publishes biased articles, the sun rises in the morning and water is wet. Move along, nothing to see here.

2. Dancer: So Zuckerberg is now political, BBC when are you going to admit you are politically motivated?

39. NigeM: The BBC is smarting because it failed to stop Brexit and Trump. As a result it is now slinging mud at everybody else because it knows its influence is on the slide. The population is slowly waking up to the antics of the BBC.

The top-rated comment there ought to be particularly painful for the BBC. It is well put.

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?