Does the BBC hate Palestine?

Why does the BBC hate Palestine? Yuri Prasad asks rhetorically in Socialist Worker . Prasad asserts that the BBC’s interest in the Hamas tunnel networks and use of civilians as human shields is minimising the bombing of Gaza.

In fact most people horrified by the Israeli onslaught in Gaza know about the horrors from the BBC and similar media. The BBC interviews lots of Israeli journalists, government and IDF spokespeople, retired diplomats, ex-prime ministers and similar; but it reports the figures provided by Hamas for casualties. It has reporters in Gaza, and they have reported on the ground what has happened. The BBC first reported the Al-Ahli hospital bombing as “an Israeli strike”, and has sifted evidence carefully since.

Palestinian officials and members of pro-Palestine campaigns have often been interviewed on Newsnight and other news and current affairs programmes.

There is a British bias in the BBC’s coverage, of course. It has interviewed more families of people with relatives being held hostage than it has British Palestinians. It continues to give prominent coverage to SNP leader Humza Yousaf’s family trapped in Gaza, which also highlights the desperate situation for many people trapped in Gaza who don’t have ties with a significant political leader.

According to Prasad, a core problem with coverage by the BBC (and the Guardian and Channel 4) is that they “accept that Israel has a right to exist, they also accept it has the right to use military force against those that disagree. So, liberal news may report with compassion the pain of a Palestinian as they lie dying in the rubble. But watch how that sympathy vanishes if they are found to be part of the resistance.”

Hamas

Hamas themselves have not been interviewed regularly in the UK media. Their spokespeople have given interviews, but given their programme and the fact they hold a large number of hostages, they don’t get long interviews in the Western bourgeois press. Does that prove the media “hate Palestine”?

A specific criticism of the BBC shared by the government and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) is about the BBC’s refusal to label Hamas or its fighters as “terrorists”. The BBC has said it reports the attribute “terrorist” whenever the government or others use it, but says who the description comes from. The BBC’s coverage has not minimised what Hamas did on 7 October.

There are real issues with all bourgeois media coverage. These are media owned and run by capitalists seeking to make a profit. The BBC has rightly been criticised for having a chair chosen by the Prime Minister. But the serious bourgeois media try to tell the bourgeoisie what is really going on. They check facts. Their news coverage, if read with due critical care, is better than unverified social media snippets, picked up from tweets or Telegram chats.

A lot of the outrage as to whether or not Hamas beheaded babies was all played out on social media. Serious bourgeois news sources reported what was being discussed but did not rush to the conclusions that much of the Twitter commentariat was desperate for. Where allegations were reported, sometimes they were rolled back on and clarified.

Since we can’t see the whole world — or even, in fact, more than slivers of it — first-hand, the serious bourgeois media, particularly serious newspapers, if we read them carefully, are an important source for us, as they were for Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and others in their day.

That information allows the left, including Solidarity , to write better-informed and more persuasive critiques. The BBC does not hate Palestine. Rather, Socialist Worker dislikes serious journalism.