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| Former BBC News CEO, Deborah Turness (JTA) |
I’ve made no secret of my growing awareness of just how
biased the media has become. A fact made abundantly clear over the last two
years by their coverage of the war in Gaza. I’ve always known the media had
bias. After all, the people reporting and editing the news are human beings
with their own opinions. No matter how hard they try, that bias inevitably
creeps into how a story is told.
Still, I had always given them the benefit of the doubt,
believing their bias wasn’t intentional. That there was at least an honest
attempt to present both sides.
That perception vanished quickly during the early stages of
the war, when the media almost invariably presented events through the eyes of
Palestinian correspondents stationed in Gaza. Some of those correspondents, it
was later discovered, had actual connections to Hamas - the very terrorists
Israel was fighting. Others were UN-affiliated individuals whose bias against
Israel is nothing new.
This, in my view, is one of the primary (though not the
only) reasons that American public support for the Jewish state has diminished
so sharply over the last couple of years.
Some will argue that pictures don’t lie. That images of the
devastation caused by Israeli airstrikes spoke for itself. The images of
blood-covered bodies, seen in nearly every report, were accompanied by
Hamas-supplied casualty numbers, embellished to suggest that most of the
victims were women and children. These numbers were reported without question.
The media insisted they were merely “doing their job” by shining a light on the
carnage.
Yet there was virtually no mention of how many of those ‘innocent’
casualties were actually Hamas operatives. Or that Hamas terrorists
deliberately embedded themselves within civilian enclaves such as hospitals and
schools, precisely to maximize casualties and ensure Israel took the blame for ‘indiscriminate’
killing.
But some outlets went far beyond mere bias. Some flat-out lied
- accusing Israel of atrocities they knew had never happened. The worst
offender was, ironically, the most respected news organization on the planet:
the BBC.
Yes, the BBC—an outlet that even the New York Times
can’t match in global prestige. Those of us who pay attention already knew
about that bias, but the BBC’s influence is so vast that other outlets
uncritically buy what it sells. Its credibility gives cover to its distortions.
Recently, this bias was exposed by The Telegraph, a
conservative British newspaper, which laid out in detail how the BBC knowingly
misled the public. The evidence was incontrovertible: they presented lies as
truth, and the rest of the global media followed suit. JTA reported the
following:
“The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war…
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the broadcaster, accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to ‘minimize Israeli suffering’ to ‘paint Israel as the aggressor’ in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash for failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas official, and for using a contributor who had publicly said Jews should be burned ‘as Hitler did.’ The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan, which included chants of ‘Death to the IDF.’”
The BBC is infested with anti-Israel bias, yet it gets away
with it because – it’s the BBC. Beyond reproach. The ‘gold standard’ of fair and balanced reporting.
The American media tends to take the BBC’s word as gospel and reports it the same way. Thus the damage
multiplies.
Making matters worse, many people - especially the young - don’t
even rely on mainstream outlets anymore. They get their ‘news’ from social
media platforms or podcasts run by charismatic personalities whose opinions
masquerade as truth.
Still, the influence of the mainstream media remains enormous.
A recent example illustrates this perfectly: a poll found that more Americans
blamed Republicans than Democrats for the government shutdown. Even though it was the Democrats
who voted against every Republican attempt to reopen it.
That’s an indisputable fact. Democrats held the country
hostage. Using the shutdown as leverage to pressure Republicans into funding the
Affordable Care Act. Even if their cause was just, the shutdown hurt ordinary
Americans, especially the poor, who were deprived of food assistance through
SNAP (food stamps). Yet whenever Democratic politicians were interviewed, they called it a ‘Republican
shutdown’. And the left leaning media rarely pushed back.
The result? The majority of American voters came away believing that
Republicans were to blame. Hence the those poll numbers. Fortunately 8 Senate
Democrats with a conscience broke ranks yesterday and voted with Republicans to
reopen the government. But I’m sure the impression stuck: ‘Republicans were
starving the poor.’
If there was ever proof of how powerful media bias can be,
this is it. And if the public can be so easily misled about domestic politics
that affects their daily lives, how can we expect them to see the truth about
Israel?
I don’t know how to change the hearts and minds of a public
so dependent on media narratives. But recognizing the problem is a start.
There are, thankfully, some hopeful signs. The resignations
of top BBC officials is one. Another is the reported purchase of The
Washington Post by conservative entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, which has already
had to a rare editorial that actually assigned blame correctly in the shutdown.
Likewise, CBS’s acquisition by Skydance -whose CEO is pro-Israel and who
appointed the pro-Israel Bari Weiss to oversee its news division. Exposing the BBC and changes to 2 big media outlets are all positive developments.
And it’s no small thing that the anti-Israel bias that has long
permeated academia has finally been addressed by the Trump administration.
Their efforts have borne fruit. Universities like Columbia and Cornell have now
expanded their antisemitism initiatives. In return government funding for their
research programs has been restored.
We have a long way to go. But with these developments, we
may have just turned a significant corner. Perhaps the media’s coverage will,
at last, begin to resemble something closer to balance.
We shall see.
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