‘It seems to me there is enough in terms of criticism of the way the BBC has covered this war.’
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
Samir Shah, incoming chair of the BBC said on Wednesday he will conduct a thorough review of the network’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war including criticism that it refuses to use the word “terrorists” regarding Hamas members and complaints of anti-Israel bias.
Shah admitted, “It seems to me there is enough in terms of criticism of the way the BBC has covered this war.”
Shah said he will “consider very carefully” the BBC‘s refusal to call Hamas members “terrorists” rather than referring to Hamas as a “proscribed terror organization,” admitting the latter phrase, “feels a bit clunky to me, it’s not the natural speech of a reporter.”
Last month, the BBC issued an apology under pressure after it falsely claimed that the IDF was targeting doctors in Gaza’s Shifa hospital.
In addition, the BBC was quick to blame the IDF for a deadly explosion at another Gaza hospital even though the IDF and outside sources proved the cause of the blast were misfired Islamic Jihad rockets.
Among the most egregious examples of faulty BBC coverage of the event was from journalist Jeremy Bowen, who declared on the BBC’s “Behind the Stories” program that he didn’t “regret one thing” about his false reporting claiming that Israel was responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital that supposedly “flattened” the building.
Although the BBC issued a correction of their inaccurate coverage, Bowen insisted, “So it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening. And to answer your question, no, I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout. I didn’t race to judgment.
When Bowen was confronted about his exaggeration that the hospital was “flattened,” he replied, “Oh, yeah. Well, I got that wrong.”
Regarding the upcoming review of the BBC’s coverage of the war, Shah said, “It is not an adequate enough response [for the BBC] to say ‘both sides are criticizing us and therefore we must be doing something right,’”
He concluded, “The ambition of a BBC journalist should be that neither side is criticizing us and [everyone] thinks we’re doing well.”