Opinion

Israel is bad news, so why don’t we hear about it in the mainstream media?

August 20, 2024 

A view of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Headquarters in London, United Kingdom on July 14, 2023 [Raşid Necati Aslım – Anadolu Agency]

by Yvonne Ridley
yvonneridley


At the beginning of this year, a global survey showed that the least trusted media in the world is in Britain. It was a damning survey. The influential Edelman Trust Barometer revealed how British journalism had plunged to the bottom of the annual ratings, with only 31 per cent of people saying that they trusted the media.

Speaking as a journalist and former Fleet Street staffer, I was not entirely surprised, though, having witnessed the degradation of my chosen career over almost 50 years. Of course, Edelman is a public relations firm, so was probably far too diplomatic to explain the loss of trust which has led to plunging newspaper circulation and TV viewing figures, but allow me to do it for them.

Once exposed, the public was shocked at the insatiable appetite for Royal Family exclusives, as revealed in court by Prince Harry during the historic phone-hacking trials. Taking on the Mirror Group Newspapers first, the rebel royal then won the right to make a claim for unlawful gathering of information against the Daily Mail.

Public trust was also rocked when much-loved and respected TV presenters were hit with scandals initially and vehemently denied by the BBC’s Huw Edwards, ITV’s Phillip Schofield and Dan Wootton of GB News. Their employers were all accused of cover ups to protect their stars.

Sadly, one aspect was not covered by Edelman, but is more than worthy of an investigation. I’m talking about the dishonest way in which the media has covered events in occupied Palestine, especially Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, either through their headlines or story content.

It is often what is not written or said, rather than what is, that upsets the most discerning of readers and viewers.

Thanks to rigorous research by the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, we have two hard-hitting books which examine media coverage of the conflict in the Middle East and the impact it has on public opinion. Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel were both compiled by senior journalists and ordinary viewers who examined how audiences understand the news and how public opinion is shaped by media reports.

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In the largest study of its kind ever undertaken, the late and much respected Greg Philo and Mike Berry focused on TV news, illustrating major differences in the way that Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and described, and the presentation of the motives and rationales of both sides.

Combining these findings with extensive audience research involving hundreds of participants from the US, UK and Germany, More Bad News From Israel was described as “a masterclass in understanding how people perceive the conflict thanks to media bias.”

However, the events of 7 October in Israel, when Hamas unleashed the audacious Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, appears to have changed dramatically the way that the general public receives its news. For instance, TikTok became the fastest-growing news service, delivering live and unfolding news events in real time to anyone following the social media network.

Images were often graphic and shocking, and provided a news service the likes of which few of us have ever encountered before. Thanks to the Israel Defence Forces, aka the TikTok Army, whose soldiers generously filmed their own war crimes and crimes against humanity, the public has been able to watch a genocide live-streaming on their iPads and smartphones. With so many heroic citizen journalists on the ground it became a news gathering competition which left the mainstream media lagging behind and providing coverage of the same events but in a sanitised, diluted way. Israel hampered news coverage by not only banning Western journalists from Gaza, but also by deliberately killing Arab journalists on the ground in Gaza for Al Jazeera and other Middle East news channels.

Censorship of content on social media is virtually non-existent, so whether we wanted to or not we saw distraught relatives weeping over their headless children and other horrific images of babies, children, women and the elderly shredded by US and British bombs. In one UN school being used as a public shelter Palestinians were praying at dawn when Israeli bombs hit. We witnessed relatives “pouring” what was left of their liquidated families into plastic shopping bags.

I’m not sure of the legality of the kind of bombs being dropped in Gaza — Israel has a history of ignoring international laws generally, not least concerning the legality of using certain types of bombs — but doctors reported that they were seeing corpses in horrific conditions, the likes of which they’d not encountered before. Having been exposed to the graphic videos and war crimes committed by the Israeli military (many of them filmed by their own hands, probably much to their regret if and when they stand in the dock at The Hague) the tame reporting of the mainstream media served only to highlight the inadequacies of journalism in the West.

One example of misleading headlines and the dehumanisation of Palestinians came last month when the BBC reported on the killing of a young Down’s Syndrome man who was mauled to death by Israeli military attack dogs. The furore over the “shameful” handling of the story prompted the BBC to rewrite the headline and content, only for the Israeli Embassy in London to then register a complaint when the truth was told.

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And this is the problem. When the British media does give truthful, unedited accounts of events in Gaza, readers and viewers who don’t have access to social media are shocked, some are even disbelieving.


The last thing the pro-Israel politicians in the UK want is for anyone to know the truth of what is happening in Gaza.

According to esteemed Israeli journalist Gideon Levy who writes fearlessly for Haaretz, the media in Israel, to its eternal shame, also more or less shields Israelis from what is really being done on the ground in Gaza (and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem) in their name.

As Britain’s national, publicly-funded broadcaster, the BBC draws most of the criticism in this country. It failed outside scrutiny miserably when four weeks of BBC One’s daytime coverage of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza starting from 7 October was investigated. The subsequent Open Democracy report found that journalists used the words “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” a total of 52 times to refer to Israeli deaths, but never in relation to Palestinian deaths.

Moreover, many news organisations have yet to correct or apologise for the notorious fake news from last year that Hamas had decapitated 40 babies on 7 October.

One of the worst offenders is said to be the right-wing Daily Mail, which this week led with a front page story about Labour Party MPs in Keir Starmer’s new government. The Mail told us with its usual pompous invective that more than half of the MPs took union cash to help them fight July’s General Election.

Of the 404 Labour MPs who were elected, the Mail said that 213 “raked in a whopping £1.8 million from union bosses since the election was called in May” adding: “It is the first time the scale of union donations to MPs in the new Government has been laid bare, sparking fresh accusations last night that Labour was ‘under the thumb’ of its ‘paymasters’ amid inflation-busting pay rises being offered with no strings attached.”

The whole story essentially questioned the impartiality of the Labour MPs whose influence may have been bought by the trade unions seeking improved wages for members who are teachers, GPs, junior doctors, nurses and rail workers “already being offered inflation-busting pay hikes”.

Former Conservative Home and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said: “This shows the alarming extent to which the Labour Party is under the thumb of its union paymasters. Keir Starmer’s MPs have pocketed almost £2 million from unions, whilst taxpayers are forced to fund Labour’s inflation-busting pay awards to those very same unions. How much longer will Keir Starmer sell influence like this?”

He’s right, of course, but Cleverly has said not a word about the influence bought by the Westminster-based Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and its Conservative counterpart. Not a word. The Daily Mail obviously thinks that a left-leaning political party taking money from left-leaning trade unions is worthy of a front-page splash, but what about the same party taking money from right wing lobbyists focused on improving the status of an alien state in Westminster’s corridors of power?

READ: UK lawyers submit evidence of Palestinian torture to halt UK arms exports to Israel

According to the news organisation DeclassifiedUK, LFI funded more than half of the UK Government’s Ministers. Some of Keir Starmer’s most trusted colleagues sitting in the British cabinet have raked in hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash from several pro-Israel lobbyists. Chief beneficiaries include Starmer himself, his Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Jonathan Reynolds, who handles arms exports to Israel as UK Trade Secretary, as well as Labour’s election mastermind Pat McFadden, whose responsibilities now include national security, have both benefitted from donations from pro-Israel lobbyists. LFI takes MPs on “fact-finding” junkets to occupied Palestine. Individual major funders include pro-Israel businessmen Trevor Chinn and Stuart Roden.

The European Leadership Network (ELNET) is another lobby group which aims to strengthen ties between Israel and Europe. It has forked out for junkets to Israel for parliamentary staffers. One told OpenDemocracy: “There was a clear and obvious agenda to make sure people had a pro-Israel stance going into government,” adding that, after returning from the trip, a senior figure at the Israeli Embassy asked: “Did you enjoy the trip we sent you on?”

ELNET’s funders include the American billionaire Bernie Marcus, who is a supporter of Donald Trump and a major donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is often accused of wielding undue influence over US politics and has already spent millions of dollars influencing the outcomes of primary elections in America.


Cleverly also forgot to mention that he is one of the 126 Conservative Party MPs prior to the General Election who accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups.

“The value of the donations or hospitality amounts to over £430,000, with the organisations paying for sitting Conservative MPs to visit Israel on 187 occasions,” said DeclassifiedUK in May.

READ: Ex-UK Home Secretary Braverman’s Israel trip funded by anti-Muslim Zionist activist

Surely the threat posed by a foreign nuclear power having undue influence on both sides of the House of Commons should have had the Daily Mail foaming at the mouth, but the story has been widely ignored. And yet, if it was Moscow and not Tel Aviv buying up influence with MPs and governments it would be front page news every day for weeks and months on end.

It is this sort of blatant propaganda and bias which has affected the public’s trust in the media. We can all see that a genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are taking place, but why are the atrocities seen daily on social media not being reported impartially and in full by the mainstream media?

With stories being leaked about censorship in newspapers like the New York Times, where journalists are banned from using the word “genocide”, it’s little wonder that people no longer trust mainstream news sources.

What the BBC, NYT and other mainstream media fail to realise is that by sanitising its language and imagery, it is complicit in the murder of innocent children like Hind Rajab; it is giving a green light to war crimes being carried out by the occupation forces; and it is whitewashing Israel’s murderous — nay, genocidal — intent.

“I cannot for the life of me see why fellow journalists writing the scripts used in TV news bulletins and online media are going along with this sanitised and possibly racist narrative,” I wrote in February. This was in relation to the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab. She and her family were massacred by Israeli soldiers, but an article published online by the BBC was headlined “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”, implying that she died of natural causes. And yet the child was clearly killed in a murderous act which falls clearly within the definition of a war crime, as were the two medics who tried to rescue her.

Unless or until the mainstream media recognises the destructive force that is the pernicious ideology called Zionism, then when it comes to news gathering, newspapers and TV news will become redundant. Maybe that is what Israel’s goal is: if it kills non-compliant journalists and their media outlets and controls who has access to its killing fields, then it will be able to manipulate what the world is able to see; how it is reported; and when. The rogue, apartheid state will then be able to carry on killing Palestinians with even more impunity than it enjoys at the moment. You might think I’m joking, but the writing is already on the wall.