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The past year of conflict in Gaza has been covered in the media with extraordinary bravery, mostly by local journalists. Israeli authorities have not allowed the foreign press inside the occupied territory, apart from via short media trips embedded with the military.
According to Reporters without Borders (RSF) more than 130 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces. The RSF also asserts that 32 of them were targeted and it has filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
Israel has used its powers to shackle what it sees as dissent by shutting down Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah, Nazareth and East Jerusalem. In April the channel was taken off air inside Israel.
British media companies and correspondents have been vocal in calling for access to Gaza, but to no avail. In July the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) initiated a letter signed by 70 media companies and NGOs urging Israel to give journalists “independent access to Gaza”.
Despite these challenges, the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky, among others, have still managed to keep the story in front of UK viewers’ eyes by reporting from inside Israel, the occupied territories and Egypt. As the conflict expands into Lebanon, the BBC has moved more of its Middle East reporters to cover the conflict live from Lebanon and northern Israel.
The reporting team has included Syrian Middle East correspondent, Lina Sinjab, and BBC bilingual correspondent, Sally Nabil, alongside the likes of senior international correspondent, Orla Guerin, and international editor, Jeremy Bowen.
In recent years, BBC viewers have become familiar with such scenes of large teams presenting live from war zones. Lyse Doucet and Clive Myrie presented live for an extended period from a Kyiv hotel rooftop following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is effective, but costly and often dangerous.
Eventually the Kyiv reporting team was scaled down, leaving behind just a couple of reporters in Ukraine or nearby, bringing in more when events called for it. This will may well prove to be the case in Beirut in a few weeks’ time.
Accusations of bias
Despite its impressive efforts to cover the current Middle East conflict as closely as possible, the BBC has been subjected to accusations of bias from all sides. Its correspondents’ words and interviewing techniques have come under heavy scrutiny.
Just one week after the Hamas attack in October 2023, the BBC had already received 1,500 complaints about its coverage. This was reportedly “split almost evenly between those claiming its reporting has been biased against Israel and those saying it was biased against Palestinians”.
In March, BBC director general, Tim Davie, and the director of editorial policy, David Jordan, faced questioning before a House of Commons select committee about its coverage. By this date, Jordan said the number of complaints about coverage had grown to 8,000, and again were 50-50 in terms of bias for or against Israel.
During the hearing Davie addressed a question about BBC Arabic staff retweeting remarks seen as “essentially pro-Hamas”, according to Conservative MP Damian Green. Davie explained that: “Some of those tweets that we’ve seen are unacceptable and we have taken action and we’ll continue to take action.”
There have also been regular complaints about the BBC’s refusal to label perpetrators of violence as “terrorists” unless it is a quote from a source. The BBC has repeatedly explained its reasoning, which dates back to its founding principles, on not airing loaded language.
In perhaps the most absurd of the complaints, Olympics presenter Hazel Irvine was accused of a lack of impartiality and pro-Palestinian bias for mentioning the “dark shadow of conflict in Gaza” as the Palestinian team sailed down the Seine during the opening ceremony.
The BBC’s complaints unit dismissed the complaint, stating that “it was not a requirement of impartiality that the commentator’s remarks about the various teams should be precisely equivalent”.
In the same week the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust accused the BBC in a report of being “institutionally hostile to Israel”.
While the BBC promised to examine the report, a BBC spokeswoman said: “The Israel-Gaza conflict is a polarising and difficult story to cover and we understand there are a range of views. The BBC has focused on reporting the conflict impartially, bringing audiences breaking news, insight and analysis, and reflecting all perspectives.”
As I have written before, the logistics of covering the front line of a conflict (in addition to the particular access challenges in Gaza), make it impossible for the BBC to win this war of words.
At times like this it tends to fall back on neutral language, fact-checking and reporting carefully both sides of the divide. Under its current BBC News CEO, Deborah Turness, it is attempting to be more transparent with audiences about its own coverage.
This week Turness accused critics of being stuck in echo chambers on social media. “BBC News does not and cannot reflect any single world view”, she said, adding: “In this war, we cannot be a place where any side feels that their perspective prevails.”
An expanding conflict
Smaller media companies and newspapers have also covered the conflict creditably despite the constrained circumstances. There has also been a heavy reliance on the global news agencies – Reuters, AP and AFP – who have continued to employ local journalists inside Gaza as reporters and photographers.
As the media’s focus switches from a long-distance view of Gaza to an expanding regional war involving Iran, coverage will be stretched thin. Even at the most peaceful of times there is highly limited access for journalists wishing to report from Tehran.
Iran ranks at number 176 out of 180 countries on the RSF Freedom Index. Its media is controlled by the government and there are many cases of dissenting journalists being jailed.
As Israel and Iran battle to control the narrative, the task of journalists to report accurately and fully will remain crucial – but it won’t get any easier.
Colleen Murrell was the recipient of a grant from Ireland's media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, for researching and writing the Reuters Digital News Report Ireland (2020-24).
