> the whole point is that they are financially independent of government

Hasn't been the case for a long time though, eg. [0]

[0] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/blog/the-bbc-mid-term-charter...

> you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests

oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights.

> every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much

dude you're literally commenting in a thread about how the BBC is complicit in preventing coverage of Israeli crimes because of conflicts of interest.

> Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought

My point is they are responding to external constraints shaped by the broader society - the very same group who seems to put up with Israel's outrageous stunts. To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. The BBC is not quite a weathervane, but like so many commentators in this space, is so heavily constrained in what it can do that it's meaningless to focus on the actions, not the constraints.

It's like when people are shocked that politicians are not morally superior to the average person in the society that raised them. You sample from a group, you're going to mimick its distribution.

So I am not surprised or shocked how the BBC is acting. I am surprised and shocked that the many societies (Europe, America, ME) seems to accept this situation, as a root cause if you like.

BBC had a report from 2006[1] which admitted that its coverage was biased towards Israel on top all the recent coverage.

> - that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to Israelis and Palestinians;

Do you have any credible source that shows the opposite?

[1]: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_wo...

> Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it

Here's one example. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, faced calls to have her visit to the LSE cancelled by various groups, including Campaign Against Antisemitism and Union of Jewish Students. She was also called unfit for office by the US ambassador to the UN.

On another occasion, an organization called UK Lawyers for Israel attacked an article in the Lancet, a medical journal, claiming a high projected death toll and decrease in health in Gaza as a result of the hostilities. A key point made by the organization was that the famine would help reduce obesity prevalent in the territory. UKLFI is an all-star group of legal heavyweights and not one you can easily cross.

And since you ask for sources, could you kindly share yours please?

> There was a study about negative bias towards Israel at the BBC. It contradicts your explanation.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/11/pro-israel-camp...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for...

Do you mean a report by the Israeli-based lawyer Trevor Asserson, maybe?

https://campaignformediastandards.org.uk/asserson-report.pdf

If so, then you're spreading misinformation. This is not a study. It's a report sponsored by Israel. It has flawed methodology and they made heavy use of ChatGPT.

I rest my case.

>https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...

The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising that with any culture war issue, than you can find some academics to be on your side.

>https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...

Skimming the article, the methodology used is very questionable. For instance:

>Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, the BBC ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles.

If you think 1 death = 1 coverage, then clearly BBC is biased. However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate. How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias? Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage? Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?

>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.

Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.

There are other serious allegations made in that piece that I don't have expertise to comment on, but the above two snippets don't inspire much confidence.

Yes... that's what the Muslim media monitoring organization says.

It's like the olden Google days - where people were doing SEO campaigns measured in deepness of the links...

Anyone who call it "Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza" is hardly a reliable source.

And the entire criticism is amount of coverage per death? I men the Israeli deaths have names attached to them and you can verify them, the Palestinian ones are just numbered by Hamas. Obviously the coverage will be different.

I skimmed the article by CfMM and it's hardly a neutral source. Like they complain that BBC doesn't call Palestinian prisoners hostages. Well obviously they don't them them that, because they aren't hostages.

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It could be because your comment is too vague, personally I don't understand what you mean. Who are the ownership/leadership of media companies?

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Nobody here even mentioned Putin, and you conspicuously didn't cite additional sources for your imperative claims. It's not just baseless, it's also a non-sequitur in the context of the article.

You sound like a deeply insecure and paranoid individual, perhaps distancing yourself from politics would be healthy?

In a meta sense, yes, but in practice it’s mostly just a large collection of journalists and editors, real humans, working in a chaotic information space where there’s a large variety of angles and sources being put out at all times depending on the context.

It’s equally easy to cherry pick this sort of thing to build a narrative of some ulterior agenda. Especially given the high pace that news demands in the social media age.

What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.

Call me crazy, but neutral journalists should not be calling either side "evil". They should be reporting what each side does and let the reader draw their own moral conclusions.

and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.

Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.

Learn to discern what is a fact, and what is opinion presented as fact, and learn to read critically - such as question if there would be any omissions, or misrepresentations of facts to make persuasions. Learn to dissect the works, such as dramatic music and literary methods of persuasion, and how it affects the reader's perceptions.

All of this was taught in highschool literary criticism classes - just on old books and such, rather than modern material. But the same exact lessons could've been applied. Except people merely either half-assed those classes and use cliff notes, or just straight skipped them - leading to today's world where most adults are unable to critically examine the media they consume.

As much as there are barriers to reporters here, it seems less than most other conflicts. Its not like journalists have unrestricted access to the Ukraine/Russia front line. Access to other conflicts like Sudan or Myanmar are also very restricted in practise.

The self-described mission of the Centre For Media Monitoring is "Promoting Fair And Responsible Reporting Of Muslims And Islam", so they might be slightly biased...

The kid was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who yes is a Hamas minor official, but the thing was that the documentary makers knew that and hid it from the BBC who commissioned the documentary by pretending he had a different surname. The documentary showed the boy's "father" but it was actually his uncle. The kid's grandad, Ibrahim al-Yazouri, was one of the founding members of Hamas.

They translated the documentary's participants use of the word Yehud i.e. Jew into 'Israeli'. One of the cameramen Amjad Al Fayoumi (who effectively directed it, since the 'directors' were based in the UK) had posted on Facebook support about the 7th October terrorist attacks that kicked all of this off.

The problem is that the BBC and other media producers need to be squeaky clean when doing reporting on this, on both sides. It's not even like this was a quick news broadcast where accuracy needed to be checked, it was commissioned well in advance, they followed the boy around for months.

> the father of the child narrator’s son

this was confusing but I think it's supposed to just be "father of the child narrator." Also kind of weird they (the original parent link, it is in the bbc article) didn't name the documentary (maybe it's common knowledge to their audience?).

It certainly convinced you anyway

In todays times, both sides will always complain anyway.

That, or they’re doing a bad job and excusing it as balance.

Apologies for the oversight. However I feel the author's phrasing "hysterical pro-Israel campaign" to downplay their concerns is telling.

Where?

Bob Vylan said "death to the IDF." He didn't call for the death of Israelis. It's the difference between saying "death to the RMP" in Ireland during the troubles versus calling for the deaths of British people themselves.

You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.

Wasn't it calling for death to a military force leading a campaign of total war, and not a death call against Israelis in general?

Like nobody would say "death to the Khmer Rouge" is a death call against Cambodians. It technically would be, since it was Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge who were killing innocent children, but it's a specific subset of Cambodians (the Khmer Rouge) and only those who were actually doing the killing.

The second paragraph from your link says the calls were to the “IDF”.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Do any of those qualifiers make it less true?

Oh that’s hilarious because it has been misattributed to Voltaire and TIL it was from 1993

Wtf, I hate that quote now! Just kidding its still accurate: In the East you don’t criticize the party, in the West you don’t criticize one particular designated genocidal foreign army. Easy enough to follow.

I guess it's hard to define words. Surely terrorism has this vague meaning of doing very evil and violent things.

But a picked up a random dictionary and it says: "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".

I struggle to understand what political aim Israel is pursuing when using unlawful violence and intimidation.

If you believe that Israel is performing a genocide what is the point of explicitly instilling more fear in the victims? Just sadism? I genuinely don't understand what advantage would Israel have in employing terror tactics against Palestinians. Is the idea that they do so in order to make them even more angry so they can justify their genocide? Is that the argument? Or am I not giving the same meaning to the word "terrorism" as you do?

I don't want to argue about which side is on the right side or whatnot; I found that this kind of conversation is is highly unproductive online. But I am interested in understanding how words have changed their meaning over time. Is terrorist now just a synonym for "murdering civilians"?

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If it meets the definition then they should.

>Wanting Israel to exist because the world has shown it will not allow Jews to be safe anywhere else does not make someone manipulated by a foreign power.

Is this an alt account? This is basically the exact wording as another comment flagged minutes ago.

Many US states actually have laws on the books that prohibits anybody that works with or I think event contracts with the state gov from "discrimination against Israel", in various forms, etc, depending on the particular state.

To my knowledge, no US state has any other sort of legal recognition of any other foreign government/state.

Defence contractors hire a lot of people which in turn create a lot of ancillary jobs to support said industries.

Defence contractors are also becoming increasingly sophisticated so they use more software, more chips, more clouds, and more information security.

Almost all of MAFANG has some defence-related footprint, and some have multiple. You might see a few defence/defence adjacent companies in the monthly WhoIsHiring posts as well as https://www.workatastartup.com .

The simple truth is there are a lot of zionists in powerful positions both in terms of governmental and monetary. Open wikipedia and look up cabinets and powerful people in US government since WW2. Pay attention to their ethnicity; even if half are zionists, that's a lot of people. Edit: people downvoting this, first part of the comment is just facts, second part is plausible speculation. Why are you downvoting?

One theory is that an abundance of American Christians believe in dispensational premillennialism[0], which rebukes orthodox Judaism in the hopes of returning Christ. Many dispensationalists (including Issac Newton[1]) attempted to interpret the Bible as a function of divine will, and argued that the foundation of Israel is directly imperative due to the prophecy of Daniel. This seems to go against the majority orthodox Judaism interpretation that the Third Temple (as well as the return of Christ) is willed by God alone and not predetermined conditions that men can control.

It's a bit out-there, but unfortunately I can't write-off DJT accepting it all at face-value. He's got conspicuous in-laws and an awfully weird track-record writing policy for the Levant. A religious conviction to defend Israel on behalf of his savior seems to slot rather neatly into his internal belief system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premillennialism#Dispensationa...

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16878

You can be very much in favor of Israel the country existing, and even defending itself, while still being opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza.

I have not seen credible people call such a stance "being manipulated by the Jews".

You leapt to at least 3 conclusions in only two sentences. That's talent.

1. "The world" is too broad of an audience to indict.

2. "Anywhere else" does not necessitate the endless support of a rogue state.

3. Israeli statehood is a Zionist matter with a highly mixed opinion among Jews (especially under the current Likud admin).

It's possible to believe that both October 7th and the subsequent genocide of Palestinians are horrific.

It's the duty of the press to report on these horrors in an unbiased and impartial manner.

> You few bleeding heart lefties

Ad hominems aren't arguments, fyi

Like Qatar?

In the case of Australia you're correct in that it's not Israel reaching into Australia to alter opinion.

What is the case (in a many layered complex fabric) is that Australian Jewish groups have both actively pushed a narrative and worked hard to discredit any inkling of voice given to Palenstine by the public broadcaster that does work hard to be in the vicinity of neutral.

For better or worse they have gamed the Australian media system in their favour.

This recently hit the Federal Court of Australia which determined that (former) ABC executives (senior staff of the public broadcaster) caved to a pressure campaign to fire a radio broadcaster who tweeted a link to a Human Rights Watch report (that was unfavourable to Isreal) "in her own time" (not on the public clock and not contrary to any employment agreement).

Court Documents: https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/services/access-to-files-and-tra...

Extensive other reporting elsewhere.

Society came very close to realizing the beginnings of a decent state in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell faught in it, and wrote about what he saw that society achieving in his book, Homage to Catalonia.

> I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.

For a few brief years, it looked like we were there.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

Well, we have been improving. I don’t consider it too optimistic we’ll continue to do so.

I felt a glimmer hope from Grok believe it not. On X it has been showing the potential of an AI being seen as a trusted authority to cut through a lot of propaganda based on facts. But then elon didn't like the "facts are liberal" vibes and nerfed it and now it can't be trusted, it's just another propaganda mouthpiece.

This points to what I think is the missing amendment to the US constitution, when a media company gets big enough to influence significant portions of the electorate it should not be allowed to be owned by a single billionaire or a small family. Large media ownership should be distributed as widely as possible across society so that one rich guy isn't able to force his opinions on everyone.

Concur, but from a control systems point of view. Any system that does not define upper/lower limits and does not address feedback loops, are prone to oscillations, and if the size of the system grows over time, the oscillations can become progressively more violent.

Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).

Could just be cyclic? 1776->1861 (romanticism leading into civil war), 1861->1940 (modernism leading into WWII), [weird cold war baby boomer era of prosperity] 1970->2025 (post-modernism leading into..)

The myth of social progress conflated with technological advancement. Even that isn't assured when corruption, apathy, and cult of insane beliefs defund the "Library of Alexandria" and the world slips back into relative darkness again.

I agree human nature hasn't really changed since Plato's time and technology is the main thing that has. But the tech provides much more information and communication which leads to things like slavery going. Also I think most people are shocked that trench warfare is still going on but the Russian leadership seems a bit behind the times. Apparently Putin spent time during the lockdown reading previous centuries history and here we are.

The way I look at it - you can be optimistic and hope that your actions can have a positive effect on your life and the world - if you’re wrong, you’re no more fucked than if you’d been pessimistic the whole time, and you at least felt better during said time.

Globally this is true because of improvements in developing countries. Not uniform improvement everywhere. Some places backslide.

The "end of history illusion" is not the belief that there is a decent end state, but the belief of each generation that that state has been reached, and that they were to first to reach it.

I can think of numerous people who while not solely responsible for the state of things, have certainly fanned the flames to attain great personal prosperity at the expense of our collective psyche. Those people have names and addresses and they are not as they may believe immune from retribution.

I don’t want to live through any more historical times but I increasingly believe we’re on a precipice of incredible amounts of political violence, both against people who don’t deserve it, and people who do. And those people would be wise to pump the brakes a little.

This is why monarchies are better than democracies. There is no accountability or ownership. A king wants to pass down something better to his progeny. A politician wants to make money and generally doesn’t care what state he leaves things in.

> We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful.

All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.

What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.

> Banning it though is a really bad move

Why? With how confidently you state that, I'm rather curious what reasons you have.

Most thinking people will try not to take current event reporting at face value. For many Americans, it's easy to accept a lot of things your Mainstream Media Source gives you (including NPR or NYTs), and ironically when one of the current themes is to distrust mainstream media.

Thanks, we added this to the thread's top text.

How is this flamebait? Is there another way to report on this topic that would be less inflammatory? Or should media manipulation by foreign governments simply not be discussed and we should just keep quiet less someone get upset?

Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?

Iran isn't an ally of any country in the west. The west says "Iran is an awful, oppressive country" basically daily. What's new to report there? They're already economically cut off from most of the world. There's not much else for us to do.

Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.

None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.

>1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.

This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with. If they're biased to be anti-israel, then arguably the top brass telling them to tone it down a notch would make the coverage more neutral.

>3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.

This presumes there's some Objectively Neutral™ version of a headline for a story, but how do know what that should be? Is the "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens ..." wording supposed to be the neutral version? If that's the neutral version, I can't imagine what the anti-israeli version is supposed to be.

"Brave Truth Tellers"? There were protests on the 8th october after Israel was attacked and didn't even retaliate yet. Nothing happened to the people that shared their thoughts. I personally think they should improve their education on the topic, but that is my opinion.

This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.

"Counterfactual" my arse...

It's ~1% click through most just get the news from the headline.

The narrative of "pro-/anti-" is part of the problem.

Zionist settlers are outright evil, while most Israelis don't care or are unaware of what's going on in Gaza. Unfortunately, the world has been being paying attention and has had enough of the hasbara of ethno-nationalist supremacy BS that is plain to see. A lesson that the Holocaust/Shoah didn't teach properly to much of anyone now that those who survived it and are mostly gone, while those here now lack the oral history continuity of it. It's an intentional Pyrrhic victory in the tradition of the American western frontier and the Trail of Tears. There's now a plan to create a "humanitarian zone" concentration camp in Rafah requiring security screening and involuntary captivity for 600k.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-07/ty-article/.p...

> we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide

Without knowing what "we" means, allow me to cite a few more recent BBC headlines, these related to "genocide":

    Gaza war: UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of *genocide* (March 26)
    UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and *'genocidal acts'* in Gaza (March 13)
    Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of *acts of genocide* in Gaza over water access (December 19, 2024)
    Amnesty accuses Israel of *genocide* against Palestinians in Gaza (December 5, 2024)
    Saudi crown prince says Israel committing *'genocide'* in Gaza (November 11, 2024)
    Brazil's Lula compares Israel's Gaza campaign to the Holocaust (February 28, 2024)
    ICJ says Israel must prevent *genocide* in Gaza (January 26, 2024)

Again, this notion that there is some pro-Israel bias plaguing the BBC just doesn't compute for me. Were the claims of this anonymous open letter valid, I wouldn't be able to tap a couple keywords into X and dump a list of such BBC headlines. Apparently any leader, pressure group or institution on Earth that cares to make a headline need only accuse Israel of "genocide" and it will be on the BBC the same day. Whatever supposed editorial bias is in effect appears to be highly ineffective.

It would be alot more than 7 if Hamas didn't murder a bunch.

I’m not Israeli tech worker.

Care to refute with facts any of my points?

Or all you can do is drop words and call names?

Everyone knows this is the only tactics of pro-xamas lunatics - just to scream loud. No facts, no logic, no answers to uncomfortable questions.

Sure, here you go:

Not only every expert consulted by every journal agreed that the explosion was not even caused by an airstrike, but they also agreed it was caused by a projectile launched from Palestinian territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...

Like for example, your comment makes no sense. It reads like you got paid to write it. You're not contributing anything at all - just expressing that you feel something that most people would call "exaggerated" and "performative" and "embarrassing"

The original URL was https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro...

Owen Jones is a UK political commentator and activist who reaches a large audience via Youtube etc. He has covered the latest Israel Palestinian war extensively and continuously from the start. is that a fair summary?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Jones

> Owen Jones (born 8 August 1984)[2] is a left-wing British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist.[3][4][5][6]

> He writes a column for The Guardian and contributes to the New Statesman, Tribune, and The National[7] and was previously a columnist for The Independent. He has two weekly web series, The Owen Jones Show and The Owen Jones Podcast.

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Tab completion, your majesty. Talk to Apple and Google.