“If we are going to serve as the stenographers for Islamists, we bloody well better convey the most up-to-date, in-season Hamas talking points.”
London, June 27 – Journalists at the British Broadcasting Corporation acknowledged with chagrin today a lapse in their procedures that resulted in parroting obsolete propaganda from the Islamist terrorists who govern much of the Gaza Strip, instead of ensuring they had obtained the latest propaganda to parrot before sharing it with their audience, for example still reporting that Palestinian children have no way to stay warm in the coastal Mediterranean June night.
Editors and correspondents at the organizations admitted in conversations with industry colleagues that they felt embarrassment at the obvious unforced error. “We expect more from ourselves as professionals,” sighed Joe Gebbles, whose twice-weekly reports have informed viewers since October of Gaza’s imminent starvation.
“Basic fundamentals of journalism,” agreed a rueful Orge Jorwell, an editor in the BBC’s Tel Aviv offices. “As I recall – and this is obviously not a valid excuse, but I’m just describing what I think happened here – I think each of us assumed that our colleagues, all consummate professionals, would not let such a rudimentary element of the job fall by the wayside. If we are going to serve as the stenographers for murderous antisemite Islamists, we had bloody well better convey the most up-to-date, in-season Hamas talking points.”
Reports by Gebbles and at least four other BBC correspondents since October have relied on Hamas-provided content, from casualty figures and allegations of IDF attacks to uncritical repetition of easily-falsifiable statements by the terrorist group. These included descriptions of Hamas- or Islamic Jihad-launched rockets hitting a hospital as “an Israeli airstrike” and the discovery of mass graves near a hospital that Hamas called evidence of a massacre by the IDF, when the BBC itself had covered the digging and filling of the mass graves long before the IDF ever reached the area.
Observers noted that while reports from within Hamas-controlled areas of the coastal territory hew to the Hamas propaganda line for safety reasons, the BBC personnel, which operate from Israel or London, are under no such restrictions. Their choice to parrot Hamas talking points remains the product of their own volition, not outside pressures – and that fact makes the lapse all the more egregious.
“It would be one thing to have to read what you’re given, if you want to be allowed to stay, which we did in 2014,” during the last sustained Israel-Hamas war, when international journalists did operate in Gaza under close Hamas control. “But here, they can’t just pass off responsibility for the mess-up to Hamas. They should have sought out the updated talking points themselves, like responsible journalists.”
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