Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But this is also the example coming to them from the top. On the occasions where Israel has clearly committed egregious violations, such as shooting at people massed at the aid dispensal locations or the medics who then got buried in shallow graves, Israel gets barely a whimper of criticism from European politicians - and apparently full-throated cheering and support from the US. The ICC arrest warrant is as forgotten as last year's snow.
So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
Whenever a group publicly criticizes a behavior, you see the rhetorical question “Why are you surprised?”, and that feels dismissive and disingenuous.
Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought.
Every actor has reasons to behave. People are critical of the behavior, whatever the actor’s incentives are. Because a behavior feels more logical or rational it shouldn’t be discussed? If you would answer negatively then what’s the point of asking your question? Is it just to express your cynicism of that whole situation?
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.
Where are you getting this from, this idea that the ones that are angsting about the first, are not angsting about the second?
pg just recently tweeted about the ludicrousness of the 83 year-old historian (?) getting arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestian Action, now effectively deemed a terrorist organization in the UK as I understand it.
This post is about the BBC, so the comments are about this specific news about the BBC. The BBC is constrained but not as much as the UK government obviously. It even tries to report objectively on scandals inside the BBC, to what extent it succeeds is always up for debate, as it is in this case debated here.
I ma glad there are people out there who do care.
No, you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests and every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much.
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.
> oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights.
Check your notes again. At least part of the "fiery" was not within students' rights. The "not peaceful" was definitely not within students' rights. Harassing Jewish students is not within students' rights; not being harassed by other students is.
Students can be stupid and this is a special demographic that thinks it was touched by Jews. And yes, if they use violence and intimidation, their hobby perhaps needs some examination.
For the unrelated conflict in the middle east it certainly isn't helpful in preventing any death. On the contrary, they often demand and justify "holy" wars, fueling even more hatred.
So f these guys, really.
Yes, this was the joke that the news were calling the people rioting "young scholars". I'm not sure you're meant to repeat this crazily positive characterisation still, unless you're also paid by whomever funds the media to look silly.
Well, I'm not surprised by that as I've seen the way that the BBC approaches "impartiality" (e.g. have experts explaining one side of an issue and then allow non-experts to spout falsehoods which aren't challenged despite them being demonstrably false).
As a license-fee payer, I detest the way that the BBC is ignoring its journalistic duty to present the facts in a non-partisan manner or at least attempt to do so. However, they consistently use different language to report on the different sides of the war.
Self censoring their own documentary does not align with that.
Hasn't been the case for a long time though, eg. [0]
[0] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/blog/the-bbc-mid-term-charter...
Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it.
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.
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...
The Lancet item was a letter, not an article. It is a speculative letter than was then pushed as a 'Lancet article' (something you do in your comment) to give it credibility/authority it does not have.
In July 2014, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese fundraised for her former employer UNRWA by posting that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”
In January 2015, immediately following the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, Albanese posted an article from Iranian state-owned media PressTV with the title “CIA and Mossad carried out the Paris attack.”
In November 2022, Albanese told a Hamas conference: “You have a right to resist.”
On October 7th, 2023, as the Hamas massacre was still unfolding, Albanese minimized the atrocities by posting: “Today’s violence must be put in context.”
What the lawyers did is certainly tasteless, but it also doesn't fit procecution.
I won't give you any sources, but these are utter trivialities to what some Jewish people have to endure. And I have yet to see a mob threatening anyone you mentioned, because they don't exist.
> - 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...
The reaction is not surprise. Its disappointment. The same you might feel whenever you see a blatantly selfish act.
Is there another source that does a better job at substantiating the claim that BBC has a pro-Israel bias?
"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide." - https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
It's like the olden Google days - where people were doing SEO campaigns measured in deepness of the links...
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.
> 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.
Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government".
>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
So if the BBC was covering the election in Venezuela, would it be "biased" to point out that the election results were from the "government controlled" electoral commission, and that it was packed with Maduro's cronies? After all, the electoral commission is probably the "legitimate" authority for counting votes, so why point out it's staffed by government cronies? Just say that the opposition claims that their guy won, but the electoral authority said Maduro won. End of story. Or is it only biased if the journalist thinks something fishy is going on (ie. the vote was rigged in favor of Maduro)? How would we adjudicate this? This just inevitably devolves into "if you support Israel then saying anything bad about them is bias, and if you oppose Israel then saying anything good about them is bias".
They might be murderous terrorists, but they were, in fact, elected in as free an election as Gaza was likely to get.
They're as much a legitimate government there as the current US administration is here.
Yes.
One major difference that I see - though of course I can't speak for the journalists - is that my country and tax dollars are directly involved in this conflict. Every child who burns alive, every man woman and child raped in an Israeli camp, every doctor or medic killed by targeted drone or sniper fire is in a sense in my name. I'm not saying Sudanese political instability isn't impacted by western actions, but this conflict is very real for a lot of people because of a direct, material involvement.
Journalists maybe feel this way, too?
I do also think this is a pretty straightforward distinction, and suspect your bringing up a fundamentally different conflict to say something like "well you think Israeli deaths get too much coverage in this war, why do Sudanese deaths not get very much?" is weird and borderline disingenuous.
Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
I do not agree. Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed. Some were captured, some were used as labor or for experimentation. Some started a new state! If a sustained campaign is not successful in killing every single individual, how many before you might call it a genocide? This is a poor metric. If the borders of a country are eliminated (first politically, then practically), alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths targeted by culture/location/race, and confiscation of their property, there has been a genocide as far as most of the world is concerned. These are elements of culture and they can only be recreated or replaced or lost to time.
> Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
The retaliation sped up the ongoing genocide as a pretext. Each side has wrongs they are retaliating from. The hostages are a justification to do what was already an official state goal. Complete annexation of Palestine. Imagine if any US state (or country) was slowly swallowed by a neighbor encroaching with violent and disposable settlers, the violence would be the same. This is the state of modern warfare demonstrated repeatedly over the last 200 years. Further imagining there is a moral actor, is arbitrarily picking a side.
I didn't say anything about "not all killed". Please - all these silly distractions and fallacies permeate any attempts to discuss this. You're not talking to an avatar representing all the worst, easiest to counter arguments from the "other side". You're talking to a real person who is articulating a view.
How often should the media report deaths? Each time a group of people die? Each time bodies are found?
> 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?
Are you familiar with the saying, “when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound”?
> Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage?
I would assume that an individual or a group of people that aspire towards neutrality, fairness, and humanitarian principles would treat one life as the same as another.
For reference, here is the BBC mission and excerpts from its charter available at https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/mission .
>> Our mission is "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain".
>> The Charter also sets out our five public purposes:
>> 1. To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them
>> The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.
>> 2. To support learning for people of all ages
>> The BBC should help everyone learn about different subjects in ways they will find accessible, engaging, inspiring and challenging. The BBC should provide specialist educational content to help support learning for children and teenagers across the United Kingdom. It should encourage people to explore new subjects and participate in new activities through partnerships with educational, sporting and cultural institutions.
>> 3. To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services
>> The BBC should provide high-quality output in many different genres and across a range of services and platforms which sets the standard in the United Kingdom and internationally. Its services should be distinctive from those provided elsewhere and should take creative risks, even if not all succeed, in order to develop fresh approaches and innovative content.
>> 4. To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom
>> The BBC should reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom both in its output and services. In doing so, the BBC should accurately and authentically represent and portray the lives of the people of the United Kingdom today, and raise awareness of the different cultures and alternative viewpoints that make up its society. It should ensure that it provides output and services that meet the needs of the United Kingdom’s nations, regions and communities. The BBC should bring people together for shared experiences and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the United Kingdom. In commissioning and delivering output the BBC should invest in the creative economies of each of the nations and contribute to their development.
>> 5. To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world
>> The BBC should provide high-quality news coverage to international audiences, firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. Its international services should put the United Kingdom in a world context, aiding understanding of the United Kingdom as a whole, including its nations and regions where appropriate. It should ensure that it produces output and services which will be enjoyed by people in the United Kingdom and globally.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
Yes, it would be biased in the same way that the BBC runs more pieces about Ukrainian civilians than it does about Palestinian civilians. There are likely more published BBC articles about Ukrainian civilians with photographs, audio, video, and documents than there are about Palestinian civilians.
There is BBC staff reporting from Ukraine and/or with the help of Ukrainian media affiliates and Ukrainian sources.
Where are the BBC reporters in Gaza?
However, as luck would have it, the BBC published 3 separate pieces of news about Israel/Palestine today.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mz8gxzg82o
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rp31lk7mzo
3. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2k14n9d8y9o
I’ve read all three articles, and I skimmed them again quickly to verify that none of the three mention that “At least 78 Palestinians have been killed since the morning” like Al Jazeera does (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/8/live-israel...).
If the BBC is willing to publish 3 separate articles about recent developments in the Israel/Palestine conflict in the same day, then why does the BBC not also report the casualties of said conflict that happened on said day? Not even breaking news with reports of unknown casualties. Just nothing about it and no indication of anything having happened at all.
> Gaza death toll hits 95 as Khan Younis attack casualties rise
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
then there is this tweet that is Arabic and contains a video > https://twitter.com/AJA_Palestine/status/1942671277883273250
with the following translation
> Translation: A Palestinian boy injured in an Israeli bombing asks his sister for food as he is starving while he waits to receive treatment.
My reply still stands in that BBC still has made no visible attempt to report a story with any casualty figures for Gaza this day even though they did publish 3 other pieces of news concerning the conflict. Therefore, the "relevancy bias" does not apply to the BBC here because the BBC considers the conflict relevant enough to report on 3 times within 24 hours.
Why does the BBC not consider the daily toll of casualties in this very same conflict sufficiently relevant to report on?
No "preliminary estimates on this breaking story"?
No "unconfirmed reports at this time"?
Nothing.
Pasting again
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
We will have to agree to disagree if hospital sources and the Nasser Hospital are not sufficient.
What source would be sufficient?
This approach towards determining relevancy is what I meant by “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound” earlier.
Update:
> Dr Mohammed Saqr, the director of nursing at Gaza’s Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, said he had personally witnessed countless mass casualty incidents in recent weeks.
> “The scenes are truly shocking – they resemble the horrors of judgment day. Sometimes within just half an hour we receive over 100 to 150 cases, ranging from severe injuries to deaths … About 95% of these injuries and deaths come from food distribution centres – what are referred to as the ‘American food distribution centres’,” Saqr said.
> On Wednesday, between 20 and 44 people were killed, according to officials in Gaza.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/09/gaza-aid-worke...
Israel doesn't allow reporters in Gaza, and has systematically murdered the ones who were there.
In armed conflict far away from the country in question, comparatively for each side, yes, both sides' deaths getting similar coverage is how one should expect the media to operate.
If Chile and Peru get into a war tomorrow, the expectation would absolutely be that coverage of deaths by the BBC would be similar for both.
>How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting?
The obvious key difference here is that in those wars both sides of those conflicts do still tend to get similar coverage per death; which is almost none. At the very least there's not orders of magnitudes difference. Not sure how you missed this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
No, as Russia is a reasonable threat to the UK whereas Hamas is clearly not.
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.
Really, and how exactly would you verify them? And of course they would never just make up the numbers, right? https://www.cfr.org/blog/un-halves-its-estimate-women-and-ch...
> Why do you suggest Palestinian prisoners are not?
A hostage is taken randomly to force the other party to do something. The Palestinians arrested were arrested because of a specific reason pertaining to them, some have been tried in court, some have not, but none were taken randomly.
You can call some of them prisoner of war, but of course those would be combatants, and again they were taken because they were fighting.
None were taken randomly, so none are hostages.
> akin to “due process” is happening in Gaza right now?
I'm not surprised you are getting basic information wrong, most Palestinians activists know almost nothing about Palestine or Gaza. To give you a correction the prisoners we are talking about were arrested in the West Bank, not Gaza.
- https://cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-double-stan...
- July 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/03/gaza-film-prod...
- February 2025 https://www.declassifieduk.org/battle-for-the-truth-pro-isra...
- November 2024 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-israel-g...
- November 2023 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-g...
Review of documentary BBC refused to air: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-do...
My experience is quite the opposite with BBC having a clear anti war stance.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide."
https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.
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.
Do you believe this with regard to what is happening in Israel/Palestine?
The chaos of information and what is truth is only bubbled up when 1) there's very few journalists in the area or 2) all the journalists are being killed or 3) there's no journalists and only special interests.
Consider that even if it was a "narrative" which at this point is controlled by social media, as it stands it seems to be: "these people are evil, they should be killed, sorry not sorry about the babies" or "these people are committing genocide, this bad."
The problem here is the enormity of what is actually going on in Gaza: a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot. It is not two sides in disagreement, each jostling for attention on roughly equal terms, each somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Two years in, we’re well beyond that and the only thing that matters is that one side is sadistically slaughtering the other and the world is pretending it’s not happening.
So you are saying, you dont know of:
The genocide in Tigray
The Darfur genocide
The history of the DRC
The Rwandan genocide
The Genocide of Isaaqs ...
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.
> Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.
Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.
and who's doing that discrediting? That's also a source.
Even when a source is unreliable, probable half-truths and lies are still valuable information when read critically and juxtaposed with many sources. Observing and noting when different factions agree and disagree on basic facts can be highly enlightening even when it's impossible to make a judgement on whether either side is right or wrong and to what degree. Identifying and recognizing the use and proliferation of canned phrases is also very helpful in constructing a mental map of the global journo-political landscape.
Also, highly credible organizations will be wrong sometimes and vice versa. One is never enough.
> We believe the refusal to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ is just one in a long line of agenda driven decisions.
Sadly no one will be able to document the carnage in gaza. They plan to create an internment camp in the south and move civilians into at after making sure they are not linked to Hamas. Then they are going to basically follow Trump's plan to clean Gaza by building new jewish settlements and kill anyone outside the internment camp. While doing that they will not allow independent journalists to go in gaza.
Israel has not granted access to journalists to report independently since October 2023.
There has been very limited escorted trips with external journalists but all tightly supervised by the IDF.
Journalists already in Gaza have been killed regularly and there are credible accusations that many are deliberately targeted by the IDF.
Has Russia granted access by independent journalists to russian occupied Ukraine in that time period? As far as i know the answer is no.
And even on the Ukraine side there has been significant restrictions
E.g. a quote from https://theintercept.com/2023/06/22/ukraine-war-journalists-...
“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”
Maybe its hard to say which one is worse, but they seem to be at least in the same neighbourhood
Ukraine/Russia conflict is obviously extremely dangerous but it allows far more media access, transparency, and foreign presence.
According to the world press freedom index, Israel has the third highest press freedom of all middle eastern countries (Qatar and Cyprus are a bit higher, everyone else in the middle east is lower in most cases much lower).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index#Rank...
I'm not saying its a paradise for reporters. There are clearly issues. But saying "zero press freedom" is a massive overstatement.
How you can have a sentence that includes the word "paradise" in it when referring to what's happening in Gaza is beyond me.
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-hamas-propaganda-documentary...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-palestinian-chi...
> The only other BBC documentary which focused on the apocalyptic plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza was taken down as a result of a hysterical pro-Israel campaign - because the father of the child narrator’s son had a junior technocratic position in the Hamas administration. Irrelevant, given the narrator’s words were written for him by the documentary producers.
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?).
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.
https://www.allsides.com/blog/bias-killing-news-trust
Cheers!
There are only binary states and opinions, either you’re a genocide supporter or an antisemite. Internet discussion on politics have gotten too toxic. Covid brought everyone online and we’ve been stuck in echochambers ever since.
From my perspective the BBC is extremely anti-Israeli but for some people this is obviously not good enough. They want the BBC to champion their cause. Naturally people supporting the anti-Israeli cause who only get anti-Israeli content will feel that the BBC is "pro" Israel. Nothing could be farther from the truth and Pro-Israeli media looks nothing like the BBC.
This is from 2006:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/governors_archive/im...
"We were appointed by the Governors to assess whether the BBC's coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict meets the required standards of impartiality."
...
"apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias; on the contrary there was evidence, in the programming and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial;"
...
"these shortcomings include:"
...
"Equally in the months preceding the Palestinian elections there was little hard questioning of their leaders"
...
This has been a big criticism of the BBC which is still not addressed:
"The term "terrorism" should accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies."
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"?
Those acts are different from military occupation or apartheid or genocide. It's not a judgement of value. It's a description of a method.
My point is that the word "terrorism" transcended the description of a technique for reaching certain goals, to a general blanket term used to describe "pure evil" and so people started to use it to describe very bad things even if they are not technically terrorism
They don't plow through a crowd with a truck or plant a bomb in an everyday place because they don't need to do that to instill terror, those are tactics of the weak. No, they disappear the people around you, with the same aim, and from a position of power. Which is the greater terror? A truck that detonated downtown or knowing a relative that got killed, locked up, or tortured? Apartheid and genocide are worse terrors than that, and by a stronger oppressor.
Many Palestinians in the West Bank have to pass through military checkpoints daily just to go about their daily lives, and at every point, one wonders if it is on that day that their life goes sideways.
We have "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation".
Why do we need to use the word "terrorism" there? I suspect it has to do with the fact the word "terrorism" has been abused by american right wing after 9/11 to just describe "any muslim" and "any evil" and there has been appetite ever since to have some retribution and use this term back to label the west (and israel as its proxy).
Again, I'm not trying to defend the actions of israel against the palestinian population of the west bank in particular, but I find that "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation" are already strong words enough and we don't need to strip the word "terrorism" from its specific meaning.
The definition that most people have in mind is probably what just mentioned earlier: how similar is it to the examples of irregulars "setting bombs in public infrastructure", "suicide trucks", and "suicide bombers".
But as the dictionary definition betrays, the ambiguity due to etymology exists, and is frequently exploited as a rhetorical technique by people using the word.
Are you seeing the problem, yet?
Terror is just a tool in the end.
- settlement and expulsion of Palestinians (think the bulldozer tactics)
- a testing ground for weapons: Israel routinely uses footage and draws evidence about how they’ve battle tested their weapons and tech they’re selling in the West Bank. There’s a book about this: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-labor...
Anyway I think there’s probably more goals I can think of but these might be enough for now. Makes me too sad otherwise.
I have never heard the BBC accuse the Israeli settlers of terrorism against West Bank Palestinian villages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
edit: honestly, look at the comment quality on this post. There's a reason that HN should avoid purely political stuff like this.
It's deeply concerning that these publicly funded media outlets are being co-opted and manipulated by a foreign power.
[1]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staf...
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.
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...
The Israel of the Bible does not refer to the country Israel, but many Christians have been deceived.
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 .
To my knowledge, no US state has any other sort of legal recognition of any other foreign government/state.
"To know who rules over you, simply notice who you are not allowed to criticize" - UnknownWtf, 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.
One party starts with the "moral advantage" — but as soon as conflict escalates, sides look more alike than different. This is war after all. Media is entrenched, disregarding their own side's actions. We've seen it in Ukraine-Russia. And now in Israel-Palestine.
F*ck war.
Israeli citizens protesting against the genocide and war crimes rekindled faith that it's mostly the top of govts and military industrial complexes pushing for this.
Not just BBC, most media ended up out in the open this time around. Or maybe it has always been like this, we are just growing up now and taking notice.
Things are a bit different now though.
Dont know--seems to me they are doing the right thing.
But it seems we've only replaced those mechanisms with more refined versions (manufacturing consent through mass media, surveillance and indirect indentured servitude through student debt, rent and health insurance).
We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.
There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.
The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.
Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds.
It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives...
Maybe we have lots of food and entertainment. I suppose that is good, in theory. But again, not something of recent history, that has more to do with the availability of large shipping vessels and TV production...
The part people may find optimistic is continuing to improve in any appreciable manner, versus some gains made decades ago...
You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...
Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.
I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.
You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.
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.
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...
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).
Media conglomerates manufacture consent far more subtly than the Church ever could. Student debt servitude, rent extraction, and opaque health insurance bureaucracy bind millions in ways that feel inescapable. Yet because it’s all cloaked in market-speak and "public interest" we barely notice our chains. Recognizing these illusions is painful, but it’s also the first step toward tearing them down. If we’re honest, the next century of political and economic evolution won’t be about perfecting the PR, it’ll be about building genuine checks on power, creating institutions that can’t be gamed, and demanding real accountability, even when the robes change.
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.
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.
Politicians don’t have this headship and from their behavior clearly don’t view themselves as stewards of their country and people (they do care about their own children though). An example of this would be Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off American public lands to foreign interests. The money raised from this would not make a dent in the deficit or debt, and it would take away beautiful fishing and hiking from Americans. Thankfully this was done away with, but a good king would never consider selling public land in the middle of his country to foreigners.
Now compare a good king to a good politician.
There will always be reasons to oppose any current equilibrium for improvements, and that's ok.
(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.
Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?
Some will always want much more than others. Some will always take paths that are easy. Some will have no problem taking advantage of the weak.
Keeping all those traits in check is a full time job. Its not free. It eats into limited time and energy. Sooner or later compromises are made.
Therefore parasites and predators always find space in any ecosystem you look at. You might be able to turn off/keep in check behavior of a few. But never all.
Or maybe you think we’ll destroy the world or something, in which case that’s “chicken little syndrome.”
It’s hard to imagine we will regress in any meaningful way. That’s basically never happened, and even when it did, during the “dark ages,” we recovered – on a long enough timeline (which isn’t even that long) we’ve made exponential progress in every facet of life. There’s a lot to look forward to. Or you can be pessimistic about it during the few brief years you have in this world…
It was a realization that nothing, except technology, is changing. We're not entering into some scary unknown time, but just regressing to the mean. Humanity seems to be stuck on a perpetual loop, probably because we really suck at learning from the past and inevitably convince ourselves that 'this time it'll be different.' And even on those issues we do seem to have made progress on, like slavery - is it just a coincidence that slavery ended universally, after millennia of efforts, only just after the Industrial Revolution and mass urbanization which effectively obsoleted it?
On the theme of slavery, consider that we mostly don't even blink twice now a days when a country drags men off the street, separates them from their family, puts a gun in their hand, and throws them in a trench to kill and most likely die. Those that continue to refuse to kill not infrequently end up 'dying in training.' To say nothing of barrier troops. This is all much worse than even slavery, but we casually accept it, because it hasn't yet been obsoleted. If the role of humans in warfare is ever minimized, imagine what lovely things they'll write about our morality and hypocrisy, just as we are wont to do about the past today.
---
As for the chapter referenced, Ctrl+F for "And democracy has her own good" and read from there. "Drone" is a term you'll see throughout classical writings. It's a reference to drone bees who contribute nothing to a hive, but exist solely to consume and mate if they can. So it's a term that refers to everything from beggars to criminals to corrupt politicians who prefer enriching themselves and special interests over broadly socially motivated politicking. So in modern times it would include practically all politicians.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
Russia doesn't give out passports to men until they've fulfilled military requirements. Please inform yourself.
Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.
People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...
Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours.
His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.
Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:
Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.
In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.
People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.
By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.
So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.
And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.
Thought experiment - how many generations does it take to forget grandpa?
If Grandpa is the issue, their grandchildren may have falsely optimistic opinions of their corrupt roots. Their children (grand grand children) don't have the same rosy memories, and don't get why Mom and Dad are into their weird rituals. But it's Mom and Dad so it can't be so bad, right?
It's not till their grandchildren, normally, that (assuming they are decent people and the trait isn't genetic or somehow encouraged by society) people can maybe see what utter crappy people their grand grand grand grand parents were, and maybe do something about it.
I agree with everything you said, but that's a rather odd conclusion. things are getting worse, not better.
For one, so many publications here in Europe are financed by the local governments and we have no problem allowing them to function and act in the interest or said governments. Two, it flies in the face of an independent, free individual who can choose what to read and discern what the truth is. By blocking it, you are saying, "You, as an individual, are not able to take your own decisions, you are not able to separate truth from lies and fiction." If, supposing the later is actually the case, then all this "free" media is actually dangerous as it becomes a game of "don't trust them, trust us!" and whoever has the better image, the best marketing and exposure wins over the others.
What they're sometimes guilty of (in my judgement) is one-sided reporting. E.g., regarding illegal immigration, providing sympathetic personal stories of illegal immigrants, but not of the persons hurt by illegal immigration.
It's also possible they've gotten better about this. I stopped listening years ago.
Why? With how confidently you state that, I'm rather curious what reasons you have.
If you want a longer answer, George Orwell penned an eloquent one all the way back in 1944: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
As such, you end up with a large cohort of people believing immigrants eat their pets, vaccines have microchips in them and are more harmful than the diseases they protect against, 5g towers cause cancer, chemtrails are a thing, and trickle-down economics benefits working people.
Now, I may ultimately accept the idea that no matter what we do, we're always inevitably screwed, and even the smallest attempt to curtail speech will always end in an even worse outcome (like how there exist some infinities larger than others), but even I get a little uncomfortable being that nihilistic.
It is not that one has to accept that we are inevitably screwed. That assumes that no amount of work or effort can address social problems peacefully, and that the only way for a functional society is through force.
Im hoping that current decades of polarization and championing of censorship will end up resulting in similar conclusions as the UN did after world war 2. Censorship and violence only breed higher quantity and intensity of censorship and violence.
We've had decades of Fox News and the like declaring things like "War on Christmas" and "War on Christianity" to make people in the majority feel like victims, presenting immigrants as subhumans that take jobs and commit crimes as they invade our country, and presenting trans people as deviant threats to our children, trying to make them all trans, too.
This is a completely fictional world, but such a large number of people have become believers that they've now been able to take over political power.
As a result, we get state laws that directly attack freedom of speech via book bans and scrubbing school curriculum of anything parents deem objectionable, which can include innocuous things like acknowledging gay people exist or that the civil war was fought over slavery. We also got our current administration, which has used lawsuits and other threats to attack any speech the president doesn't like.
I don't see where it gets better anytime soon - and I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to get a lot worse before they do get better, because a large cohort of people are cheering it on.
And before anyone chimes in that this is a both sides issue: I've yet to see actual legal action taken by the left wing to curtail speech. Instead, I've seen social pressure levied - largely in the form of freedom not to associate with individuals or businesses that engage in speech people find objectionable. This is the correct way to engage in an environment of free speech, even if I find it distasteful how far it's been taken and how petty it's been in some cases.
I'm not really advocating for censorship myself. Ultimately, I'm merely reflecting upon how an environment of nearly absolute adherence to free speech has been eroded by a number of bad actors utilizing propaganda and lies to chip away at that very free speech over the decades, bringing us to a point where we're sliding down the very same slope towards destruction of freedoms that free speech absolutism was intended to prevent. The whole exercise feels like a Catch-22, hence my prodding for something a little more concrete yet specific than "censorship = bad".
It is fairly common belief that lies and propaganda is stronger than truth. However rather than see it as a fundamental part of nature, I would propose an alternative theory. Lies and propaganda is a symptom when social trust in society start to break down. You could ban Fox news or any other right-leaning media and there is little to no evidence that society would be any different.
The idea of free speech absolutism is an concept that people build to attack free speech. Free speech is about valuing and believing that people should be free to hold and express their opinions and beliefs without fear of retaliation. Fear can be created by law, by mobs or by those who hold some form of power like employers, but regardless of method the result is the same. Society need to value the idea of free speech. Absolutism has nothing to do with that. The idea that people should not fear the government for beliefs they hold, but should fear their employer, is inconsistent with free speech as a human right.
If you are looking for something more concrete, I would point towards research that that looks at social trust and its roles in conflicts. There exist a fair amount of research on this topic, some which is left politics and others which is right politics. One major finding are the importance of shared values. What kind of values those are is less important than that they are shared. If they aren't shared, then the next most important part is that they aren't shoved into the face of people who do not share them. Trying to stamp out opposing values, especially in a public and diffused way, has a long history of creating violence, fear and mistrust.
Not just a "foreign" government, but a government that is waging a hybrid war against the European Union, which includes disinformation through outlets such as RT.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/02/more-than-400-...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n3926pSPNwXd8j7I716CBJEz...
Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?
Even on HN (and sometimes, especially on HN).
There are some divisive topics that are less prone to flame wars on HN vs. other discussion platforms, but those are fairly limited, and often not political (in my experience).
This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".
At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.
But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).
I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.
The brinksmanship card of HN is the reverse of this framing: There must be level-headed discussion. To wit:
>The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.
The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them
But I think, by definition, if an article draws a lot of flagged/downvoted comments (as this one has), it’s hard to argue that it’s not divisive, at least to this audience.
Gaza doctor whose nine children were killed in Israeli strike dies from injuries (June 2)
Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC (June 4)
Three journalists among five killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital (June 5)
Four killed near Gaza aid centre, health workers say (June 8)
Dozens of Palestinians killed while seeking aid in Gaza, hospitals say (June 11)
More than 20 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire near Gaza aid sites, Hamas-run ministry says (June 16)
Israeli forces kill 51 Palestinians waiting for flour at Gaza aid site, witnesses and rescuers say (June 17)
Eleven killed by Israeli fire while seeking aid in Gaza, rescuers say (June 18)
At least 12 Palestinians killed waiting for aid in Gaza, say medics (June 19)
Israeli military kills 23 Palestinians near aid site in Gaza, witnesses and medics say (June 20)
GHF boss defends Gaza aid operation after hundreds of Palestinians killed near sites (June 27)
At least 81 people killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says (June 28)
Israeli military investigates 'reports of harm to civilians' after hundreds killed near Gaza aid sites (June 30)
Hundreds of families displaced by wave of Israeli air strikes on Gaza, Palestinians say (June 30)
Dozens killed in Gaza as Israel intensifies bombardment, rescuers say (July 3)
Israel's strike on bustling Gaza café killed a Hamas operative - but dozens more people were killed (July 4)
How am I supposed to not see what I'm seeing with my lying eyes? I don't believe I'm capable of this tier of cognitive dissonance.
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
Do you remember when headlines with Israel's atrocities would be rewritten to not upset them? This was <1y back even.
At least it seems widely reported on https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/100-bbc-insiders-pen-lette...
So it it seems like a legitimate letter, what's less clear is which, if any, of their pro Israeli articles are written by people who believe what they are saying...
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...
2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates back going on 2 years now.
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 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.
I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.
> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?
I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.
This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.
"Counterfactual" my arse...
I am curious as to when and how journalists use language. Looking at the headlines you chose, I see that some are written in active voice and some are in passive voice. When do journalists choose to use active voice over passive voice?
Well, you're capable of some level. The allegations in no way suggest that articles critical of Israel aren't run.
The entire population of Gaza was only ~2 million and Israel has now killed/wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians directly, and it's likely some multiple of that have been killed indirectly (starvation, disease, deaths of despair, etc). If this was China, we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide, done all we could to economically sanction them out of existence, and perhaps even flirted with direct invasions which would entail risking not only WW3 but global nuclear warfare.
But because it's Israel, we're instead shipping them weapons to keep carrying out this "war" and the media continues framing it as just a regrettable conflict with unfortunate collateral damage.
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.
So the way that real propaganda works is by taking some issue people generally feel a way about, expressing some empathy towards that, and then working to shift that person's perspective. For instance here [1] is the first article you linked: "UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide". It not only spends much of the article softly trying to undermine these claims, but even leans on one of the most classical propaganda techniques - appeals to emotion. This is a quote from that article:
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Not surprisingly, Israeli diplomats are angry [at the claims]. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, described the report as "an obscene inversion of reality", and accused Ms Albanese of questioning Israel's right to exist. Many Israelis, too, are likely to be shocked. And the suggestion of genocide, towards a state which was founded as a direct result of Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, will cause deep offence.
In the wake of 7 October attack, and the fact that so many Israeli families are still waiting for news of loved ones taken hostage, hearing such outspoken condemnation is hard. Noam Peri, whose father Chaim was taken hostage, also travelled to Geneva. Her focus, naturally, is that her father not be forgotten.
"My father was kidnapped from his own home," she said. "He's an 80-year-old person that was sitting in his home with my mother, and he was brutally taken from there, and has essentially disappeared since. He has no communication, with no-one in the world."
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- Al-Ahli hospital explosion (Oct 2023)
- Al-Shifa hospital “medical teams targeted” (Nov 2023)
- Summary executions claim (Dec 24)
- Aid‑centre shooting attribution (Jun 2025)
- Al‑Shifa “raid on medical teams” redux (Jun 2025)
Imagine if the journalists weren’t “forced to do pro Israel PR”.
BBC needs a proper external investigation on the levels of anti semitism that clearly permeate the ranks of their so called journalists.
Or maybe they removed articles because of political pressure? Post overwhelming evidence against the fact that the Al-Ahli hospital explosion was caused by an Israel airstrike, for example.
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...
Are you an LLM?
Most of the consulted experts agree that it was fired from inside Palestinian territory.
No consulted experts agree this was an airstrike.
No consulted experts agree this was fired from outside Palestinian territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...
Maybe you are, in fact, an LLM.
watching or reading publications from any of these nation's news outlets is intended and virtually guaranteed to paint them all as the "good guys", and any other countries as "bad guys". just like BBC is doing here. this is not a conspiracy, it's all fairly well documented.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...
Feels kind of gaslighty when we can all perceive that there is a disproportionate overrepresentation of exactly that, but if us gentiles say it is called an “antisemitic trope”
not every observation is based on wanting a hurtful outcome against jewish people, but every reaction to that observation seems like thats the assumption. doesnt seem productive though, counterproductive and self fulfilling is what it seems like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTNuBKtzHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYUL1R4pupU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gut1jyzwFV8
Everyone here can identify the fake comments. They think they're slick but it's just the Streisand effect at this point.
Basically, you're suggesting that propaganda only works on the feeble-minded and dumb, and "All True Scotsmen" know better than to fall for it.
Wow.