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I'm a US-ian and have no particular dog in this hunt, but could you relate any instances where this led to the British public being significantly misinformed about a major event?
Everything I've seen, including recent statements from the Israeli government, indicate that the Gaza Health Ministry (often referred to by Israel-sympathetic press as part of Hamas, rather than part of the government of Gaza which Hamas currently dominates) death toll statistics from the Gaza war were largely accurate.
Is there a case of BBC reporting "Hamas-sourced" information in a way that was notably harmful to the British public's truthful understanding of the conflict?
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
Hamas does want to kill all the Jews, it's in their original charter which was never retracted:
I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
Can you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists.
This happens a lot with the BBC in the rush to publish. It is not an excusable situation. There are real consequences. The decline is parallel to the rise in social media and moving the news teams out of London and attention dynamics.
You can find a list of problems in the corrections and clarifications here - work through 2023 to 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarificat...
Do you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
You know the stupid shit thing though? My friendship group has an Iranian, a Palestinian, a Saudi, two Jews and a bunch of English people in it, a German and I'm literally descended from a nazi and everyone is quite happy and gets on fine.
Divisive narratives hurt everyone.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Direct link to Israel/Hamas section:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Here's a Guardian (left) report about the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/09/tim-davie-expe...
And Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
And an anti-Hamas/pro-Israel critique:
https://honestreporting.com/exposed-leaked-report-reveals-th...
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
Sure. https://archive.is/tFzfZ
> > the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
> a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary
Yes, as mentioned systemic bias is across multiple issues, including Israel/Hamas but not limited to that issue.
> I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact
Yes, the HonenestReporting critique mentioned does that.
It stands to reason that it'd be a rounding error, both because of the overwhelming, omnipresent pro-Israel bias displayed by the mainstream media and almost every government, in full opposition to the popular sentiment and the communications of NGOs or humanitarian law institutions, and because of the complete disconnect between the casualties on the Israeli side versus the many tens of thousands of dead in Gaza...
Then I got to the section of the report that questioned the casualty numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health... This has been a consistent target for criticism by Israel, but the criticism has repeatedly failed to find any purchase: the MoH methodology is widely understood to be a (severe) undercount of the dead, there has been no reasonable deconstruction of the methodology, there has been no estimates (outside of genocide apologists) that have been below the MoH numbers. At this point, criticism of the MoH methodology is about as credible as descriptions of Gaza protests as "pro-Hamas protests".
So when I got to this section, I just stopped reading, because every other claim, which had already been laughably limited in scope, became outright questionable.
Just posting this here to avoid someone seeing 2 links (including "honest reporting"...) and believing that the "pro-Hamas bias" accusations against the BBC are in any way robust.
You then say anyone that disputes the Hamas numbers is an ‘apologist’ for a genocide you made up.
You have provided no sources.
OK.