The war in Gaza has been a notoriously controversial and
difficult story to cover as a journalist. The Israeli
government banned international journalists from the
territory. At least 171 journalists and media workers in
Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank have
been killed since the war began.
The BBC has faced
relentless accusations
of bias from all sides. You would think, then, that when
it commissioned the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,
billed as a “vivid and unflinching view of life” in Gaza
seen through the eyes of children, it would have been
meticulous in its commissioning and oversight.
Yet
almost as soon as the programme was broadcast on February
17, a journalist
outside the BBC revealed that one of the children
featured in the film, 13-year-old Abdullah, who also acted
as its narrator, was the son of a Hamas official. His
father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, is a deputy minister of
agriculture and therefore, as Hamas runs the government of
Gaza, a Hamas official.
No major investigation was
required to find out who this man was – an expert on
wastewater treatment, in particular on the removal of heavy
metals from industrial wastewater, who received degrees from
UK universities. No evidence has emerged that he is linked
to Hamas’s militant operations. But getting someone with
any link to what is classified as a terrorist organisation
by western governments to narrate the film was inevitably
going to be criticised – especially because the link
wasn’t explained to viewers.
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The BBC pulled the film
four days after its premiere and said it would investigate
the matter. Where it really went wrong was that, for 12
days, the BBC tried to pin the blame elsewhere. It dumped on
the production company, Hoyo Films, stating: “The
production team had full editorial control of filming with
Abdullah.”
I argue this is a weak defence. A
broadcaster can’t blame someone else when a mistake
appears in a film.
Under Ofcom
regulations, the broadcaster has full editorial
responsibility, regardless of whether a freelance or
independent crew carried out filming. Any mistake is the
BBC’s mistake.
I was head of news and current
affairs at Channel 4 for 17 years. We sometimes made
mistakes. It happens. But the key is not to make things
worse by trying to wriggle out of blame.
As it
happens, Channel 4 also
featured this child in some of its news coverage without
initially disclosing his father’s role. “As
international media access is restricted, Abdullah was
sourced through an established journalist who has also
worked for other major global media outlets,” Channel 4
News said in a statement.
Ofcom
regulations
The BBC’s second excuse was even
weaker. It said that filmmakers were asked
in writing a number of times whether this child had any
connection with Hamas.
Here is a journalistic tip for
the BBC’s news bosses: if you ask someone a question and
they don’t answer, you don’t just keep asking. You
demand answers or you go and get the answer yourself. As a
former news boss myself, I would have demanded to see the
boy’s entire family tree.
Finally, after 12 days,
the BBC took responsibility and issued an apology. BBC chair
Samir Shah told MPs that people “weren’t doing their
job” when it came to oversight of the production. Shah described
it as “a dagger to the heart of the BBC claim to be
impartial and to be trustworthy”.
A child of 13
should arguably not have narrated the film at all. He was
not narrating his own words but a script written by the
programme makers, which included facts about the history and
geopolitics of Gaza. I would point the BBC to Ofcom
guidance that children under 16 should not be asked for
views on matters likely to be beyond their capacity to
answer properly without the consent of a responsible
adult.
On a subject like this, I would not have had a
child narrate a film – especially not when one of the
responsible adults in his life was a Hamas
official.
This was a powerful and
beautifully shot film. It’s hard to see how any of its
content could be described as pro-Hamas propaganda. The
strongest moment was when a child said he hated Hamas
because they had caused the war and all the misery being
suffered now. But it’s almost certainly politically
impossible for an amended version of the documentary to now
be shown, which is a great loss.
This debacle even
resulted in a bizarre decision by the Royal Television
Society to drop
an award recognising the brave and brilliant work of
journalists in Gaza (it has since reversed this after backlash
from journalists). We have relied on journalists in Gaza
to show us what is happening.
They have continued
filming when their own families have been killed. Their
reports have been powerful and moving and true. Why should
they be punished for a BBC cock-up?
Falling
trust
I have never worked for the BBC, but I have
always admired it for two things. First, for the brilliance
of its journalists. Second, for its ability to turn a
mistake into a PR catastrophe.
The film contained
editorial errors, but in my view the outrage built over
days, resulting in calls not just for a public
inquiry, but even a police
inquiry, because the BBC wouldn’t take the rap. My
journalistic heart went out to the great people who work at
the BBC.
This ghastly incident sits alongside other
(quite different) recent scandals about the BBC: the bad
behaviour (whether alleged or proven) of powerful presenters
and figures Huw
Edwards, Russell
Brand, Tim
Westwood and Gregg
Wallace. In each case, it turned out that BBC bigwigs
had received complaints over long periods of time before the
stories went public.
For many reasons beyond the
BBC’s control, trust in the broadcaster is falling. It is
constantly being attacked by the right-wing press, and
undermined by conspiracy theorists who say you can’t trust
the so-called mainstream media and that there is no such
thing as truth.
In a 2023 YouGov
survey on trust in media, only 44% of Britons said they
trust BBC journalists to tell the truth. That was nearly
half the level of trust in the BBC 20 years earlier, yet it
still made the BBC the most trusted media outlet in the UK.
Other surveys
by Ofcom of people who actually watch TV news put trust
in its accuracy much higher – something like
70%.
There is a general fall in trust in all
institutions in the UK. The politicians
and tabloids who attack the BBC are trusted far less than
BBC journalists. But their unfair assaults make it all the
more essential that the BBC avoids errors like this, and is
transparent when those errors are
revealed.
Disclosure statement
Dorothy Byrne
was formerly Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel
Four, and Editor at Large at Channel Four.
Dorothy
Byrne, President of Murray Edwards College, University
of Cambridge
This article is republished from
The Conversation
under a Creative Commons license. Read the original
article.
