Visitors to the Middle East section of the BBC News website on April 11th/12th 2013 may perhaps have been surprised to discover that one of the most important stories going on in the region – at least according to the amount of coverage allocated by the BBC – was one concerning ‘Women of the Wall’.
Particularly strange is the fact that two of those reports – one written and one filmed – relate to the April 11th arrest of five members of ‘Women of the Wall’: an event which was already over around the time that these BBC reports appeared, as a Jerusalem judge had ordered their release after a few hours. Neither of those reports makes that fact clear. The third article, written by Erica Chernofsky, also mentions the women’s arrest on April 11th, and it too fails to mention their release, even though it was published several hours after that event.
Whatever one’s personal view of the 25-year-old campaign by members of ‘Women of the Wall’, it is difficult to understand how the BBC can justify running three remarkably similar reports on the subject simultaneously.
