Watching the BBC’s Israel election coverage

There are 5,881,696 people in the world who might have a practical interest in the subject matter of the article published on February 17th on the BBC News website’s Middle East page under the title “Israel PM Netanyahu criticised for ‘excessive’ spending“.Expenses art  

Those five million and some people are Israeli citizens with the right to vote in the upcoming elections and estimates of how many of them are native English speakers vary, with the more generous appraisals putting the number at around 200,000. Of course even they can hardly be said to be in need of a BBC report on the topic because their local media has covered it (to put it mildly) extensively, including the English language version of Ha’aretz which coincidentally produced a similar article on the same day, along with the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post to name but some.

45.9% of the BBC News website’s visitors come from the UK, 14.5% from the US, 3.6% from India, 2.6% from Russia and 1.8% from Brazil. In other words, the editorial decision to publish a four hundred and nineteen-word article about a report by Israel’s State Comptroller and Ombudsman on the subject of expenses at the Israeli prime minister’s official residences cannot be said to be based either on the degree of relevance that subject has to the website’s audience or the importance of the story in the overall framework of major news events in the Middle East.

Related articles:

BBC News, impartiality and the Israeli elections

Tim Franks on BBC WS Newshour: ‘you make Israel sound like a normal country’

What makes a story newsworthy for the BBC?

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