A post by CAMERA Arabic.
Last October CAMERA UK documented the amendment of a BBC News English language report which originally promoted inaccurate information put out by the PLO on Twitter. The PLO’s statement claimed that its then chief negotiator, the late Sae’b Erekat, had been taken to hospital in Tel Aviv – rather than to a hospital in Jerusalem as was actually the case. As noted at the time, the PLO-NAD subsequently put out another Tweet clarifying the matter.
However, it took the BBC Arabic website over three months to make the same amendment. Only after several communications from CAMERA Arabic did it correct the two reports – dating from October 18th and November 10th – in which the hospital’s location was inaccurately reported.
Notably, the second report replaced “Tel Aviv” with “Jerusalem” in its direct quote of the PLO’s original statement, thereby ‘correcting’ the inaccuracy in the one place it would have been legitimate to leave it standing. CAMERA Arabic takes the view that in this case it would have been best practice to report both the PLO’s inaccurate statement concerning the location of the hospital and its subsequent correction.
