On June 27th the BBC News website published reporting by Lyse Doucet in Iran under the headline “Tehran is coming back to life, but its residents are deeply shaken”. That article was also translated into other languages, including Arabic, Spanish and Russian.
As several social media users pointed out, the Russian language version was originally illustrated using a photograph of a market stall in Tel Aviv, which the BBC told readers showed “the Tehran market”.
That image was subsequently replaced but it was not the only recent example of the BBC presenting photography from Israel as having been taken in Iran.
On June 23rd BBC television aired a report by Orla Guerin “on the Turkish border with Iran” who told viewers that:
Guerin: “…but we have certainly met people today, and again yesterday, who have run and who have described terrible days and nights when they could hear bombing, when they were desperately afraid for their own safety, for their families.”
The footage shown during that commentary from Guerin was as follows:
That footage in fact shows an Iranian missile exploding by a road in the Ashdod region in southern Israel on June 23rd. The BBC itself published that footage on its website on the same day with the following explanation:
“An Iranian strike was caught on driver’s dashcam in Israel.
The missile appeared to hit near a power station in the city of Ashdod.
There have been no reports of fatalities, but electricity supplies have been disrupted in some areas.
The Iranian attack on Israel is part of ongoing strikes between the two countries.”
Apparently the BBC’s fact checking procedures are not sufficiently adequate so as to prevent a photograph of a market stall with signs written in Hebrew and footage which includes a Hebrew and Arabic road sign from being passed off as having been taken in Iran.
