Last month we documented our receipt of a fourteen-month late response to a complaint submitted to the BBC in August 2024 concerning the BBC News website’s portrayal of the twelve victims of the Hizballah attack on Majdal Shams the previous month.
BELATED BBC RESPONSE FAILS TO ADDRESS COMPLAINT ISSUES
As was noted at the time, the BBC’s response did not actually address three of the four items that were the topic of our complaint and so we submitted a Stage 1b complaint which included the following:
“The response notes that one item was amended – albeit a whole month later and without any footnote added – and cites the same article by Raffi Berg twice. However, Raffi Berg’s report was not included in the complaint at all. These three items were: [emphasis added]
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c29dydz84ngo
“Israel says it has hit Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after 12 children and young adults were killed in a rocket strike while playing football in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c72vg87rzd5o
“Israel accuses Hezbollah of carrying out the strike on a football pitch that killed at least 12 people, including children, the deadliest attack in the current hostilities, and has promised to respond.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cjk36y6e63yo
“The BBC’s Paul Adams has visited the site where 12 people, mostly children, were killed in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday.”
They however remain online in their original form and have not been amended. They therefore continue to mislead BBC audiences with regard to the fact that all twelve of the children killed in the attack were between the ages of 10 and 16 – information that was in the public domain around 24 hours after the attack took place. No “young adults” were killed in that attack. The victims were all children rather than “including” or “mostly”.”
Nearly a month later, on November 3rd, we received a response to that Stage 1b complaint which opens as follows:
“You have sent us a follow up complaint about this report: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67307858”
In fact, our “follow up complaint” was not about that report at all but concerned the three others that were included in the original complaint but which were not addressed at Stage 1a.
The BBC’s reply continues:
“As we tried to make clear in the previous reply to you, we initially used the wording “children and young adults” to describe the children killed. This is because not all the people killed had yet been identified and not all their ages were yet known. We therefore used a broad term to describe them.
Once it had been confirmed they were all aged between 10 and 16, we used the wording “children and young people”, which is reasonable way to describe people in this age category.
As we also said in our initial reply, we are not going to amend the reports because they stand as a record of what was known as the time.”
That “what was known at the time” justification for not amending reports to provide updated information that gives BBC audiences a clearer and more accurate view of the story is of course not new.
Another recent example appeared in the BBC’s response to a Stage 1b complaint submitted by CAMERA UK in late August after amendments were made to a report concerning an incident in Lebanon.
BBC PARTLY CORRECTS LEBANON ‘SHELLING’ CLAIM OVER SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER
The corporation’s response to our follow-up complaint about that amended report still promoting the inaccurate and unverified claim that the attack had been carried out by Israel included the following:
“Concerning this report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68698766 – you say: “While the headline to this report has been amended, references to “shelling” removed and a footnote added, the amended version of the report still promotes disinformation in the form of an unsubstantiated claim of an Israeli attack.”
We corrected the headline and text to report accurately what the UN peacekeeping group had said, by removing references to “shelling”.
However, we did accurately relate in this article the allegations reported at the time by Lebanon’s National News Agency, and we accurately related the denial that Israel made to these allegations.
You say: “The parts of the report referring to a ‘drone strike’ that did not happen should therefore be removed.”
The article is date-stamped 30 March 2024 and it is a duly accurate report of what each side was saying about the cause of the blast at that point in time. It is not our practice to go back and amend past reports in the manner you are requesting.”
BBC editorial guidelines include the following:
“The public has a right to be informed about past events and the BBC’s online archive is an important source for future reporting and historical research.
The Editorial Guidelines say:
The archive of the BBC’s online content available in perpetuity is a permanent public record and its existence is in the public interest. (Editorial Guidelines 13.4.27)”
Anyone doing “future reporting” or “historical research” based on the items that were the subject of the above two complaints would be likely to wrongly conclude that the victims of the July 2024 attack in Majdal Shams included “young adults” and that “an Israeli drone” was involved in the March 2024 incident in southern Lebanon.
It really should not be difficult for the BBC to ensure that its “permanent public record” provides information about “past events” that is accurate, especially in cases in which new information later comes to light, by simply adding an update at the top of a report or a link to a subsequent report providing an accurate account of events.
