Last month several media outlets reported the story of the rejection of Stage 2 complaints made by CAMERA Arabic to the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU), with the Jewish Chronicle noting that over the past two years:
“While 101 of Camera’s complaints were upheld and BBC Arabic was forced to make 213 corrections to stories deemed biased, inaccurate or misleading (an average of more than two a week throughout the conflict), many others were rejected.
Under the BBC’s appeals system, complaints rejected at the first stage can be escalated to the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU), the corporation’s internal regulatory body. For BBC Arabic, part of the World Service, the ECU’s ruling is final; Ofcom does not intervene.
Camera appealed decisions on 31 occasions. Twenty-two of those appeals have been rejected by the ECU, a further nine await an outcome. Not a single appeal submitted to the ECU by Camera has so far been upheld.
One rejected appeal asked the corporation to reconsider a story that referred to dead Hamas fighters without mentioning their affiliation to the terror group.
Another highlighted a profile of slain Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, which only referred to “accusations” that the terror leader had killed civilians.”
More on those and additional examples can be found in CAMERA Arabic’s full report – “Turning a blind eye to bias at BBC Arabic”.
