Media Manipulators, David Leigh in The Guardian

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Media manipulators

How a north London web-designer began a campaign that deluged the Guardian with emails

More net news

David Leigh

Guardian

Thursday February 22, 2001

Why would the Guardian provide moral and medical justification for the multiple murder of innocent Israeli civilians?

It’s a pretty bizarre question, but we found ourselves being asked it over and over again this week. Emails clicked in to the letters page by the hundred, all making the same weirdly alliterative points. This followed publication of a Guardian article trying to understand the motivations of the Palestinian bus driver who ploughed into a queue this month, killing eight Israelis.

The mysteriously similar emails – from all over the world – started coming in, too, to our foreign editor; to our website; and to the personal email address of our Middle East correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg.

They were inconvenient, and also sometimes a bit scary in their violent tone – “The bloody Guardian… Have you killed a Jew today?… Are you anti-Jewish?… Unrelenting Guardian anti-Israel bias… Why would the Guardian provide moral and medical justification etc…?’

This global blitzing was tending to crowd out genuine expressions of opinion from our readers. Our suspicions aroused, we tried to discover what was going on. It wasn’t straightforward. But eventually we discovered the trick. A website calling itself HonestReporting.com was set up in London last autumn.

It has recruited 12,000 subscribers to its database, it claims, all dedicated to fighting anti-Israel “bias” in the media. The aim was to recruit a total of 25,000.

Every time someone writes something they don’t like, details of the offending article are circulated round the world, together with a handy form of protesting words, ready to be lightly embroidered and electronically dispatched at the push of a button.

“This is what you should do,” they tell their members “Forward it on to the news company concerned at the email address provided. If you can, please change the subject of the email to ‘complaint’ or something similar.”

Their first success, HonestReporting boasted, was with the London Evening Standard. Its columnist Brian Sewell wrote last autumn calling on Israel to “become a multicultural society” and cease exploiting the Holocaust to justify unacceptable behaviour.

“The next day, [we] sent out a letter to subscribers.” Standard articles recorded “a wave of complaints… hundreds of Jewish readers have written in”. Then “after more pressure” there followed a pro-Israel article by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. “This is an example of what we can do.”

And now it was the Guardian’s turn to get the email treatment. A long electronic bulletin went out headed: “The Guardian: a mainstream British newspaper consistently blames Israel for everything.”

It complained that a Steve Bell cartoon showing Sharon’s bloody handprints on the Wailing Wall “encroaches on brash anti-semitism”. It complained that a Muslim, Faisal Bodi, had written questioning Israel’s right to statehood; and complained that the Guardian had said Sharon had killed the peace process. “No blame is assigned to Arafat.” And there too, was our old alliterative friend: “Why would the Guardian provide moral and medical justification…?”

Who was behind this internet harassment? The website gave no address. It had been registered last October under a London name and phone number that seemed not to exist. Eventually, it transpired that it had been set up by a 27-year-old Jewish web-designer from north London called Jonathan. “Don’t give my full name,” he asked. “Someone was killed in Stamford Hill [the Jewish district] the other day.” He and his friends came up with the idea by themselves: “We were just brainstorming.”

But the operation was now being funded and run from the US by an organisation concerned with media fairness, Media Watch International.

And who were they? “We’re pretty new,” says their director, Sharon Tzur, speaking from Manhattan. “It’s a group of concerned Jewish business people in New York.”

Yet a bit more inquiry reveals that this is not quite the whole story either. For this week’s bulletin denouncing the Guardian was in fact composed in Israel by a man named Shraga Simmons.

And when he is not working for HonestReporting, Mr Simmons is to be found employed at another organisation altogether – Aish HaTora. This is an international group promoting orthodox Judaism. “I do some work for Aish,” Mr Simmons says, from Israel. And Jonathan, the web-designer who started it all in London, also concedes: “I go to the odd class at Aish.”

Aish verge on the colourful in their antics. Founded by Rabbi Noah Weinberg, who complains that “20,000 kids a year” are being lost to Judaism by marrying out, Aish invented speed-dating – eight-minute sessions in cafes to help New Yorkers find compatible Jewish partners. They’re widely regarded as rightwing extremists. And they’re certainly not people entitled to harass the media into what they would call “objectivity”.

david.leigh@guardian.co.uk

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works….

There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I am an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

BBC Betrays Jeremy Bowen

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Beeb betrays Bowen

After witnessing his local colleague and driver, Abed Takkoush, being incinerated by an Israeli tank near the Lebanese border in 2000, Jeremy Bowen was shot at himself. Andrew Balcombe, Zionist Federation Chair, immediately wrote to the BBC Trust demanding Bowen’s removal as Middle East Editor claiming that this incident – a ‘tragic mistake’ – ‘may have coloured (his) views about Israel.’ Ever since, the zionists have been gunning for Bowen, unearthing internal emails in which he carried out his remit of reviewing the situation in the Middle East for fellow staffers, and claiming in the Jerusalem Post, ‘Jeremy Bowen faces Mecca while he writes for the BBC.’

New efforts to undermine him have resulted in the BBC Trust caving in to the ZF and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (Camera).  Complaints that Bowen’s online analysis, How 1967 defined the Middle East and his report From Our Own Correspondent BBC Radio 4, 12 January 2008 were ‘chronically biased’ came from Jonathan Turner of the ZF and from Camera. Even though the Trust only upheld three out of 24 specific complaints, this has been spun as a huge victory and Turner called Bowen’s position ‘untenable.’ The 118-page report published by the BBC Trust was lambasted for ‘failing to offer correctional steps.’  The complainants even claimed BBC editorial guidelines are ‘illegal.’

For describing Jebel Abu Ghoneim (Har Homa) as ‘a big concrete housing development,’ when the complainant insisted that the buildings were faced with Jerusalem stone, Bowen was accused of using language that ‘appears to be calculated to promote hatred of the Jewish state and the Jews.’

His statement: ‘For Palestinians, the settlements are a catastrophe, made worse every day by the fact that they are expanding fast’ was upheld as accurate, even though the complainant argued that the settlements were ‘beneficial economically’ to the Palestinians, are ‘not expanding’ and they are ‘militarily necessary for Israel’s security.’ Another of Bowen’s statements that annoyed the ZF was that Israel was ‘in defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own.’ This time, the Trust found that Bowen’s language was ‘imprecise’ and suggested he should have qualified ‘everyone’ with ‘nearly everyone.’

The BBC Trust claims that Bowen’s online piece ‘breached the rules on impartiality’ because readers might come away from it thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the1967 war. As Robert Fisk commented: ‘…I suppose the BBC believes that Israel’s claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another “sensible” view of the war.’ The Independent journalist admits feeling nauseous every time he types ‘Trust’ into his laptop. ‘…That word,’ he wrote, ‘which so dishonours everything about the BBC.’

Anthony Lerman observed in the Guardian: ‘There’s something faintly distasteful about the whole exercise…one wonders whether people behaving like vexatious litigants should really be given such credence.’

The ZF submitted that the number of complaints to the BBC from pro-Palestinian groups has reduced over the past three years; hence, the BBC must be pro-Palestinian.

The BBC Trust’s report can be read in full at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/esc_bulletins/2009/mar.pdf

Meanwhile, the long-running Freedom of Information case between Steven Sugar and the BBC over publication of the Balen Report is back in the High Court. The ZF manufactured a storm over an internal document produced by a senior editorial adviser hired in 2004.  They are hopeful that Malcolm Balen, appointed to appease the zionist lobby, found the BBC was biased against Israel.  The corporation is appealing a House of Lords ruling that overturned a previous decision that the report was ‘for the purposes of journalism’ and therefore exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

None of Balen’s public comments indicate his report would be anything other than bland. The Thomas Report, an independent inquiry commissioned by the BBC Governors in 2006, took Balen’s findings into account. They concluded, far from being biased against Israel, the BBC had work to do to make their coverage more even-handed.

BBC news managers responded to Thomas: ‘An internal BBC News review, led by senior editorial adviser Malcolm Balen, led to greater resources being allocated to the Middle East and the appointment of a specific editor, veteran foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen.’

BBC Impartiality Review (3)

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Diane Langford and Robert Robinson gave oral evidence to the BBC Governors’ Independent Review Panel, Chaired by Sir Quintin Thomas.

Members of the panel were welcoming and attentive. The meeting lasted for just under an hour. We began by explaining  PSC’s aims, emphasising our independence, non-party political nature and the diversity both of our membership and partner organisations.  We stressed that we work within the framework of international and human rights law and suggested that the BBC should do the same in its coverage and terminology.

Our proposal that panel members should visit Palestine to acquaint themselves with the situation was received with non-committal smiles. One panel member told us that he found his experience of visiting Gaza reflected in our ‘interesting’ written submission. [See this blog for written submission]

The panel was told how perplexing our members find it that the BBC fails to report what is going on in Palestine when information is widely available from reliable sources. Generally BBC coverage is seen as a parallel universe – far from the one that actually exists on the ground. That the BBC shapes the news rather than reporting it is completely unacceptable.

Examples given included the false impression of two equal sides, failure to provide basic context, failure to mention occupation, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Among other issues covered were the BBC’s failure to explain the original dispossession, its constant reference to Israel’s ‘War of Independence’, repeated misinformation such as referring to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and uncritically supporting Israel’s repudiation of international law, amounting to collusion with an illegal occupation.

We also took issue with what is NOT said: no sense of the sheer scale of

dispossession, the racism suffered by indigenous Palestinians inside Israel, dearth of maps, and completely invisibilising non-violent resistance.

We reiterated our complaint about the lack of Palestinian voices, citing ‘Women’s Hour’ as culpable. Fresh examples of distortion were given, for example, the BBC’s pusillanimous coverage of Sharon’s illness in which they presented him as a ‘man of peace’, contrasting with Lindsey Hillsum’s nuanced report for Channel 4 in which she acknowledged the fact that there is no peace process – specifically mentioning that disengagement from Gaza was a move to consolidate colonies in the West Bank.

There was a discussion on the failure of the BBC as a public service broadcaster to call Israel to account, perceived as the corporation’s unquestioningly acceptance of the impunity bestowed on Israel by its powerful friends. We also discussed the ways in which the BBC bows to pressure from the Israeli Embassy, tailoring language and muzzling its own journalists.

Robert handed the panel a draft suggestion for the BBC Website regarding settlements and spoke about settler violence and the consensus amongst international human rights lawyers on the subject.

Finally we expressed the hope that the review will be seen as an opportunity to set things right. If the BBC starts to live up to its obligations as public service broadcaster this will have been a worthwhile exercise. DL