Mick Hartley

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BBC reporting

From the JC:

A BBC journalist who wrongly suggested Israel was behind last week’s Gaza hospital blast had previously caused outrage by presenting a picture of an injured Syrian girl as a “heartbreaking” image of a Palestinian child hurt in an Israeli attack.

The BBC is being urged to take further action against Jon Donnison, who has worked for the corporation for 15 years. In November 2012, he shared a picture of a young girl lying on a hospital bed with bloodied clothes, which had been taken in Syria.

Posting on X/Twitter, he captioned the image with the words: “Heartbreaking. Pain in #Gaza’.” The original photograph was posted by Palestinian journalist Hazem Balousha.

After realising his mistake, Donnison apologised for the post and said: “A photo I retweeted from another journo showing injured children was not in Gaza as I said but apparently from Syria. Apologies.”

Well well. It's almost like he's primed to believe the worst of Israel – and to accept every Palestinian report.

The BBC's problem in a nutshell…

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2 responses to “BBC reporting”

  1. Graham Avatar
    Graham

    I first became aware of Jon Donnison watching a BBC report in the late noughties during a wave of attacks including a bus bombing and after it being described by the presenter in the studio, they went live Donnison somewhere in Israel. He described how the bus had been almost blown in half and then added,’We don’t know if the bomb was intended to kill anyone’. It was such an incongruous and inexplicable statement that it went round and round in my mind for a day or so before it clicked, that he’d intentionally been trying to minimise the seriousness of the attack.

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  2. Joanne Avatar
    Joanne

    ‘The BBC’s problem in a nutshell…’
    And not just the BBC’s. I think this has been going on for a long time in the Western media. Remember Charles Enderlin’s report on the shooting of Muhammad al Durah on France2, which was very possibly faked? The entire report was originally provided by a freelance Palestinian cameraman in Enderlin’s employ who was a member of Fatah.

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