BBC's ludicrous response to my complaint about its report on the murder of Dafna Meir

BBC's online report about the terrorist attack

On 18 January I made a formal complaint to the BBC about its online report on the terrorist attack that killed Dafna Meir. My complaint was based on what I wrote here.

Below is the main part of the response (which failed to address many of the complaints I raised) from Brian Irvine. I have highlighted some especially dubious parts, but the most ludicrous is the whole paragraph in response to the complaint that the BBC never mentions Palestinians as being the perpetrators. Irvine's response is to deny this by pointing to a different report of a different terrorist attack - a report dated 8 days after my complaint - in which he says Palestinians were mentioned as being the perpetrators. So - no need to be accurate in a report so long as you can point to some different report which was accurate. This suggests the BBC's policy is to routinely fail to mention Palestinians as being the perpetrators in its reports of terrorist attacks by Palestinians as long as once in a blue moon this rather salient fact is mentioned (also note that the report he links to was the murder of Shlomit Kreigman - but you would not know this because Shlomit's name is never mentioned - another example, in fact, of the BBC's dehumanisation of Israeli victims).

I was sorry to read you were unhappy with a number of aspects of the BBC News article 'Israeli woman stabbed to death in Otniel settlement house'.

BBC News makes no distinction between the value of Israeli or Palestinian lives, and strives to report what are often highly emotive stories about the conflict in a neutral way.

Sadly and tragically, deadly violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not rare. Incidents where the scale of deaths or casualties is low unfortunately are characteristic of the ongoing conflict, and for this reason we do not routinely report each attack or violent death.

In regard to headlines, our headlines are designed to a give a short, brief outline of what the article is about and can't include all the details. This is often due to limited space and readers are expected to read the complete article to get the full picture of a particular story.

As for your comment "Palestinians are never mentioned as being the perpetrators"; this is not the case, we aim for the highest standards of accuracy in each article we publish and always seek to report on a story in impartial manner. A recent example of this can be seen here:

'Israeli woman dies of wounds after West Bank stabbing attack' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35407654

We believe we have reported on the recent violence in an accurate and impartial manner and will continue to do so.

Brian Irvine

BBC Complaints

See also:

• International community perplexed why an Arab teenager would stab to death a defenceless Jewish Mum…..  
• Rules and Guidelines for reporting on Israel
• 4-1 in favour of the Arabs - all the world will know of the murder of another Jewish woman
• Another brutal terrorist killing the media will ignore
• While Jews are murdered by Muslim terrorists the Jerusalem Post says the real threat to Jews is "Jewish terrorists" 
• Palestinians celebrate murder of Dafne Meir 
• Understanding media terminology for events in Israel 
• Exposing the antisemitic scorecards