The BBC has come under scrutiny over its Twitter guidance policy after the BBC Trust upheld a complaint against correspondent Wyre Davies who was reporting on an incident in Gaza, according to media reports on Friday.Yes, the BBC - that bastion of fair and accurate reporting - is actually defending its disseminating inaccurate and misleading information!
The trust concluded that a tweet sent by Davies breached the corporation’s accuracy guidelines after it was later established that his tweet was misleading.
Davies had tweeted: “In this ‘limited operation’ at least 13 Palestinians and 3 Israelis have been killed - nearly all civilians. #Gaza,” however it later emerged that four of the casualties were civilians. The remainder was described as “militants.”
“The Trust has not asked the Executive to carry out a formal review of its Twitter policy but rather highlighted that the current guidance of its use by BBC staff should be looked at and if necessary additional guidance be issued,” the Trust said.
Chris Hamilton, the BBC's social media editor for Journalism, stated: “To uphold the complaint would suggest that for all tweeting, from both individuals and ‘branded’ accounts (for example, @BBCBreaking), we must continuously be deleting tweets sent in good faith at the time and clarifying them with new tweets, potentially long after the event, as new information emerges on any given news story.
“It even suggests we should do the same for news stories in our website archive,” he added.
It isn't that hard. Davies could have said "according to Hamas, nearly all are civilians" so at least we would know who he is trusting with his news. The fact is that he tweeted Hamas propaganda without attributing it and without checking it out, or even attempting to. And the BBC is defending that.
The Independent adds:
In his response to the complaint, Davies - who tweeted 24 times that day on the developing situation in Gaza - noted that the number of casualties in the conflict had risen quickly and that "the 'fog of war' is also something that armchair critics at home rarely experience - we were not covering the State opening of Parliament but a brutal and confusing conflict".If it was an honest mistake, it should have been corrected by Davies. Period.
This justification after the fact for BBC's unquestioning parroting of Hamas lies is truly revealing. It proves that accuracy is not the BBC's major goal - it is more interested in defending its lies.
UPDATE: Davies tweeted this false information on November 15. Yet on the 14th, I already showed a number of lies Hamas was disseminating. The "fog of war" excuse is absurd.
I didn't realize that I was the first one to tweet a response to Davies saying he was wrong. He ignored me, as well as a CAMERA followup.
On the 14th, Davies also tweeted that "BBC sources" claimed Israel targeted Mahmoud Zahar. He emphasized that Zahar was a political, not military, target. But that was not true either, and he never corrected himself.