Sunday, August 24, 2025
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Last week, a BBC reporter got more than she bargained for when what should have been a straightforward interview about A-Level results turned into a denunciation of her employers. Callum Johnson-Mills, a 19-year-old student at Liverpool City College, who was picking up his results that day, took the opportunity to say on-camera, “free Palestine, end the genocide, and the BBC is complicit”, calmly repeating the last part as the flustered reporter tried to get the conversation back on track.When Callum posted the clip to his TikTok account, it went wildly viral – to date it’s racked up to 5 million views on TikTok alone, which seems to indicate a widespread frustration about the BBC and its failure to accurately cover the extent and nature of Israel’s crimes in Gaza. A comprehensive study published this year, which analysed 35,000 pieces of BBC content, found that the organisation affords Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality, and that it has consistently omitted crucial context from its reporting and shut down allegations of genocide.We spoke with Callum about how he became involved in Palestine, what kind of action he’d like to see other young people take, and why we should all be willing to make things awkward.
It came from the unbiased sounding "Centre for Media Monitoring." In fact, it was created by the virulently anti-Israel Muslim Council of Britain and its report was created together with the Council of
Arab-British Understanding. The CfMM rails against any coverage of Islamist terrorism in the media and complains about the very term "Islamist" when the media refers to Boko Haram, ISIS or Hamas.
The CfMM looked at thousands of BBC reports using a methodology that was suffused with bias in its assumptions. For example, it considers every death in Gaza to be a "murder," it calls the war in Gaza a "genocide," it considers every Israeli interviewed to be pro-Israel. Based on these flawed premises and many others about how news is reported, it "found" that the BBC was biased towards Israel.
Dazed took this extraordinarily poorly devised study and promoted it as true, and then gives a worshipful interview with a person whose hate for Israel supersedes everything else.
This is just a small example of anti-Israel bias. But when multiplied by the hundreds and thousands, it is framed to give the impression that there is no other narrative at all - the entire point is not only to promote lies but also to delegitimize and marginalize the truth.
It isn't a conspiracy. No antisemites are sitting in a back room orchestrating these types of lies and media campaigns. No, it is even worse - it is the mainstreaming of antisemitic attitudes that is independently promoted by today's Jew-haters to cross-promote each other. Their methods o framing lies as obvious truths reach more and more people, gaining more adherents and therefore more "independent" voices to add to the tsunami of hate.
One can fight a small group of conspiracy theorists. But this is decentralized, peer-to-peer hate, where its cumulative strength cannot be fought with fact checks and bias exposure.
Fighting this new antisemitism needs an entire sea change in understanding how it has gotten to this point and in what must be done to counter it at its very root.
When academia, journalism, activism and politics all converge on demonizing the world's only Jewish state as uniquely evil, the problem goes way beyond media bias or corrupt curricula.
This isn’t about one college student whose anti-Israel message went viral. It’s about the machine that platforms and promotes him as heroic. There were years of priming the public to transform this bigot into a hero. And unless we address the root - the intellectual, ideological, philosophical, structural and methodological failures that power it - exposing bias will never be enough.
(h/t Jill)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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