Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

It's about the careful wording, about who gets to be on the spotlight, about who gets to call the other side a tyrant, an evil state, about saying things like "regime change" and no-one batting an eye. Slowly, but surely, you form an opinion as to who the bad actor is as you've seen or read about its bad behaviour (but not of the behavior of the other party)

Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.

In a meta sense, yes, but in practice it’s mostly just a large collection of journalists and editors, real humans, working in a chaotic information space where there’s a large variety of angles and sources being put out at all times depending on the context.

It’s equally easy to cherry pick this sort of thing to build a narrative of some ulterior agenda. Especially given the high pace that news demands in the social media age.

What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.

and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.

Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.

Learn to discern what is a fact, and what is opinion presented as fact, and learn to read critically - such as question if there would be any omissions, or misrepresentations of facts to make persuasions. Learn to dissect the works, such as dramatic music and literary methods of persuasion, and how it affects the reader's perceptions.

All of this was taught in highschool literary criticism classes - just on old books and such, rather than modern material. But the same exact lessons could've been applied. Except people merely either half-assed those classes and use cliff notes, or just straight skipped them - leading to today's world where most adults are unable to critically examine the media they consume.

> What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.

Do you believe this with regard to what is happening in Israel/Palestine?

The chaos of information and what is truth is only bubbled up when 1) there's very few journalists in the area or 2) all the journalists are being killed or 3) there's no journalists and only special interests.

Consider that even if it was a "narrative" which at this point is controlled by social media, as it stands it seems to be: "these people are evil, they should be killed, sorry not sorry about the babies" or "these people are committing genocide, this bad."

> and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.

> Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.

Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.

> are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse

and who's doing that discrediting? That's also a source.

Thats a very reductive view of the situation, have you been keeping track of the headlines or are you just a disinterested outsider?

> Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.

Even when a source is unreliable, probable half-truths and lies are still valuable information when read critically and juxtaposed with many sources. Observing and noting when different factions agree and disagree on basic facts can be highly enlightening even when it's impossible to make a judgement on whether either side is right or wrong and to what degree. Identifying and recognizing the use and proliferation of canned phrases is also very helpful in constructing a mental map of the global journo-political landscape.

Also, highly credible organizations will be wrong sometimes and vice versa. One is never enough.

Sure, as a consumer, that is what you should do. But the issue at hand is that the BBC and its employees hold the BBC to a journalistic standard that it does not meet (according to those employees).

This is the kind of comment that at first glance seems measured and well-phrased. I’m sure it depicts a common situation in journalism too, after all they’re just humans like the rest of us.

The problem here is the enormity of what is actually going on in Gaza: a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot. It is not two sides in disagreement, each jostling for attention on roughly equal terms, each somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Two years in, we’re well beyond that and the only thing that matters is that one side is sadistically slaughtering the other and the world is pretending it’s not happening.

Call me crazy, but neutral journalists should not be calling either side "evil". They should be reporting what each side does and let the reader draw their own moral conclusions.

"...a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot."

So you are saying, you dont know of:

The genocide in Tigray

The Darfur genocide

The history of the DRC

The Rwandan genocide

The Genocide of Isaaqs ...