The BBC’s editorial guideline states:
3.4.2
In all our content we must check and verify information, facts and documents, where required to achieve due accuracy. If we have been unable to verify material sufficiently, we should say so and attribute the information.
And also:
3.4.4
Particular care is required when researching on the internet or using material from websites. Even normally reliable sources of information on the web may not always be accurate. We should also be alert to the possibility of hoax websites; the most convincing material on the web may not be what it seems. It may be necessary to check who is running the website or confirm with an individual or organisation that the material is genuine.
So it’s kind of sad that for two consecutive days the BBC was caught with their pants down, publishing erroneous images when reporting on Syria.
May 27, BBC News uses ‘Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre’:
“This image – wich cannot be independently verified – is believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial.”
Seriously? whoever came up with that caption is an idiot.
Firstly, around 30 children were killed in the gruesome massacre that took place in Houla, and which was reported by the BBC only a day before. A quick look at this picture is all that is needed to realise that there are way more than 30 bodies in it.
But more importantly, in the age of right-clicks and web extensions, searching for an image on the internet is as simple as, well, right clicking your mouse. Two very good image search tools that I use are TinEye, and Google Image search. Naturally, I searched this image and found one result of the original on TinEye with this link address: http://img8.tianya.cn/photo/2007/12/10/6010070_1830879.jpg. The access is denied, but the URL says all you need to know.
The Google search resulted in a blog post on shineyourlight, titled: Nine Years of War in Iraq. in it we have the original image with the following caption:
An Iraqi child jumps over a line of remains in a school where bodies had been brought from a mass grave discovered in the desert in the outskirts of Al Musayyib, 50 km south of Baghdad, May 27, 2003 in Iraq. People had been searching for days for identity cards or other clues among the skeletons to try to find the remains of family members, including children, from the grave that locals say contained the remains of hundreds of Shi’ite Muslims executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime after their uprising following the 1991 Gulf War. (Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
Furthermore, the blog post was from January this year.
So here he have 3 dates preceding May 25, the day of the massacre, in connection to this photo, but the BBC couldn’t verifiy what I could in 3 minutes?
Yesterday, the BBC was caught again: BBC News mistakes Halo UNSC logo for UN.
I won’t say much, the shame speaks for itself. I’ll just add that the photo featured on BBC is the first result for the search term “UNSC logo” on Google.
Halo is a science fiction video game franchise.
The BBC did apologise and have since retracted those images, thus they treated the symptoms but the illness remains. Such shoddy journalism should not exist in the first place. I really hope this is a result of an overly motivated desk person who wanted to impress his boss (and should get be fired ASAP, along with the editor who missed it), and not institutional policy and practice at the BBC.
