BBC News website changes headline wrongly implying Northern Ireland culture minister tried to foist 'pro-Israeli stance' on Belfast arts festival. 'McCausland defends Belfast festival pro-Israeli stance' was originally published on 24 March and reported that Nelson McCausland had approached the festival requesting the inclusion of 'pro-Israeli views and Christian music' at this year's event. The article quoted the minister from the relevant email correspondence with a festival organiser, in which he asked for 'a view sympathetic to Israel in any relevant talk or debate'. However, the context for the intervention was only referenced towards the end of the piece and was itself insufficient: 'The culture minister said he had asked the festival to include pro-Israeli views as a previous Israeli speaker had had his invitation withdrawn at the last minute by the festival.' Fri. 1 Apr. 2011 @ 13.06 - Lawyer claims that thousands of leading Islamists will soon arrive in Egypt from a variety of notorious centres for radical Islam - including Afghanistan, Somalia and Chechnya. Ibrahim Ali, an Egyptian lawyer who works with Islamist groups, has claimed that thousands of leading Islamists from around the world are preparing to return to Egypt in the next few days in light of the regime change. According to the Egyptian Al Masry Al Youm, Ali predicted that: '3000 leading figures of the Jama'a al-Islamyia and Egyptian Islamic Jihad groups will return to Egypt in a few days, as their names have been dropped from the "wanted" list maintained by Egyptian security forces.' The article then quotes Ali's list of where the individuals are coming from, citing many countries well-known as breeding grounds for radical Islam - alongside London: 'They are coming back from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Kenya, Iran and London'. Wed. 30 Mar. 2011 @ 18.07 - Coverage of new Amnesty International report includes references to executions conducted by 'Palestinian Authority' - despite all uses of the death penalty conducted by Hamas in Gaza. On Monday, Amnesty International released its latest report on the global use of the death penalty throughout the world. 'Death Sentences and Executions in 2010 report' includes details of '527 executions in 23 countries', excluding China. The coverage of the report on the BBC News website and The Guardian's blog include data from Amnesty that misleadingly implies that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has been responsible for several executions in 2010 - when all recorded instances of capital punishment were conducted by Hamas in Gaza. Both the BBC's 'Amnesty International: Global death penalty trend falls' and The Guardian's 'Death penalty statistics, country by country' include tables - citing Amnesty's figures - that refer to 'The Palestinian Authority' as one of the territories that has conducted executions in 2010. The term 'Palestinian Authority' is taken from Amnesty's report and press materials, which use it as an all-encompassing descriptor for both of the Palestinian territories. Nick Cohen cites an exclusive interview with the brother of a Libyan dissident conducted by Michael Weiss for Just Journalism. They Missed the Story, April 2011 Nick Cohen The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan composed an aphorism as he watched dictatorships pile opprobrium on democracies: "The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there." Journalists, lawyers, academics and opposition politicians can investigate the injustices of democracies, and because they can investigate, injustice is kept in check. They cannot expose the greater atrocities of dictatorships because there is no freedom to report, and hence their greater crimes pass unnoticed. I have my doubts about the universal jurisdiction of Moynihan's Law - America was responsible for many great crimes while he was its good and faithful servant. But his insight explains why Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career. The BBC's Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians' problem - and vice versa - the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced. 
April 1, 2011 The Wire BBC amends misleading Belfast festival headline
Fri. 1 Apr. 2011 @ 13.15 -The Wire Thousands of leading Islamists set to 'come back' to Egypt - including from London
The Wire Coverage of Amnesty report repeats misleading 'Palestinian Authority' reference
Press They Missed the Story
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Friday, 1 April 2011
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