#aljazeera

Is The BBC Bias? Al Jazeera Writes "Iran Claims," Auntie Skips Straight To Believing Them Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Did Not Occur. One Newsroom Reached For The Word "Claimed." It Was Not The One Funded By The British Public. LONDON. Somewhere in Stevenage right now there is a man holding a cooling mug of tea and staring at his phone as though it has just cancelled Christmas. At 11:40 last night he typed is the BBC bias into Google, phrased exactly like that, because it was late and he was furious and grammar is for people whose broadcasters haven't let them down. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows. What set him off was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed." When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his brother-in-law calls "terror telly," ran the only headline of the night that would survive contact with a first-year journalism seminar: Iran claims to have struck back. The BBC went with Iran strikes back. So did The Guardian, which reported the strike as established fact and moved briskly on to what it meant for the climate. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times filed the retaliation as history and began investigating the emotional aftermath. There was just one problem with the strike, which is that it largely failed to occur. The missiles that launched were mostly intercepted, several others toured the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on three Western front pages without a single warhead arriving. Seven Letters Auntie Couldn't Afford "Claimed" is not a fancy word. It costs nothing. It requires no satellite analysis, no flak jacket, no correspondent on a Doha hotel roof gesturing at the horizon as though the horizon owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: dull, cheap, and the only thing standing between the reader and the windscreen when a regime's press release turns out to be travelling at speed. "Attribution is the entire job," explained Dr. Margaret Pellow, a media researcher who works from a converted garden shed in Leamington Spa and would like everyone to know the shed is insulated. "A foreign government announces a military triumph. You write that they announced it. You do not write that it happened, because you were not there, and neither, as it turns out, were the missiles." The corporation's own editorial guidelines on impartiality run to thousands of words about due weight, due balance, and due care. Nowhere, apparently, do they mention due verbs. The result was the strange spectacle of a broadcaster so anxious about appearing to take sides that it took Tehran's, by accident, out of politeness. "I went in wanting to know whether Iran had actually hit anything," said Derek Ainsworth, a retired geography teacher from Harrogate who reads five news sites every morning in an order his wife considers obsessive. "The BBC told me Iran struck back. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By teatime, it emerged that the difference between those two sentences was approximately every missile." Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Three Front Pages Here is the part the explainers never quite explained. Iran's capacity to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the great open secret of the conflict. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its missile barrages have been launched with hours of advance notice, into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results that military analysts describe, in technical language, as fireworks with a press strategy. The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a Western news desk on deadline, an institution with no air defences whatsoever and a deep institutional yearning to type the words "Iran strikes back," which is, let's be honest, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims to strike back, claim disputed by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but has the inconvenient advantage of being what happened. "Tehran has discovered something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was the Guardian headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial." BBC Verify, the corporation's celebrated fact-checking unit, did eventually produce satellite analysis of the impact sites, examining craters with the forensic enthusiasm of a man measuring his neighbour's hedge. The craters were verified. The verb never was. Verify checked everything about the strike except whether the headline should have called it one. Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Makes This Worse Before anyone in Doha has this article framed, let us be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and dines out on it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state, and Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive on the planet to be gentle. Which is precisely what makes the whole thing so humiliating. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones staffed by people who give lectures about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as a result. The supposed propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it. "Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organisations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The BBC was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for the Americans that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying." The Licence Fee: £174.50 A Year, Attribution Sold Separately And here is the part that stings. Al Jazeera is free. The BBC costs £174.50 a year, collected with the gentle menace of an institution that once sent detector vans round to peer at people's aerials, making it the only broadcaster on Earth whose viewers can be criminally prosecuted for watching the competition without paying for the incumbent. For that money, the British viewer received a live page, four explainers, a quiz, and a retaliation that didn't happen, reported as one that did. The one word that would have fixed it was available free of charge in any dictionary. YouGov's long-running tracker on trust in BBC journalists has been sliding for years, and the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report keeps finding that Britons choose outlets like medieval knights choosing coats of arms. The Guardian signals virtue. GB News signals rebellion. The BBC signals that you still believe in institutions, bless you. Al Jazeera now signals that the person sharing it is about to say "well, actually, check the verb," and no force in Britain can stop him. The sensible people at Latest Story have been recommending the boring alternative for ages: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for someone other than the government to confirm it. What The Man In Stevenage Decided Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the licence fee payer who paid £174.50 to be told about a missile strike that was intercepted somewhere over the word 'claimed.'" Because that is the sincere bit, underneath the jokes. The word "claimed" is not pedantry. It is the whole contract. A reader cannot be everywhere, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf, and the night that question got asked in Doha instead of London is a night worth being furious about. When newspapers report claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated. As for the man in Stevenage, he has reached his own settlement with reality. He still watches the BBC, because he is British and change frightens him. But last Tuesday, quietly, with the curtains drawn, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out of the window at the wheelie bins and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire. If it has, reality should know we are a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal. Our American colleagues at Bohiney.com ran the same comparison against The New York Times and arrived at the same place, only louder and with worse tea. Disclaimer This article is British satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article

Is The BBC Bias? Al Jazeera Writes "Iran Claims," Auntie Skips Straight To Believing Them Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Did Not Occur. One Newsroom Reached For The Word "Claimed." It Was Not The One Funded By The British Public. LONDON. Somewhere in Stevenage right now there is a man holding a cooling mug of tea and staring at his phone as though it has just cancelled Christmas. At 11:40 last night he typed is the BBC bias into Google, phrased exactly like that, because it was late and he was furious and grammar is for people whose broadcasters haven't let them down. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows. What set him off was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed." When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his brother-in-law calls "terror telly," ran the only headline of the night that would survive contact with a first-year journalism seminar: Iran claims to have struck back. The BBC went with Iran strikes back. So did The Guardian, which reported the strike as established fact and moved briskly on to what it meant for the climate. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times filed the retaliation as history and began investigating the emotional aftermath. There was just one problem with the strike, which is that it largely failed to occur. The missiles that launched were mostly intercepted, several others toured the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on three Western front pages without a single warhead arriving. Seven Letters Auntie Couldn't Afford "Claimed" is not a fancy word. It costs nothing. It requires no satellite analysis, no flak jacket, no correspondent on a Doha hotel roof gesturing at the horizon as though the horizon owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: dull, cheap, and the only thing standing between the reader and the windscreen when a regime's press release turns out to be travelling at speed. "Attribution is the entire job," explained Dr. Margaret Pellow, a media researcher who works from a converted garden shed in Leamington Spa and would like everyone to know the shed is insulated. "A foreign government announces a military triumph. You write that they announced it. You do not write that it happened, because you were not there, and neither, as it turns out, were the missiles." The corporation's own editorial guidelines on impartiality run to thousands of words about due weight, due balance, and due care. Nowhere, apparently, do they mention due verbs. The result was the strange spectacle of a broadcaster so anxious about appearing to take sides that it took Tehran's, by accident, out of politeness. "I went in wanting to know whether Iran had actually hit anything," said Derek Ainsworth, a retired geography teacher from Harrogate who reads five news sites every morning in an order his wife considers obsessive. "The BBC told me Iran struck back. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By teatime, it emerged that the difference between those two sentences was approximately every missile." Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Three Front Pages Here is the part the explainers never quite explained. Iran's capacity to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the great open secret of the conflict. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its missile barrages have been launched with hours of advance notice, into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results that military analysts describe, in technical language, as fireworks with a press strategy. The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a Western news desk on deadline, an institution with no air defences whatsoever and a deep institutional yearning to type the words "Iran strikes back," which is, let's be honest, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims to strike back, claim disputed by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but has the inconvenient advantage of being what happened. "Tehran has discovered something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was the Guardian headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial." BBC Verify, the corporation's celebrated fact-checking unit, did eventually produce satellite analysis of the impact sites, examining craters with the forensic enthusiasm of a man measuring his neighbour's hedge. The craters were verified. The verb never was. Verify checked everything about the strike except whether the headline should have called it one. Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Makes This Worse Before anyone in Doha has this article framed, let us be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and dines out on it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state, and Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive on the planet to be gentle. Which is precisely what makes the whole thing so humiliating. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones staffed by people who give lectures about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as a result. The supposed propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it. "Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organisations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The BBC was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for the Americans that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying." The Licence Fee: £174.50 A Year, Attribution Sold Separately And here is the part that stings. Al Jazeera is free. The BBC costs £174.50 a year, collected with the gentle menace of an institution that once sent detector vans round to peer at people's aerials, making it the only broadcaster on Earth whose viewers can be criminally prosecuted for watching the competition without paying for the incumbent. For that money, the British viewer received a live page, four explainers, a quiz, and a retaliation that didn't happen, reported as one that did. The one word that would have fixed it was available free of charge in any dictionary. YouGov's long-running tracker on trust in BBC journalists has been sliding for years, and the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report keeps finding that Britons choose outlets like medieval knights choosing coats of arms. The Guardian signals virtue. GB News signals rebellion. The BBC signals that you still believe in institutions, bless you. Al Jazeera now signals that the person sharing it is about to say "well, actually, check the verb," and no force in Britain can stop him. The sensible people at Latest Story have been recommending the boring alternative for ages: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for someone other than the government to confirm it. What The Man In Stevenage Decided Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the licence fee payer who paid £174.50 to be told about a missile strike that was intercepted somewhere over the word 'claimed.'" Because that is the sincere bit, underneath the jokes. The word "claimed" is not pedantry. It is the whole contract. A reader cannot be everywhere, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf, and the night that question got asked in Doha instead of London is a night worth being furious about. When newspapers report claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated. As for the man in Stevenage, he has reached his own settlement with reality. He still watches the BBC, because he is British and change frightens him. But last Tuesday, quietly, with the curtains drawn, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out of the window at the wheelie bins and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire. If it has, reality should know we are a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal. Our American colleagues at Bohiney.com ran the same comparison against The New York Times and arrived at the same place, only louder and with worse tea. Disclaimer This article is British satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article

Is The BBC Bias? Al Jazeera Writes "Iran Claims," Auntie Skips Straight To Believing Them Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Did Not Occur. One Newsroom Reached For The Word "Claimed." It Was Not The One Funded By The British Public. LONDON. Somewhere in Stevenage right now there is a man holding a cooling mug of tea and staring at his phone as though it has just cancelled Christmas. At 11:40 last night he typed is the BBC bias into Google, phrased exactly like that, because it was late and he was furious and grammar is for people whose broadcasters haven't let them down. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows. What set him off was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed." When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his brother-in-law calls "terror telly," ran the only headline of the night that would survive contact with a first-year journalism seminar: Iran claims to have struck back. The BBC went with Iran strikes back. So did The Guardian, which reported the strike as established fact and moved briskly on to what it meant for the climate. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times filed the retaliation as history and began investigating the emotional aftermath. There was just one problem with the strike, which is that it largely failed to occur. The missiles that launched were mostly intercepted, several others toured the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on three Western front pages without a single warhead arriving. Seven Letters Auntie Couldn't Afford "Claimed" is not a fancy word. It costs nothing. It requires no satellite analysis, no flak jacket, no correspondent on a Doha hotel roof gesturing at the horizon as though the horizon owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: dull, cheap, and the only thing standing between the reader and the windscreen when a regime's press release turns out to be travelling at speed. "Attribution is the entire job," explained Dr. Margaret Pellow, a media researcher who works from a converted garden shed in Leamington Spa and would like everyone to know the shed is insulated. "A foreign government announces a military triumph. You write that they announced it. You do not write that it happened, because you were not there, and neither, as it turns out, were the missiles." The corporation's own editorial guidelines on impartiality run to thousands of words about due weight, due balance, and due care. Nowhere, apparently, do they mention due verbs. The result was the strange spectacle of a broadcaster so anxious about appearing to take sides that it took Tehran's, by accident, out of politeness. "I went in wanting to know whether Iran had actually hit anything," said Derek Ainsworth, a retired geography teacher from Harrogate who reads five news sites every morning in an order his wife considers obsessive. "The BBC told me Iran struck back. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By teatime, it emerged that the difference between those two sentences was approximately every missile." Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Three Front Pages Here is the part the explainers never quite explained. Iran's capacity to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the great open secret of the conflict. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its missile barrages have been launched with hours of advance notice, into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results that military analysts describe, in technical language, as fireworks with a press strategy. The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a Western news desk on deadline, an institution with no air defences whatsoever and a deep institutional yearning to type the words "Iran strikes back," which is, let's be honest, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims to strike back, claim disputed by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but has the inconvenient advantage of being what happened. "Tehran has discovered something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was the Guardian headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial." BBC Verify, the corporation's celebrated fact-checking unit, did eventually produce satellite analysis of the impact sites, examining craters with the forensic enthusiasm of a man measuring his neighbour's hedge. The craters were verified. The verb never was. Verify checked everything about the strike except whether the headline should have called it one. Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Makes This Worse Before anyone in Doha has this article framed, let us be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and dines out on it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state, and Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive on the planet to be gentle. Which is precisely what makes the whole thing so humiliating. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones staffed by people who give lectures about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as a result. The supposed propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it. "Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organisations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The BBC was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for the Americans that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying." The Licence Fee: £174.50 A Year, Attribution Sold Separately And here is the part that stings. Al Jazeera is free. The BBC costs £174.50 a year, collected with the gentle menace of an institution that once sent detector vans round to peer at people's aerials, making it the only broadcaster on Earth whose viewers can be criminally prosecuted for watching the competition without paying for the incumbent. For that money, the British viewer received a live page, four explainers, a quiz, and a retaliation that didn't happen, reported as one that did. The one word that would have fixed it was available free of charge in any dictionary. YouGov's long-running tracker on trust in BBC journalists has been sliding for years, and the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report keeps finding that Britons choose outlets like medieval knights choosing coats of arms. The Guardian signals virtue. GB News signals rebellion. The BBC signals that you still believe in institutions, bless you. Al Jazeera now signals that the person sharing it is about to say "well, actually, check the verb," and no force in Britain can stop him. The sensible people at Latest Story have been recommending the boring alternative for ages: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for someone other than the government to confirm it. What The Man In Stevenage Decided Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the licence fee payer who paid £174.50 to be told about a missile strike that was intercepted somewhere over the word 'claimed.'" Because that is the sincere bit, underneath the jokes. The word "claimed" is not pedantry. It is the whole contract. A reader cannot be everywhere, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf, and the night that question got asked in Doha instead of London is a night worth being furious about. When newspapers report claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated. As for the man in Stevenage, he has reached his own settlement with reality. He still watches the BBC, because he is British and change frightens him. But last Tuesday, quietly, with the curtains drawn, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out of the window at the wheelie bins and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire. If it has, reality should know we are a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal. Our American colleagues at Bohiney.com ran the same comparison against The New York Times and arrived at the same place, only louder and with worse tea. Disclaimer This article is British satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article

Is The BBC Bias? Al Jazeera Writes "Iran Claims," Auntie Skips Straight To Believing Them Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Did Not Occur. One Newsroom Reached For The Word "Claimed." It Was Not The One Funded By The British Public. LONDON. Somewhere in Stevenage right now there is a man holding a cooling mug of tea and staring at his phone as though it has just cancelled Christmas. At 11:40 last night he typed is the BBC bias into Google, phrased exactly like that, because it was late and he was furious and grammar is for people whose broadcasters haven't let them down. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows. What set him off was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed." When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his brother-in-law calls "terror telly," ran the only headline of the night that would survive contact with a first-year journalism seminar: Iran claims to have struck back. The BBC went with Iran strikes back. So did The Guardian, which reported the strike as established fact and moved briskly on to what it meant for the climate. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times filed the retaliation as history and began investigating the emotional aftermath. There was just one problem with the strike, which is that it largely failed to occur. The missiles that launched were mostly intercepted, several others toured the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on three Western front pages without a single warhead arriving. Seven Letters Auntie Couldn't Afford "Claimed" is not a fancy word. It costs nothing. It requires no satellite analysis, no flak jacket, no correspondent on a Doha hotel roof gesturing at the horizon as though the horizon owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: dull, cheap, and the only thing standing between the reader and the windscreen when a regime's press release turns out to be travelling at speed. "Attribution is the entire job," explained Dr. Margaret Pellow, a media researcher who works from a converted garden shed in Leamington Spa and would like everyone to know the shed is insulated. "A foreign government announces a military triumph. You write that they announced it. You do not write that it happened, because you were not there, and neither, as it turns out, were the missiles." The corporation's own editorial guidelines on impartiality run to thousands of words about due weight, due balance, and due care. Nowhere, apparently, do they mention due verbs. The result was the strange spectacle of a broadcaster so anxious about appearing to take sides that it took Tehran's, by accident, out of politeness. "I went in wanting to know whether Iran had actually hit anything," said Derek Ainsworth, a retired geography teacher from Harrogate who reads five news sites every morning in an order his wife considers obsessive. "The BBC told me Iran struck back. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By teatime, it emerged that the difference between those two sentences was approximately every missile." Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Three Front Pages Here is the part the explainers never quite explained. Iran's capacity to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the great open secret of the conflict. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its missile barrages have been launched with hours of advance notice, into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results that military analysts describe, in technical language, as fireworks with a press strategy. The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a Western news desk on deadline, an institution with no air defences whatsoever and a deep institutional yearning to type the words "Iran strikes back," which is, let's be honest, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims to strike back, claim disputed by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but has the inconvenient advantage of being what happened. "Tehran has discovered something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was the Guardian headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial." BBC Verify, the corporation's celebrated fact-checking unit, did eventually produce satellite analysis of the impact sites, examining craters with the forensic enthusiasm of a man measuring his neighbour's hedge. The craters were verified. The verb never was. Verify checked everything about the strike except whether the headline should have called it one. Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Makes This Worse Before anyone in Doha has this article framed, let us be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and dines out on it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state, and Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive on the planet to be gentle. Which is precisely what makes the whole thing so humiliating. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones staffed by people who give lectures about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as a result. The supposed propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it. "Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organisations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The BBC was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for the Americans that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying." The Licence Fee: £174.50 A Year, Attribution Sold Separately And here is the part that stings. Al Jazeera is free. The BBC costs £174.50 a year, collected with the gentle menace of an institution that once sent detector vans round to peer at people's aerials, making it the only broadcaster on Earth whose viewers can be criminally prosecuted for watching the competition without paying for the incumbent. For that money, the British viewer received a live page, four explainers, a quiz, and a retaliation that didn't happen, reported as one that did. The one word that would have fixed it was available free of charge in any dictionary. YouGov's long-running tracker on trust in BBC journalists has been sliding for years, and the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report keeps finding that Britons choose outlets like medieval knights choosing coats of arms. The Guardian signals virtue. GB News signals rebellion. The BBC signals that you still believe in institutions, bless you. Al Jazeera now signals that the person sharing it is about to say "well, actually, check the verb," and no force in Britain can stop him. The sensible people at Latest Story have been recommending the boring alternative for ages: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for someone other than the government to confirm it. What The Man In Stevenage Decided Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the licence fee payer who paid £174.50 to be told about a missile strike that was intercepted somewhere over the word 'claimed.'" Because that is the sincere bit, underneath the jokes. The word "claimed" is not pedantry. It is the whole contract. A reader cannot be everywhere, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf, and the night that question got asked in Doha instead of London is a night worth being furious about. When newspapers report claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated. As for the man in Stevenage, he has reached his own settlement with reality. He still watches the BBC, because he is British and change frightens him. But last Tuesday, quietly, with the curtains drawn, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out of the window at the wheelie bins and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire. If it has, reality should know we are a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal. Our American colleagues at Bohiney.com ran the same comparison against The New York Times and arrived at the same place, only louder and with worse tea. Disclaimer This article is British satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article

Is The BBC Bias? Al Jazeera Writes "Iran Claims," Auntie Skips Straight To Believing Them Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Did Not Occur. One Newsroom Reached For The Word "Claimed." It Was Not The One Funded By The British Public. LONDON. Somewhere in Stevenage right now there is a man holding a cooling mug of tea and staring at his phone as though it has just cancelled Christmas. At 11:40 last night he typed is the BBC bias into Google, phrased exactly like that, because it was late and he was furious and grammar is for people whose broadcasters haven't let them down. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows. What set him off was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed." When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his brother-in-law calls "terror telly," ran the only headline of the night that would survive contact with a first-year journalism seminar: Iran claims to have struck back. The BBC went with Iran strikes back. So did The Guardian, which reported the strike as established fact and moved briskly on to what it meant for the climate. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times filed the retaliation as history and began investigating the emotional aftermath. There was just one problem with the strike, which is that it largely failed to occur. The missiles that launched were mostly intercepted, several others toured the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on three Western front pages without a single warhead arriving. Seven Letters Auntie Couldn't Afford "Claimed" is not a fancy word. It costs nothing. It requires no satellite analysis, no flak jacket, no correspondent on a Doha hotel roof gesturing at the horizon as though the horizon owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: dull, cheap, and the only thing standing between the reader and the windscreen when a regime's press release turns out to be travelling at speed. "Attribution is the entire job," explained Dr. Margaret Pellow, a media researcher who works from a converted garden shed in Leamington Spa and would like everyone to know the shed is insulated. "A foreign government announces a military triumph. You write that they announced it. You do not write that it happened, because you were not there, and neither, as it turns out, were the missiles." The corporation's own editorial guidelines on impartiality run to thousands of words about due weight, due balance, and due care. Nowhere, apparently, do they mention due verbs. The result was the strange spectacle of a broadcaster so anxious about appearing to take sides that it took Tehran's, by accident, out of politeness. "I went in wanting to know whether Iran had actually hit anything," said Derek Ainsworth, a retired geography teacher from Harrogate who reads five news sites every morning in an order his wife considers obsessive. "The BBC told me Iran struck back. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By teatime, it emerged that the difference between those two sentences was approximately every missile." Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Three Front Pages Here is the part the explainers never quite explained. Iran's capacity to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the great open secret of the conflict. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its missile barrages have been launched with hours of advance notice, into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results that military analysts describe, in technical language, as fireworks with a press strategy. The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a Western news desk on deadline, an institution with no air defences whatsoever and a deep institutional yearning to type the words "Iran strikes back," which is, let's be honest, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims to strike back, claim disputed by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but has the inconvenient advantage of being what happened. "Tehran has discovered something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was the Guardian headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial." BBC Verify, the corporation's celebrated fact-checking unit, did eventually produce satellite analysis of the impact sites, examining craters with the forensic enthusiasm of a man measuring his neighbour's hedge. The craters were verified. The verb never was. Verify checked everything about the strike except whether the headline should have called it one. Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Makes This Worse Before anyone in Doha has this article framed, let us be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and dines out on it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state, and Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive on the planet to be gentle. Which is precisely what makes the whole thing so humiliating. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones staffed by people who give lectures about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as a result. The supposed propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it. "Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organisations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The BBC was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for the Americans that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying." The Licence Fee: £174.50 A Year, Attribution Sold Separately And here is the part that stings. Al Jazeera is free. The BBC costs £174.50 a year, collected with the gentle menace of an institution that once sent detector vans round to peer at people's aerials, making it the only broadcaster on Earth whose viewers can be criminally prosecuted for watching the competition without paying for the incumbent. For that money, the British viewer received a live page, four explainers, a quiz, and a retaliation that didn't happen, reported as one that did. The one word that would have fixed it was available free of charge in any dictionary. YouGov's long-running tracker on trust in BBC journalists has been sliding for years, and the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report keeps finding that Britons choose outlets like medieval knights choosing coats of arms. The Guardian signals virtue. GB News signals rebellion. The BBC signals that you still believe in institutions, bless you. Al Jazeera now signals that the person sharing it is about to say "well, actually, check the verb," and no force in Britain can stop him. The sensible people at Latest Story have been recommending the boring alternative for ages: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for someone other than the government to confirm it. What The Man In Stevenage Decided Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the licence fee payer who paid £174.50 to be told about a missile strike that was intercepted somewhere over the word 'claimed.'" Because that is the sincere bit, underneath the jokes. The word "claimed" is not pedantry. It is the whole contract. A reader cannot be everywhere, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf, and the night that question got asked in Doha instead of London is a night worth being furious about. When newspapers report claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated. As for the man in Stevenage, he has reached his own settlement with reality. He still watches the BBC, because he is British and change frightens him. But last Tuesday, quietly, with the curtains drawn, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out of the window at the wheelie bins and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire. If it has, reality should know we are a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal. Our American colleagues at Bohiney.com ran the same comparison against The New York Times and arrived at the same place, only louder and with worse tea. Disclaimer This article is British satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article

Listening to journalist Yara Elmjouie talk abt real opinions from Iranians within the country and from the diaspora.