• Pro-Palestinian protester who climbed big ben, has been charged and arrested after climbing the London landmark.
• Mainstream news outlets have offered different headlines, influencing the war of narratives in their own way.
A Palestinian protester who climbed Big Ben has been charged after spending more than 16 hours on the London icon waving a Palestinian flag on Saturday.
Pictures show Daniel Day, 29 was been lifted to the ground by a cherry picker and then arrested by police.
Westminster Bridge had been closed after a standoff between emergency services and the protester, who scaled the tower without shoes while carrying the Palestinian flag with a large crowd gathering in Parliament square to show solidarity.
Behind the police cordons protesters could be heard shouting ‘free Palestine’ and ‘you are a hero’.
Daniel posted on social media around 6pm filming himself threatening to climb higher if the negotiator on a platform came any closer.
He said: “I will come down on my terms … Right now, I’m saying I’m safe.
“If you come towards me, you’re putting me in danger and I will climb higher.”
As a result of the incident, Parliamentary tours were cancelled.
The Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty said on X there needed to be an explanation about how the man got into the parliamentary estate.
He said: “Every day in parliament I see dozens of armed police officers patrolling Portcullis House and the parliamentary estate. Where were they today?
“On Monday there needs to be a full explanation to MPs and staff as to how this protester was able to evade security so easily.”
The headlines in both the article from the BBC and The Guardian show a stark difference in language with one mentioning that the man was a pro-Palestinian protester and the other, the BBC, choosing specifically not to mention it at all.
The BBC also did not write an article until the individual responsible came down, critics could potentially argue it was to prevent protesters from raising awareness of the matter or imitating the incident in other London landmarks.
Is this new?
This is not the first time the BBC has chosen to withhold information from the British public.
In 2006 two Labour MPs leaked a proposal by president Bush of the United States to bomb Al Jazeera.
The leak was not covered by the BBC or sky news at the time even when it directly involved a conversation by then Prime Minister Tony Blair.
During the Gaza genocide the BBC Researchers from the Glasgow University Media Group analysed BBC reporting of Gaza from 7 October to 4 November 2023 and found that:
‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could be seen in relation to ‘massacre’, ‘brutal massacre’ and ‘horrific massacre’ (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinians deaths).
The BBC have also been responsible for being a state broadcaster that helped propagate the Iraq war.
A study by academics in Cardiff university shows over three weeks of conflict in Iraq, 11% of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin, the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. The BBC was the least likely to quote official Iraqi sources, and less likely than Sky, ITV or Channel 4 News to use independent (and often sceptical) sources such as the Red Cross.
The BBC has a history of hiding information and manipulating language of stories to fit their agenda, it is therefore not surprising to know and see the continuous nature of the BBC’s official bias in action rather should create caution whenever the BBC is used for information.
