James Myburgh: Boer-baiting at the BBC

Key topics:BBC memo exposes guideline breaches on Trump, trans, and Israel-Palestine coverageReporting on South African farm attacks and land laws lacks full contextFactual errors and misleading statistics persist, violating BBC standardsThis article was first published by PoliticsWeb..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By James Myburgh.The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has recently been plunged into a crisis following the leaking of a memorandum by the journalist Michael Prescott, who served as an independent advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.The document, which was submitted to the BBC’s board, but seemingly disregarded, highlighted serial breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines – particularly when it came to reporting on Donald Trump, trans issues, and Israel-Palestine, particularly by the BBC’s Arabic service.An area which the memorandum did not deal with was the nature of BBC reporting on South Africa, particularly when it comes to the recent Expropriation Act, enacted earlier this year by President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the question of violence against farmers under African National Congress (ANC) rule.Much of the BBC’s recent reporting and commentary has been in response to Trump’s typically wild and hyperbolic statements on these topics. And yet correctly noting that there is not a “genocide” in South Africa – an impossible yardstick given both the rarity and enormity of that evil – does not absolve the BBC of its obligation to: “establish the truth” on such fraught matters and: “use the highest reporting standards to provide coverage that is fair and accurate.”.Read more:.FT: Trump vows to stop US assistance to South Africa over land law.This should not be difficult to do as there is good data on farm attacks and farm murders stretching back to 1991, and a sophisticated debate on how to interpret it. In its factcheck of Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Cyril Ramaphosa – where the United States President screened a video of hundreds of white crosses along a road symbolising the victims of farm murders – BBC Verify answered the question: “Has there been a genocide of white farmers?” by pointing to the fact that only 23 white people and nine black people were killed in attacks on farms and smallholdings last year. Inexplicably, however, BBC Verify failed to then go on and provide a full picture of the extent of such killings over the three decades of ANC rule.Here the data shows that during the ANC’s first decade in power about 1 300 people were killed, with two-to-three times that number injured, in over 7 000 attacks on farmsteads. Although the ANC regime blocked the release of a racial breakdown of the victims, we know from various sources that over three-quarters of those killed (about 1 000) were white, though many Coloured and Indian farmers were murdered as well. The attacks, usually by groups of armed youth, almost invariably involved an element of robbery or the looting of the property of the often-elderly deceased.If one wishes to apply a more appropriate yardstick than “genocide” one could compare these figures to the total number of Israeli civilians killed between 2000 and 2010 through the period of the Second Intifada (about 750 deaths); white civilians killed during the Rhodesian Bush War (about 500); or the number of civilians killed during the first decade of the troubles in Northern Ireland (about 1 500). The population of the commercial farming community at the time was small – probably fewer than 250 000 people – with the violence falling predominantly on those living and working on the land in the eastern half of the country.The peak of the violence against farmers was reached in the late 1990s and early 2000s with over 140 people being killed in around 1 000 farm attacks annually between 1998 and 2001, according to official police figures. Since then, the intensity of that violence has gradually diminished, and the numbers have recently fallen to the current lows highlighted by the BBC. Clearly, farmers came to be regarded as fair game for systemic robbery-murder-type as the ANC took over the country.If the BBC reported fairly and accurately on this topic – as required by its guidelines – it would have outlined that well-documented reality. Instead, its journalists go on air to deny that there exists any “problem about farmers being murdered.”The BBC’s coverage of the Afrikaner question has also breached its guidelines in more obvious ways, beyond the failure to include key historical context. In another article on whether there was a “white genocide” in South Africa the BBC baldly declared – under the subtitle “who are the Afrikaners” - that under apartheid the Afrikaner-led government had deliberately denied black people: “a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that ‘blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water’.”The insertion of this seventy-year-old quote was clearly intended to cast the Afrikaner minority in an odious historical light. (Afrikaners have also been accused on air of having regarded black people as “subhuman.”) The gratuitous inclusion of material likely to ignite feelings of hate in this manner happens to be against the guidelines. More to the point: though a widely circulated internet meme, the quote itself is fraudulent. Its inclusion was thus against the guideline which requires that: “Fact must be distinguished from rumour, particularly—but by no means exclusively—on social media, where misinformation and disinformation may be deliberate.”Five months after publication it is still sitting uncorrected on the BBC news website, a contravention of another guideline which states that: “Serious factual errors should be acknowledged and mistakes corrected promptly, clearly and appropriately.”When it comes to the Expropriation Act BBC reporting has gone out of its way to minimise the dangers of the law, which provides government with a legal instrument to confiscate minority-owned property for submarket value compensation. Instead, the corporation’s journalists have suggested that it is necessary as: “the majority of South Africa’s farmland is currently owned by the white minority. The 2017 Land Audit says: Black people who make up over 80% of the population only own 4% of farmland held by individuals more than thirty years after the end of apartheid. So, the ANC’s idea with this bill is to help rebalance South Africa’s land.”This repeated presentation of the Land Audit’s figures as authoritative by the BBC is in clear breach of yet another guideline which states that: “statistics must be accurate and verified where necessary, with important caveats and limitations explained.” The obvious limitation of the Land Audit figures is that they refer only to: “individually owned” land, a form of land ownership which covers 30,4% of the extent of the country, most of which is in the semi-arid West of the country..Read more: .Debunking Al Jazeera’s biased coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict: Woode-Smith.The vast majority of black-owned agricultural land is state-owned or held communally through trusts. Three decades after the end of white rule in South Africa the great majority of land in the high rainfall eastern crescent of South Africa is today in black hands. If one includes communal, state, and company-owned land, and adjusts for land potential, the best current estimate is that black ownership of agricultural land is ten times what the BBC claims it to be.One could carry on with other examples of the egregious way in which BBC reporting on racially loaded questions in South Africa flouts these and other guidelines. Yet the BBC’s propaganda on such matters has been so pervasive and unrelenting – and successful in shaping perceptions of these topics – that it is unlikely to ever be effectively challenged..This article was first published by PoliticsWeb and is republished with permission