Asia Pacific Report
A decision by the Broadcasting Standards Authority to uphold a complaint against a 1News broadcast last November is a warning to news media, says the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa.
The authority ruled that a TVNZ news item on violence in Amsterdam in the Netherlands breached BSA rules.
1News described violence in the streets of Amsterdam on November 7 and 8 following a soccer match as “disturbing” and ‘antisemitic’ and stated the graphic video of beatings were Maccabi Tel Aviv fans under attack just for being Jewish.
- READ MORE: Framing violence: How Israel shaped the narrative and its impact on Dutch politics
- Israeli football hooligans bring culture of genocide to Amsterdam
- Inaccurate 1News reporting on football violence breached broadcasting standards, rules BSA
Videographers who took the footage which 1News had used, complained to their news agencies that this description was wrong. The violence had been perpetrated by the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans against those they suspected of being Arab or supporters of Palestine.
The visiting Israelis were the attackers — not the victims, said the PSNA statement, as widely reported by global media correcting initial reports.
Before the match these same Maccabi fans had gathered in large groups to chant “Death to Arabs” — a racist genocidal chant which if used with the races reversed (“Arabs” replaced by Jews”) “would have been rightly condemned in purple prose by Western news media such as TVNZ”, said PSNA co-chair John Minto in the statement.
“But no such sympathy for Palestinians or Arabs,” he added.
Requested broadcast correction
PSNA said in its statement that it had immediately requested that TVNZ broadcast a correction. TVNZ refused, though admitting they had got the story wrong.
PSNA then referred a complaint to the BSA which upheld the complaint as failing to meet the accuracy standard.
Minto said in the statement that the BSA decision should be seen as a warning to news media to be aware that Israel was using “fabricated charges of antisemitism, to justify and divert attention from its genocide in Gaza and silence its critics”.
“Just because [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and the then US President Joe Biden made statements turning Amsterdam attackers into victims, doesn’t mean TVNZ news should automatically parrot them,” Minto said.
“That’s effectively what the BSA concluded.”
Framing violence: How Israel shaped the narrative and the impact on Dutch politics Video: Al Jazeera
Minto also pointed to what he called a recent fabricated hysteria about antisemitism in Sydney, which the New South Wales police found to be completely based on hoaxes by a criminal gang.
“In the US, Trump is using the same charge as an excuse to close down university courses and expel anyone who protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” Minto said.
“Of course, we strongly condemn the real antisemitism of anti-Jewish, Nazi-type Islamophobic groups,” Minto says.
Call for media ‘self education’
“It should be easy for professional reporters and editors to tell the difference between criticism of Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and violence on one hand, and on the other hand Nazis and their fellow travellers who condemn Jews because they are Jews.
“The BSA is, in effect, demanding the news media educate themselves.”
In a half-hour report on 16 November 2024 headlined “Media bias, inaccuracy and the violence in Amsterdam”, Al Jazeera’s global mediawatch programme The Listening Post said “one night of violence revealed … Western media’s failings on Israel and Palestine”.
“In the wake of an ugly eruption of violence on the streets of Amsterdam, the media coverage of the story [was] put under the microscope with editors scrambling to revise headlines, rework narratives, and reframe video content.”
In an investigative documentary, The Full Report, on 22 January 2025, Al Jazeera’s Dutch correspondent Step Vaessen reported how Israel had framed the violence, shaped the narrative, manipulated the global media, and impacted on Dutch politics.
