Middle East ‘poised to make its mark on global content landscape,’ says TV boss

WASHINGTON: The White House on Wednesday denied reporters from Reuters and other news organizations access to President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting in keeping with the administration’s new policy regarding media coverage.
The White House denied access to an Associated Press photographer and three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost and Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper.
TV crews from ABC and Newsmax, along with correspondents from Axios, the Blaze, Bloomberg News and NPR were permitted to cover the event.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced the White House would determine which media outlets would cover the president in smaller spaces such as the Oval Office.
The White House Correspondents’ Association has traditionally coordinated the rotation of the presidential press pool. Reuters, an international wire service, has participated in the pool for decades.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that while traditional media organizations would still be permitted to cover Trump on a day-to-day basis, the administration plans to change who participates in smaller spaces. The pool system, administered by the WHCA, allowed select television, radio, wire, print and photojournalists to cover events and share their reporting with the broader media.
The three wire services that have traditionally served as permanent members of the White House pool, the AP, Bloomberg and Reuters, on Wednesday released a statement in response to the new policy.
The services “have long worked to ensure that accurate, fair and timely information about the presidency is communicated to a broad audience of all political persuasions, both in the United States and globally. Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world, comes from the wires,” the statement from the three organizations said.
“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press.”
HuffPost called the White House decision a violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press.
Der Tagesspiegel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Tuesday, the WHCA also issued a statement protesting the new White House policy.
The move follows the Trump administration’s decision to bar the Associated Press from being in the pool because it has declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the name Trump has assigned the body of water, or update its widely followed stylebook to reflect such a change.
Leavitt said the five major cable and broadcast television networks would continue to hold their rotating seats in the pool while the White House would add streaming services. Rotating print reporters and radio reporters would continue to be included, while new outlets and radio hosts would be added.

LONDON: Hundreds of media figures have called on the BBC to reinstate its documentary on children and women living in Gaza, condemning its removal as a blow to journalistic integrity.

In an open letter sent to BBC executives on Wednesday, prominent figures — including English sports broadcaster and former footballer Gary Lineker, filmmaker Ken Loach and “Game of Thrones” actor Indira Varma — criticized the network’s decision to pull “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” calling it an “essential piece of journalism.”

The signatories argued that the documentary offers “a rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians” and claimed that some of the criticism against it was rooted in “racist assumptions and the weaponization of identity.”

The BBC removed the documentary from its online platform, iPlayer, after it emerged that the narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, is the son of a Hamas official — a fact the network said had not been disclosed by the film’s producers.

The decision followed backlash from several Jewish journalists and media watchdogs, who questioned whether the BBC had unknowingly paid a Hamas-affiliated individual and criticized the broadcaster for failing to uphold commissioning standards. In response, the BBC pulled the documentary pending a “due diligence” review.

The documentary, produced by independent company Hoyo Films, was based on nine months of footage filmed in the lead-up to last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire. It followed the lives of three children as they navigated the war.

The letter — also signed by actors Khalid Abdalla, India Amarteifio, Miriam Margolyes, Ruth Negga and Juliet Stevenson — did not dispute the narrator’s family ties to Hamas but argued that his father, Dr. Ayman Al-Yazouri, served as Gaza’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture, a “civil service role concerned with food production.”

“Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanizing,” read the letter. “This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence — a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.”

The signatories also condemned the backlash against Abdullah, saying criticism of his involvement ignored “core safeguarding principles.” They emphasized that children “must not be held responsible for the actions of adults, and weaponizing family associations to discredit a child’s testimony is both unethical and dangerous.”

Warning of the broader implications of the BBC’s decision, the letter argued that removing the documentary “sets a dangerous precedent.”

It added: “As media professionals, we are extremely alarmed by the intervention of political actors, including foreign diplomats, and what this means for the future of broadcasting in this country,” it added. “If every documentary made in conflict zones were subjected to this level of politicized scrutiny regarding contributors, filmmaking in these areas would become virtually impossible.”