After Barnabas Fund made a complaint to the BBC about a news broadcast on refugees in the US that was factually inaccurate (en NIBs March), the BBC has refused to publish a correction and defended its comment.
Barnabas Fund complained about an all-embracing comment concerning Christian refugees seeking to enter the USA that was made by their New York correspondent Nick Bryant near the beginning of the BBC 10pm TV news: ‘In an interview with an evangelical television network [President Trump] claimed without any factual basis the old Obama policy favoured Muslims over Christians’.
Barnabas Fund objected to the statement ‘without any factual basis’ and pointed out that a brief online search by the BBC would have revealed not only Barnabas Fund, but a number of news outlets that have been reporting during the past year that only 0.5% of Syrian refugees admitted to the USA were Christians. This is despite them constituting up to 10% of Syria’s pre-war population and US Secretary of State John Kerry having accepted in March (2016) that they were facing genocide. Of 10,801 Syrian refugees admitted to the USA last year only 56 were Christians (there were also only 20 Shi’a and 17 Yazidis), while 99% were Sunni Muslims.
