Bad News From The BBC 

'Replete With Imbalance And Distortion'

By Media Lens

May 25, 2011 "Media Lens" -- One of the main headlines on the BBC
news homepage earlier this month read, 'Violence erupts at Israel borders'.
Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens
more. BBC 'impartiality' decreed that the brutal killings were presented
almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.

Clicking on the link did at least bring up a more accurate headline: 'Israeli

forces open fire at Palestinian protesters'. But the brutality was sanitised,
with no details of the many victims. The Israeli viewpoint was prominent
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he 'hoped' that
'calm and quiet will quickly return, but let nobody be mistaken, we are
determined to defend our borders and sovereignty'.

Somehow a 'neutral' BBC perspective dictated that the lead image

illustrating the story was of young Palestinian men throwing rocks in
'clashes' with fully armed soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces.

The Palestinians had been taking part in annual protests on Nakba

('Catastrophe') day which, as the BBC put it, 'marks the moment when
100,000s of Palestinians lost their homes' on the establishment of the state
of Israel in 1948. Again, the BBC's sanitised version of 'lost their
homes' buries awkward history, as though homes had simply been
repossessed when families fell behind on their mortgage payments. In
reality, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000
people, had been uprooted and 531 village destroyed (Ilan Pappe, 'The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', Oneworld, 2006).

After complaints from us, and perhaps realising the newspeak was just too
much to swallow, the BBC tweaked the sentence the following day to read:

'Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their

homes in fighting after its creation.'

BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir was quick to implicate foreign

powers in the latest annual Nakba protests, asking the leading
question: 'Palestinian protests: Arab spring or foreign manipulation?' and
pointing his finger at Syria and Iran. True to type, the BBC journalist's
'analysis' was not a million miles distant from the message being broadcast
from Tel Aviv. Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist based in
Nazareth, notes:

'With characteristic obtuseness, Israel's leaders identified Iranian

"fingerprints" on the day's events - as though Palestinians lacked enough
grievances of their own to stage protests.' (Jonathan Cook, 'On an old
anniversary, a new sense that change is possible', The National, 17 May,
2011)

The BBC's famed 'balance' should mean that, in the wake of Muir's piece,

we see a BBC article about US 'foreign manipulation' of Syria and Iran, and
indeed the whole Middle East. Presumably the balancing piece is in the
pipeline.

As with the most effective propaganda published by the Soviet newspaper

Pravda, there may be something in what Muir says. But the required
journalistic emphasis, as ever, is on the misdeeds 'our' officially sanctioned
state enemies may be committing, not on the crimes of our own
government.

BBC And ITV Bias Exposed

Professional journalists reporting from the Middle East ought to

be discomfited by the publication of More Bad News From Israel, an
updated study by Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the Glasgow University
Media Group (Pluto Press, 2011; first edition published as Bad News From
Israel in 2004).

The book examines media coverage of the conflict in Israel and Palestine,
and the impact of this reporting on public opinion. In the largest study of its
kind ever undertaken, the authors illustrate major biases in the way
Palestinians and Israelis are represented in the media, including how
casualties, and the motives and rationale of the different parties involved,
are depicted. In follow-up interviews with viewers and listeners, the book
also reveals the extraordinary differences in levels of public knowledge and
understanding of the conflict. It is significant that gaps in public
understanding often reflect the propaganda generated by Israel and its
supporters in the West. Indeed, the book exposes the 'success of the Israelis
in establishing key elements of their perspective and the effect of these
being relayed uncritically in media accounts'.

In a powerful new chapter, Philo and Berry present an in-depth analysis of

BBC and ITV news coverage of the 2008-2009 Israeli attack on Gaza,
Operation Cast Lead. On 27 December 2008, Israel launched a massive
series of assaults on the densely-populated strip of land with F-16 fighter
jets, Apache helicopters and unmanned drones. Attacks with tanks and
ground troops followed. 22 days later, the total number of Palestinian dead
was estimated by B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, as 1,389. The
death toll included 318 children. Ten Israeli soldiers were also killed, four
of them in 'friendly fire' incidents. During the attacks, Israeli forces
repeatedly bombed schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN
buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the UN sponsored a fact-funding study

chaired by a South African judge, Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone
report, along with others by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch
and the League of Arab States, included accounts of the killings of civilians
by Israel Defence Forces in a cold, calculated and deliberate manner.
Goldstone subsequently issued a supposed partial 'retraction', apparently
following intense Israeli pressure. But he did not withdraw the report and
his co-authors stood by their work. (Peter Hart, 'Is There Really a
Goldstone "Retraction"?', FAIR, April 5, 2011)

The researchers recorded, transcribed and analysed over 4000 lines of

broadcast news text from both the BBC and ITV (it is not stated explicitly,
but one assumes these 4000 lines were shared approximately equally
between the two broadcasters).

'The most striking feature of the news texts', write Philo and Berry, 'is the
dominance of the Israeli perspective, in relation to the causes of the
conflict.'

Specifically, they note that the Israeli themes of 'ending the rockets' (fired
from Gaza by Hamas into Israel), the 'need for [Israel's] security' and to
'stop the smuggling of weapons' (by Hamas into Gaza) received a total of
316.5 lines of text from the BBC. Other Israeli propaganda messages, such
as the need to 'hit Hamas' and that 'Hamas and terrorists are to blame',
received 62 lines on BBC News. The total for Israeli explanatory
statements on the BBC was 421.25. This compared with a much lower total
for Hamas/Palestinian explanations of just 126.25. In ITV News coverage,
there were over 302 lines relating to Israeli explanatory statements but just
78 for Hamas/Palestinian.

But even these 126.25 BBC and 78 ITV lines of 'explanations' of the
Palestinian perspective lacked substance: 'the bulk of the Palestinian
accounts do not explain their case beyond saying that they will resist.' What
was almost non-existent were crucial facts about 'how the continuing
existence of the blockade affects the rationale for Palestinian action and
how they see their struggle against Israel and its continuing military
occupation.'

For the Palestinians, then, the military occupation of their lands and the
crushing blockade of Gaza are utterly central to the 'conflict'. But on BBC
News there were just 14.25 lines referring to the occupation and only 10.5
on the ending of the siege/blockade. ITV News had 12.25 lines on ending
the siege/blockade and a single line about the occupation. The bias is
glaring.

Instead of adequately explaining the Palestinian viewpoint, BBC and ITV

news heavily reflected Israeli propaganda:

'The dominant explanation for the attack [Operation Cast Lead] was that it
was to stop the firing of rockets by Hamas. The offer that Hamas was said
to have made, to halt this in exchange for lifting the blockade (which Israel
had rejected), was almost completely absent from the coverage.'

In short, news coverage of the brutal assault was skewed by the Israeli

perspective, perpetuating 'a one-sided view of the causes of the conflict by
highlighting the issue of the rockets without reporting the Hamas offer', and
by burying rational views on the purpose of the attack: namely the Israeli
desire to inflict collective punishment on the Palestinian people. (See our
earlier media alerts: 'An Eye For An Eyelash: The Gaza
Massacre', and 'The BBC, Impartiality, And The Hidden Logic Of
Massacre')

In classic academic understatement, Philo and Berry conclude:

'It is difficult in the face of this to see how the BBC can sustain a claim to
be offering balanced reporting.'

Based on their equally poor performance, the same would surely apply to
ITV.

Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, backs up Philo

and Berry's careful analysis, arguing that BBC coverage of Israel and
Palestine 'is replete with imbalance and distortion'. He points to his ex-
employer's 'continuing inability to describe in a just and contextualised way
the conflict between military occupier and militarily occupied. There is no
attempt to properly convey cause and effect, to report the misery, violence
and pillage that demean and deny freedom to the Palestinians and provoke
their (limited) actions.' ('BBC is "confusing cause and effect" in its Israeli
coverage', Guardian, May 23, 2011)
Llewellyn also rightly castigated the 'labyrinthine' official complaints
procedure that means members of the public have to battle with an 'army of
lawyers and layers of bureaucracy' that 'the BBC now deploys to see off all
but the most assiduous.'

He continued:

'Editors and producers rarely respond individually to complaints and, if

they do, do so with question-raising answers and self-justification.'

An experience which we and many of our readers can confirm!

Llewellyn sums up:

'The BBC, like a well-kicked hound, does not in its post-Hutton malaise
wish to antagonise politicians. It goes with reporting that's as low-profile as
possible on this most sensitive of issues. It lives in horror of being accused
of anti-semitism, Israel's ultimate smear. Reporters and editors know they
have to pitch the Israel story in a certain manner to get it on the air – in
effect, self-censorship.'

The Guardian allowed the BBC to provide a response to Llewellyn's article.

This ended with a sly comment:

'Although Tim Llewellyn was indeed a BBC correspondent some years

ago, we note that he subsequently was active for a period with the Council
for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).'

Perhaps the BBC should end its Newsnight programmes with a similar
warning:

'Although Jeremy Paxman is an anchor for the BBC flagship news

programme, Newsnight, we note that he has also been actively involved
with the British-American Project for some years.'

Something similar happened to John Pilger in 2002, when he was allowed

to defend his film, 'Palestine is Still the Issue', in the Guardian opinion
pages. Unbeknownst to Pilger, Stephen Pollard, a Zionist and later editor of
the Jewish Chronicle, was to be given the same space to mount an ill-
founded attack on the piece in the paper the following day. Pilger's film
was later praised for its accuracy and integrity following an enquiry by the
ITC.

A Stony Silence
We emailed David Mannion, editor-in-chief of ITV News, and Jeremy
Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor, for their views. Neither replied. We
did not have much luck either with Jon Williams, the BBC's world news
editor. No great surprise given that, earlier this year, Williams blocked
Media Lens even from following him on Twitter (as did Alan Rusbridger,
editor of the Guardian).

When one of our readers asked Williams why he had blocked us, he
replied: 'That's what happens when people send you abusive tweets'. In
fact, the sole Tweet we had sent him was this one, asking for his thoughts
on observations made by journalists Jonathan Cook and Tim Llewellyn on
Israel-Palestine news coverage.

We have always made it clear that we abhor abuse directed at journalists

(or anyone else). We asked Williams via Twitter and email which 'abusive'
messages he had in mind, saying that we would happily apologise if we had
caused offence. He did not respond.

We did, however, get a reply from BBC Middle East correspondent Jim
Muir - a nice example of the 'It's-not-my-job' response we have seen so
often over the years:

'I'm afraid I don't have a "response" as I'm not a spokesman for anything
other than myself. Nor, frankly, do I have time to study and evaluate the
BBC's output; that's not my job, and it's rarely part of my input as I spend
most of my time on primary sources. My own reporting is rarely on the
Palestinian/Israeli issue as such; sometimes on its ramifications but I am
normally engaged on Iraq and more recently Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and
Lebanon. I'm sure you've been in touch with BBC editorial management in
London, and equally sure that you will get a response from them.' (Email,
May 16, 2011)

In an attempt to encourage Muir to assert his human right to freedom of

speech, we emailed him back the same day:

'Many thanks for your email.

'"I'm not a spokesman for anything other than myself."

'Speaking for yourself then, what's your own impression of BBC news
coverage of the wider Middle East – how fair and balanced is it? Surely
you have a view?

'Feel free to offer your thoughts in confidence without named attribution.'

Muir did not reply.