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The BBC Pro-Israeli?

(Times-UK)Martin Walker - * The official report for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict listed a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favor of Israel. * This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC's greatest hits remain fresh in the memory. There was the send-off for Yasser Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which concluded that the corrupt old brute was "the stuff of legends." * There was Orla Guerin's story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes." * There was the case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." * These examples are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians. The writer is the Editor of United Press International.
2006-05-11 00:00:00
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