Excellent article by Tom Gross on the innate prejudice and bias in the BBC's coverage of Middle Eastern issues. In particular, Gross highlights the BBC's multifarious use of double standards. It spares no attempt to denigrate Israel while bending over backwards to sanitise Arab or Islamist extremism. Hence, for example, its failure to report the hysterical hatred of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais who recently visited Britain. One could put that down to simple ignorance, but Gross provides a more disturbing perspective:

'The BBC efforts not to "offend" Arabs extremists even extend to their reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are (hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans — Muslims, Christians, and Animists). The BBC didn't make any mention whatever of the long history of mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims; nor of the scorched-earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out there by Arabs.

'Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that "settlers" in Gaza were "Jewish" and the land they were settling is "Palestinian." I don't think I have ever heard the BBC refer to settlers in Gaza without mentioning their ethnicity or religion — which is, of course, relevant to the story (though many would dispute the historical and legal accuracy of referring to the territory as Palestinian). But the BBC doesn't appear to think ethnicity is relevant when it comes to real killing or ethnic-based cleansing.

'That is apart from situations elsewhere, in which non-Arabs are perpetrators. In one of the very same bulletins in which the BBC failed to mention the ethnic make-up of perpetrator and victim in Sudan, it made sure to let us know that "Bosnian Serbs have admitted for the first time their role in the massacre of Bosnian Moslems a decade ago." In another report last week, a BBC correspondent casually referred to "a fanatical rebel group" in Uganda. This contrasts with the term "Palestinian resistance group" that BBC reporters often use to describe Hamas, a group the BBC clearly doesn't find fanatical at all.'

And of course, the BBC employs egregious double standards over Israel and the Palestinians:

'The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel Sharon. (The BBC verdict — that Sharon has a case to answer — was never in doubt.) Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare," "charisma and style," "personal courage," and being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and "triumphant." He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." '

Perhaps Gross's most eye-popping revelation, though, is this:

'Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC." Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.'

The fact that the BBC employs such a person, who has such a brazen agenda, in such a sensitive area of reporting is simply scandalous. Even without knowing this background, however, the slant of such reporting is surely quite obvious to any truly objective observer.

It is all the more remarkable, therefore, to read in today's Guardian an item by Roy Greenslade extolling a new book, Bad News From Israel by Greg Philo and Mike Berry. I have not yet read this book, but according to Greenslade it 'shows' a clear bias on British TV news -- in favour of Israel! This is surely the media equivalent to saying that the sun revolves around the earth. It is a truly staggering conclusion, which appears to rest upon such things as the number of times Israelis are interviewed rather than Palestinians or --bafflingly -- greater coverage of Israeli than Palestinian deaths during one week in which nevertheless 'the BBC reported that there had been the greatest number of Palestinian casualties since the start of the intifada'. The book also apparently claims that Palestinians are described as 'terrorists'. This is truly as astounding claim, considering the fact that the BBC, at any rate, not only generally refuses to use the word 'terrorist' for Palestinian mass murderers but has always defended this policy on the basis of 'neutral language', even though it sometimes does use 'terrorist' to describe the perpetrators of various other atrocities.

It is hard to tell from Greenslade's article what is his own opinion rather than that of the authors of this book. But Greenslade's account of the 'real' history of the conflict certainly displays a malevolent and pathologically twisted set of prejudices. He writes:

'Most important of all is the lack of context and history. The research reveals that television viewers are largely unaware of the origins of the conflict and are therefore confused by what they are told and see in nightly reports. There are substantial gaps in their knowledge, with few showing any awareness of the 1967 occupation let alone the 1948 founding of the Israeli state on Palestinian lands. Many viewers told the researchers they saw the conflict as a border dispute between two countries. One viewer said: "The impression I got [from news] was that the Palestinians had lived around about that area and now they were trying to come back and get some more land for themselves. I didn't realise they had been driven out of places in wars previously." There was a tendency for viewers to see the problems as "starting" with Palestinian action and that the Israeli forces were therefore "responding" to what had been done to them by Palestinians. This apparently influenced many viewers to blame Palestinians for the conflict. One 20-year-old interviewee said he thought the conflict was about Palestinian rather than Israeli aggression. He had no idea that the Israelis were occupying Arab-owned land.'

But of course, Israel was not founded on 'Palestinian lands' but on land which was originally part of the Ottoman empire and then run by the British colonial administration, which had been given a madate to set up within it a national home for the Jews. The 'Palestinians' were not at that time a self-conscious people with national aspirations at all, but considered themselves part of the seamless Arab nation; and when they did develop such aspirations, these were originally directed at Jordan, the true Palestinian state, where some 80 per cent of the population are Palestinian but which is run instead by the Hashemite dynasty which was put in place by the British. Nor were they 'driven out' of Israel by the Jews; most of them ran, as has been attested by much documentary evidence. And as for the Israelis merely responding to Arab aggression, this is actually the truth, and has been the case for more than half a century.

In other words Greenslade's article, and by the sound of it this book, presents truth as lies and lies as truth --the default position now of an increasing part of the modern media. In fact, as Honest Reporting.com points out, in April 2002, the pro-Palestinian Palestine Media Watch singled out the BBC for praise in its coverage of Palestinian affairs as opposed to the US media:

'Anyone who is lucky enough to watch the BBC, Al-Jazeera, or even the Canadian CBC, or any other non-US media outlet, can only be struck by the stark contrast between how the US media is presenting the conflict and how the rest of the world media is presenting it.'

The BBC side by side with al Jazeera... yup, that's a bit more like it.

Posted by melanie at June 21, 2004