Through a fog of jet lag, I have just caught up with the report to the BBC governors on the impartiality or otherwise of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel/Palestinian conflict. It has not improved my equilibrium. How can people pronounce on the impartiality of others on an issue when they are not only demonstrably not impartial themselves, but also appear not to understand what objectivity means -- and clearly have no idea that they are not, and do not?

Some of the panel’s conclusions are fair enough. It is undoubtedly welcome that it not only criticises the BBC’s inconsistency in using the word ‘terrorism’ but that it also recommends that the BBC use it to describe violent attacks upon civilians that have the intention of causing terror for political or ideological reasons, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies. As it says:

It seems clear that placing a bomb on a bus used by civilians intending death or injury in supposed furtherance of a cause is a terrorist act and no other expression conveys so tersely and accurately the elements involved.

Quite so. Other conclusions strive to be even-handed, such as its strictures that the BBC places

...insufficient analysis and interpretation of some important events and issues, including shifts in Palestinian society, opinion and politics. There was little reporting of the difficulties faced by the Palestinians in their daily lives. Equally in the months preceding the Palestinian elections there was little hard questioning of their leaders.

But given the key role the BBC has played in the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel in the eyes of the nation, the panel comprehensively misses the point. It concludes:

Apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias. On the contrary, there was evidence, in the programming and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial.

But ‘commitment’ to be fair, accurate and impartial is not the issue. After all, there can hardly be a BBC journalist or editor who is not committed to the notion that BBC journalism must be fair, accurate and impartial. The problem is that when it comes to the reporting of the Middle East conflict – along with a host of other issues – the BBC not only has a default position that is very firmly one of ideological leftism but, crucially, that it thinks this is the objective truth.

Beneath all the strenuous striving to appear to be seated on the Mt Parnassus of dispassionate judgment, the panel cannot help revealing evidence of the very same partial mindset displayed by the BBC. Thus tellingly it says the Palestinians live under ‘the Occupation’ with a capital O. What occupation? Ever since Oslo, the Arabs in the disputed territories have lived under rule by the Palestinian Authority. The only occasions when Israeli rule impinges on their daily lives occur when Israel takes defensive security measures to stop the Arabs from murdering its citizens.

There may be ‘little reporting of the difficulties faced by the Palestinians in their daily lives’ – but there is even less reporting by the BBC of the difficulties faced by the Israelis in their daily lives, like living under siege for the past half-century surrounded by millions of people who want to wipe them out; like never knowing whether your loved ones are going to be blown to kingdom come when they get on the bus to work; like having to venture onto an armed front line every time they take the kids out for a pizza.

There are other similarly telling lapses. But far worse – and infinitely more revealing -- is its conclusion that the BBC’s coverage did not

consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture

because it gave more ‘on air’ time to Israelis than to Palestinians, and failed to give equal weight to the two ‘rival narratives’ of the Middle East conflict.

Oh dear.

Are these panel members really so obtuse that they really believe that the only people who provide an anti-Israel ‘narrative’ are the Palestinians? The amount of air-time the BBC provides for the enemies of Israel overwhelmingly exceeds the air-time given to its defenders. It routinely broadcasts items in which Israel is defamed, with no-one putting the case for its defence at all. There certainly is a systematic imbalance – but it is all the other way.

Even worse still, however, is the underlying and extremely disturbing moral equivalence of this analysis. Rival ‘narratives’? How very post-modern. How very post-factual. BBC journalism should not be providing ‘narratives’; it should be providing as objective reporting as possible of ascertainable facts. In the context of the Middle East these facts are that, ever since Israel was restored to the Jews as their country, it has been under existential attack against which it has –sometimes controversially – been forced to defend itself by measures including the retention (however complicated this essentially defensive measure became by the subsequent overlay of religious zealotry) of the disputed territories.

The fact that this objectively truthful history is denied by the Arabs does not make it any less true. ‘Rival narratives’, by contrast, means there is no objective truth but merely two stories which have equal meaning because they are ‘true’ for their rival proponents. They must therefore must be given equal weight simply because each side believes them to be true; which in turn means that BBC journalists cannot make a judgment whether either of them is actually true. This is not fairness and balance; this is a repudiation of the basic principles of journalism. It is a formula for the promulgation of falsehoods.

Would the members of this panel have wanted the BBC to give equal weight to the Jewish ‘narrative’ of the Nazi Holocaust on the one hand and the rival ‘narrative’ by David Irving on the other -- or would its first duty be to report the objective reality of the Nazi genocide? Would they want it to give equal weight to the American ‘narrative’ of al Qaeda’s execution of 9/11 on the one hand and, on the other, the rival Muslim ‘narrative’ that the whole thing was a Mossad plot?

It is clear from the exasperated tone of the report that the panel felt besieged by strident partisans of both sides of the Middle East impasse. It is equally clear that they had neither the knowledge not the inclination to decide which of these sides was in the right -- doubtless because each was merely articulating a ‘narrative’ of equal weight.

Which leaves us where we were before this panel was set up -- with the BBC, through its distortions and omissions, loaded questions, double standards, partial language, rigged panel discussions and systematic decontextualisation of violence which have succeeded in reversing the roles of victim and aggressor in the Middle East in the minds of millions of people, constituting the single most influential weapon worldwide in the monstrous campaign to prepare the ground for the destruction of Israel.

As its coup de grace, the panel declares that there is no link between the BBC’s coverage of Israel and the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment in the UK. This of course is mere assertion based on no evidence at all. Indeed, how can it be otherwise? Since the panel has concluded there is no BBC bias against the Jewish state, how can it have contributed to animosity against the Jews? QED.

The truth is, however, that every time the BBC asserts or implies falsely that Israel is the cause of violence in the Middle East, people hate the Jews just that little bit more. Thanks to this report to the BBC governors, that process will now inexorably and distressingly continue.

Posted by melanie at May 7, 2006