This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC’s greatest hits — or perhaps misses — remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a ‘hero’ and ‘an icon’ and concluded that the corrupt old brute was ‘the stuff of legends’.
There was Orla Guerin’s unforgettably inventive spin on the 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 disturbing 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’. Pressed for an explanation, the subsequent BBC statement said: ‘Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.’
There was the extraordinarily naive coverage of the London visit of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, the predominant imam of Mecca, to open London’s largest new mosque. He was described as a widely respected religious figure who works for ‘community cohesion’, and a video on the BBC website was captioned ‘The BBC’s Mark Easton: '
"Events like today offer grounds for optimism”.’ The BBC must have missed his sermon of February 1, 2004, that said ‘the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels...calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs...These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...'
These are isolated examples, but they stick longer in the memory because they 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. So it was startling to read the report for the BBC governors finding so much bias in favour of Israelis.
As Walker says, this was in part because the authors of the report placed so much weight on ‘research’ evidence about the apparent absence of coverage of the Palestinians. But then so much of this ‘research’ is itself flaky, often produced by people with all the usual prejudices and then some. Even so, Walker concludes that for all its flaws the BBCstill does a better job that any other news organisation on Earth.
Which is scary.
