The Way Of Izvestia: The BBC's Nadir
'The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery,
compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.' Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC's coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and
injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. This partiality to truth,
justice, freedom, compassion and tolerance it deems 'within the consensus about basic moral values'. It is this
consensus that the BBC spurned when it refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC)'s video appeal to
help the people of Gaza.
The presumption that underlies the decision is that the BBC has always been impartial when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
An exhaustive 2004 study by the Glasgow University Media Group – Bad News from Israel – shows that the BBC's coverage is systematically biased in favour of Israel. It excludes context and history to focus
on day-to-day events; it invariably inverts reality to frame these as Palestinian 'provocation' against Israeli
'retaliation'. The context is always Israeli 'security', and in interviews the Israeli perspective predominates. There
is also a marked difference in the language used to describe casualties on either side; and despite the far more
numerous Palestinian victims, Israeli casualties receive more air time.
Many of these findings were subsequently confirmed in a 2006 independent review commissioned by the BBC's board of
governors which found its coverage of the conflict 'incomplete' and 'misleading'. The review highlighted in particular
the BBC's selective use of the word 'terrorism' and its failure 'to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and
Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation'.
These biases were once more evident in the corporation's coverage of the recent assault on Gaza. A false sense of
balance was sustained by erasing from the narrative the root cause of the conflict: instead of occupier and occupied, we
had a 'war' or a 'battle' – as if between equals. In most stories the word occupation was not mentioned once. On the
other hand the false Israeli claim that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005 was frequently repeated, even though access
to the strip's land, sea and airspace remain under Israeli control, and the United Nations still recognizes Israel as
the occupying authority. In accepting the spurious claims of one side over the judgment of the world's pre-eminent
multilateral institution, the BBC has already forfeited its impartiality.
The BBC presented the assault as an Israeli war of self defence, a narrative that could only be sustained by effacing
the 1,250 Palestinians (including 222 children) killed by the Israeli military between 2005 and 2008. It downplayed the
siege which denies Gazans access to fuel, food, water, and medicineIt presented Hamas's ineffectual rockets as the cause
of the conflict when it was Israel's breech of the six-month truce on November 4 which triggered hostilities. It
described the massacre of refugees in an UNRWA compound in the context of Israel's 'objectives' and 'security'. The
security needs of the Palestinians received scant attention. Selective indices were used to create an illusion of
balance: instead of comparing Palestinian casualties to those suffered by Israel (more than 1300 to 13) the BBC chose to
match them with the number of rockets fired by Hamas. No similar figures were produced for the tonnage of ordnance
dropped on the Palestinians.
A parade of Israeli officials – uniformed and otherwise – were always at hand to explain away Israeli war-crimes. The
only Palestinians quoted were from the Palestinian Authority – a faction even the BBC's own Jeremy Paxman identified as
collaborators – even though the assault was described invariably as an 'Israel-Hamas' conflict, much as the 2006 Israeli
invasion was framed as an 'Israel-Hizbullah' war. This despite the fact that Israel made no attempts to discriminate
between the groups it was claiming to target and the wider population. As one Israeli military official bragged, Israel
was 'trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against
Israel'. Indeed, given the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, it would have been far more accurate to describe the
assaults as 'IDF-Lebanon', and 'IDF-Palestine' conflicts.
To be sure, Palestinian civilian deaths were mentioned, but only in terms of their 'cost' to Israel's image. Where
Israeli crimes were particularly atrocious, the BBC retreated to condemning 'both sides'. Israeli civilian deaths were
elevated to headlines; Palestinians relegated to the bottom. The aforementioned massacre of Palestinian refugees
received the same amount of coverage as the funeral of a single Israeli soldier. A hole in an Israeli roof from a
Palestinian rocket often received the same attention as the destruction of a whole Gazan neighbourhood. There was also
no investigation of Israel's widely reported use of White Phosphorus, and of the equally illegal Dense Inert Metal
Explosive (DIME) munitions. The coverage of the unprecedented worldwide protests was also minimal. Critical voices were
by and large excluded.
If there were no occupier and occupied in the conflict; no oppressor and oppressed, no state and stateless; then clearly
assisting victims on one side would compromise 'impartiality'. This view posits the Palestinian population as a whole as
an adversary to the Israeli war machine. The BBC's decision not to acknowledge the victims of the conflict is a function
of its biased coverage. When it spent three weeks providing a completely distorted image of the slaughter carried out by
one of the world's mightiest militaries against a defenceless civilian population, it is unsurprising that it should
fear viewers questioning how such a 'balanced' conflict could produce so many victims. And if the Israelis are able to
look after their own, why should the Palestinians need British assistance?
When there is no mention of the violent dispossession of the Palestinians, or of the occupation; no mention of the
crippling siege, or of the daily torments of the oppressed, viewers would naturally find it hard to comprehend the
reality. For if these truths were to be revealed, the policy of the British government would appear even less
reasonable. As a state chartered body, however, the BBC is no more likely to antagonize the government as a politician
in the government is to antagonize the Israel lobby. Indeed, the BBC's director general Mark Thompson can hardly be
described as a disinterested party: in 2005 he made a trip to Jerusalem where he met with Ariel Sharon in what was seen
in Israel as an attempt to 'build bridges' and 'a "softening" to the corporation's unofficial editorial line on the
Middle East'. Thompson, 'a deeply religious man', is 'a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater
regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors' sources at the corporation told The Independent. Shortly afterwards Orla Guerin, an exceptionally courageous and honest journalist responsible for most of the
corporation's rare probing and hard hitting reports, was sacked as the BBC's Middle East correspondent and transferred
to Africa in response to complaints from the Israeli government.
But this decision to refuse a charity appeal has consequences that go far beyond any of the BBC's earlier failings: as
the respected British MP Tony Benn put it, 'people will die because of the BBC decision'. It is so blatantly unjust that
the only question the BBC management might want to mull over is just how irreparable the damage from this controversy
might be to its reputation. The organization that only days earlier was reporting with glee a letter by Chinese
intellectuals boycotting their state media is today itself the subject of boycotts across Britain, not just by
intellectuals, but by artists, scholars, citizens and even the IAEA. Much like Pravda and Izvestia during the Cold War, today it is the BBC that has emerged as the most apposite metaphor for state propaganda.
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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch.org , and the co-editor of Pulsemedia.org . He can be reached at m.idrees@gmail.com . This article is a follow-up to an earlier feature appearing in the Adbusters magazine.