Web exclusive: A grim panorama

Tom Giles’ attempt – on The Spectator’s Coffee House blog – to impugn CAMERA’s video documenting the BBC’s violations of its Editorial Guidelines is an example of the illogical and desperate flailing with which the BBC has consistently approached reasoned arguments about Panorama’s “A Walk in the Park”, a flagrantly biased documentary about Jerusalem.
 
Mr. Giles’s complaint relies in part on his assertion, with ominous undertones, that CAMERA’s brief video “re-edited” the Panorama documentary and shows only excerpts from the programme.
 
Of course, it’s obvious that a 15-minute video meant to draw attention to journalistic malpractice in a 30-minute documentary, and to highlight the BBC’s inadequate defence of its programme, by necessity must rely on excerpts and montages. Indeed, the video also selectively excerpts examples from CAMERA’s complaint, omitting, for the sake of brevity, other instances of the documentary’s violation of the Editorial Guidelines.
 
Readers should take note that, importantly, Mr. Giles does not directly refute even one of the points we made in the video, evidently seeking instead to distract readers with incoherent and incongruous commentary. He says nothing about BBC’s out-of-context statistics. There is not a word of explanation for why the BBC twice relayed unsubstantiated and false accusations that Jerusalem is being ethnically cleansed of Arabs when, in fact, the city’s Arab population is growing faster than its Jewish population. Nor does he attempt to explain why the BBC does not refer to acts of Palestinian terrorism even while it charges Jews with acts of violence.
 
Instead, the Panorama editor wrongly claims that our video “gives a very different impression of the film than that broadcast”. On the contrary: the montages and clips in our video were meant to provide viewers a cross-section of the programme’s highly partisan treatment of controversies in Jerusalem.