Tired of the BBC’s bias over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? So too is The
Guardian, and a new book More Bad News from Israel by Greg Philo and Mike Berry. However, their weariness is
with what they see as the BBC’s pro-Israeli bias. Berry and Philo, according to The Guardian, “find that the Israeli explanation of why it went to war on a largely defenceless Gazan
population is the one broadly accepted by the BBC. It was a ‘response’ to Palestinian rockets.” Furthermore, the authors have done some of that bean counting (first popularised by
Lord Pearson of Rannoch in his attempts to prove that the BBC was pro-integrationist with regard to the EU – The Guardian didn’t approve of the technique then) to suggest that the BBC
gives more lines to Israeli explanations than to Palestinian explanations.
You do not have to be Melanie Phillips to find this argument absurd, almost surreal. It does not seem to me for a moment that the BBC “broadly accepted” Israel’s arguments; it seemed to me that the BBC correspondents questioned them with a degree of rigour and indeed, at times, open scepticism. And that bean-counting ignores the fact that some of those minutes given over to Israeli explanations would have come in the form of hostile questioning by BBC correspondents of Israeli government figures (just as, in Pearson’s time, much of the time he said had been allocated to pro-EU spokesmen consisted of hostile questioning of those spokesmen – even if I suspect he was right in general about a bias within the corporation).
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