Mick Hartley

The BBC and Israel

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Mick Hartley

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as a public broadcaster, funded by a license fee from every television owner in Britain, whether or not he or she actually watches the BBC. For its audience of hundreds of millions, including world leaders, it retains an unrivaled reputation for accuracy and impartiality — an increasingly rare phenomenon in this era of fake or partisan news.

This reputation is not deserved. And while the BBC is regarded as biased on many issues (Brexit, for instance) in a way that has angered large sections of the British public, when it comes to Israel, its distortions and one-sidedness are in a league of their own.

Comments

  1. Joanne Avatar
    Joanne

    What a depressing read. Actually, though I’m not British and don’t normally watch the BBC, I got a taste of its bias when I was as student staying in Paris in the late 1980s.
    While there, I often got my news by radio from the BBC World Service. One of the reports I listened to concerned an attack in northern Israel that caused many deaths and injuries. The report included a sympathetic visit by the reporter to the family of one of the … victims? Nope. It was a visit to the family of one of the attackers. I guess that attacker had died during the operation.
    My jaw dropped as the reporter commiserated with the family, which was based in somewhere in Lebanon. There was no visit to any of the families of the Israeli victims. I couldn’t believe the imbalance. Did many of the listeners see this discrepancy? Did many of them care?

    Reply
  2. Mar Lizaro Avatar
    Mar Lizaro

    A point made by Tom Gross that, I think, needs emphasising:
    “But in my mind the larger problem is those more senior correspondents and producers whom the BBC has stuck with, who are too clever to say anything so ugly in public but instead lie and deceive in their reports in ways that will almost inevitably stir up antisemitism among many of the BBC audience.”
    This is something I noticed as well.

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