Beware the bias against Israel

Media aides of both Prime Ministers have angrily accused the BBC of bias in Middle East coverage. Indeed, Israel's press office in Jerusalem has done what one can't help suspecting Alastair Campbell would quite like to have done here - withdrawn bureaucratic co-operation usually extended to foreign media representatives.

All news organisations inevitably get things wrong. So do governments, Israeli and Palestinian, and reporters are simply doing their job recording events that some would prefer not to be recorded. My own experience as a reporter on both sides of the Middle East conflict is that BBC reporters do their best, in difficult circumstances, to convey the truth as they see it. But particularly in its flagship news and current affairs programmes - a trend that took hold after the September 11 attacks in the US and has accelerated during the suicide-bomb stage of the Palestinian intifada and, more recently, the Iraq War - the BBC has often tended to provide a narrative of the Middle East which risks undermining the professionalism that generally marks on-scene reporting.

I happened to be on a BBC radio panel on the night of September 11, while bodies were being pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, and was startled to hear a fellow panellist remark that the real question was US policy towards Israel (fortunately, the presenter and another panellist jumped in to challenge the suggestion).

ONLY days later, as a consumer rather than a participant, I heard BBC presenters grill Henry Kissinger in almost identical terms (and then remark at how weird it was that Americans so missed the point of September 11). Repeatedly since then, I have heard presenters let pass remarks after suicide bombings in Israel suggesting that the "real question" is Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the run-up to the Iraq War, leading BBC radio and television figures routinely suggested that, again, the "real issue" was not Saddam Hussein, but Israel. One Radio Five presenter wondered out loud shortly before the war whether it was a good idea for the White House to have a spokesman named Ari Fleischer (that is, presumably, a Jew). On BBC-TV's Question Time, a member of the audience suggested that a war against Saddam would not be on the agenda if it were not for "the Israelis" in the Bush Administration (again, presumably, a code-word for Jews - a remark that astonished me and, I still dare to hope, others, but not evidently Mr Dimbleby).
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Permanent Link posted by J @ 11:59 pm