Jenin assault: BBC reporting has been pro-Israel for decades, but is it changing?
Walking over rubble in Jenin on 5 July 2023 after Israeli army attack
Tim Llewellyn writes in Middle East Eye:
For the past 23 years, since the beginning of al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, BBC management of the news from Palestine and Israel has been blatantly adapted to Israeli and western government interests and concerns.
I called it in 2005 “the tyranny of spurious equivalence” – the underlying assumption that Israel and the Palestinians were equal-weight contestants in an eternal war.
BBC reporters in the field were, I wrote, “lions led by donkeys”, trimming their stories so they were acceptable to editors in London, and thus Israel.
Academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry, and their team at Glasgow University, wrote two seminal research accounts: Bad News from Israel (2004) and More Bad News from Israel (2011), detailing the pro-Israel bias, chapter and verse, of the BBC, ITV and ITN, spanning the use of language to disparage and demean Palestinians; the falsification of cause and effect; confusing the perpetrator with the victim; and failing to include sufficient historical background.
In 2006, a panel set up by the BBC board of governors (then the corporation’s overseer) found the BBC’s coverage of the conflict to be “misleading”. It noted the absence of historical context, pointing to the BBC’s failure to convey the disparity in the experiences of occupier and occupied.
Seventeen years later, despite the corporation’s national and global reach and its reputation for fairness, the BBC has exponentially degraded its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict and shown itself to be impervious to criticism – except when it comes to Israel’s friends and supporters.
In 2009, the BBC refused to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza after Israel’s three-week air, land and sea invasion of the besieged enclave. Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed, along with 13 Israelis. The Gaza appeal ban was a shocking, immoral decision. BBC insiders protested, to little effect; ultimately, then-MP Tony Benn voiced the appeal himself on the Today programme, over the half-hearted protests of the presenter.
Pro-Zionist coverage
The Panorama programme’s coverage of the issue is continually pro-Zionist. It is impossible to document here the thousands of complaints of pro-Israel bias and framing that have inundated the corporation, to the point where they are no longer answered, while Israeli complaints are acted upon with alacrity.
I therefore turned on BBC Radio last Monday morning expecting more of the same – and indeed, in many parts of the coverage, there was more of the depressing same. But this time there was a difference, and it started with international affairs editor Jeremy Bowen on the breakfast-radio programme Today, which is essential listening for the British political class. It is vital to examine his reporting, first in the Today studio, hours later on the road to Jenin, and then in Jenin.
Bowen has reported well and bravely before, as Middle East correspondent and later editor, but he has been a sporadic visitor to Israel/Palestine recently. Sometimes, I have felt Bowen straining at the BBC self-censorship shackles that younger and less experienced reporters do not even try to break.
This past week, much changed. Bowen’s forthrightness spread to his colleagues on the road, in the occupied West Bank and Israel, and even to presenters in London. For the first time in more than 20 years, I felt that the journalists in the studios back home were taking his lead and beginning to portray some of the realities of the Palestinian plight.