Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The pope: Catholic. Bears: poop in the woods

Yes, the BBC's coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is tilted to one side on a continuous basis, according to an independant panel.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4964702.stm

What is curious though, is this conclusion: 'The BBC fails to always give a "full and fair account" of the Israeli Palestinian conflict but is not deliberately biased.' What exactly is the nature of the bias then? What is conspicuously absent is any statement of the actual content of the bias; which is that the Palestinians are always the innocent victims, and the beastly state of Israel is always the bully, the agressor and the villain. Why isn't that mentioned at all? Because when it comes to issues like the poor ickle Palestinians, lefties lose any vestiges of objectivity or professional distance. They go into 'empathy' mode, tutting at the horrible jews (the bad father figures) and making every weak justification of the behaviour of the Palestinians (the oppressed juveniles). Its like the normal rooting for the little guy against the big bully but on steroids.

Lost in the BBC's mish-mash of hardly-researched half-truthful reporting of the Palestinian conflict is any concerted effort to learn the REAL history of that busy part of the world. How many BBC journalists or indeed the legions of Israel haters across Britain, know anything about the Ottoman empire, the fall of it in the 20th century, and the British protectorates (established under League of Nations mandate) that replaced it? I have never heard either group talk about these huge salient facts AT ALL, and presume they neither know nor care about them. What has become a characteristic of all politics in the 21st century is peculiarly pronounced when it comes to the 'Palestinian Issue': the passionate promotion of a cause or issue that you know almost nothing about. I think of it as the Lady Di principle.

Michael Grade, chairman of the BBC, says that he finds the report 'reassuring'. I reckon if the report had said that the BBC journalists kill and eat babies he would also find that 'reassuring'. Another signal feature of our age is the utter impregnability of organisations like the BBC when faced by genuine criticism. Shame and a sense of duty are as rare as unicorn dandruff.

"We are confident we have the right editorial structures and processes in place to provide high quality, impartial journalism and to ensure we continue to make progress in developing the authority and comprehensiveness of our output."

You can get software that produces stock rubbish like this- corporate gobblydegook that does nothing to address the actual fact of the bias that has been identified, and is interchangeable with corporate gobblydegook from any other day or any other issue.

The British publish deserve better than this for their 3.7 Billion pounds.

Update: Turns out that the report said the bias was AGAINST the Palestinians... un-frickin-believable. What were they watching??? Which BBC were they scrutinizing? Not the one I watch...

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