Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Criticism of the BBC's Middle East coverage from supporters of both Israel and Palestine led the BBC to commission an investigation and report from a senior broadcast journalist Malcolm Balen, referred to as the Balen Report and completed in 2004. The BBC's refusal to release the report under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 resulted in a long-running and ongoing legal case.[40][41] This led to speculation that the report was damning, as well as to accusations of hypocrisy, as the BBC frequently made use itself of Freedom of Information Act requests when researching news stories.[42]
After the Balen report, the BBC appointed a committee chosen by the Governors and referred to by the BBC as an "independent panel report" to write a report for publication which was completed in 2006. Chaired by the British Board of Film Classification president, Sir Quentin Thomas, the committee found that "apart from individual lapses, there was little to suggest deliberate or systematic bias" in the BBC's reporting of the middle east. However, their coverage had been "inconsistent," "not always providing a complete picture" and "misleading", and that the BBC failed to adequately report the hardships of Palestinians living under occupation.[42][43][44] Reflecting concerns from all sides of the conflict, the committee highlighted certain identifiable shortcomings and made four recommendations, including the provision of a stronger editorial "guiding hand".
Of the report's findings regarding the dearth of BBC reporting of the difficulties faced by the Palestinians, Richard Ingrams wrote in The Independent that "No sensible person could quarrel with that judgement."[45] Martin Walker, then the editor of United Press International, agreed that the report implied favouritism towards Israel, but said this suggestion "produced mocking guffaws in my newsroom" and went on to list a number of episodes of (in his view) clear pro-Palestinian bias on the part of the BBC.[46] Writing in Prospect Magazine, Conservative MP Michael Gove wrote that the report was neither independent nor objective.[47]
Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn wrote in 2004 that the BBC's coverage allowed an Israeli view of the conflict to dominate, as demonstrated by research conducted by the Glasgow Media Group.[48]
In the course of their "Documentary Campaign 2000–2004," Trevor Asserson, Cassie Williams and Lee Kern of BBCWatch published a series of reports The BBC And The Middle East stating in their opinion that "the BBC consistently fails to adhere to its legal obligations to produce impartial and accurate reporting."[49]
Douglas Davis, the London correspondent of The Jerusalem Post, has accused the BBC of being anti-Israel. He wrote that the BBC's coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict was a "portrayal of Israel as a demonic, criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors" and resembled a "campaign of vilification" that had de-legitimised the State of Israel.[50] "Anglicans for Israel", the pro-Israel pressure group, have berated the BBC for apparent anti-Israel bias.[51]
The Daily Telegraph has criticised the BBC for its coverage of the Middle East. In 2007, the newspaper wrote, "In its international and domestic news reporting, the corporation has consistently come across as naïve and partial, rather than sensitive and unbiased. Its reporting of Israel and Palestine, in particular, tends to underplay the hate-filled Islamist ideology that inspires Hamas and other factions, while never giving Israel the benefit of the doubt."[52]
In April 2004, Natan Sharansky who was then Israel's minister for diaspora affairs wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, as having a "deep-seated bias against Israel" following her description of the Israeli army's handling of the arrest of Hussam Abdu, who was captured with explosives strapped to his chest, as "cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes."[53]
In March 2006 a report about the Arab-Israeli conflict on the BBC's online service was criticised in a BBC Governors Report as unbalanced and creating a biased impression. The article's account of a 1967 United Nations resolution about the six-day war between Israel and a coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria suggested the UN called for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from territories seized during the six-day war, when in fact, it called for a negotiated "land for peace" settlement between Israel and "every state in the area". The committee considered that by selecting only references to Israel, the article had breached editorial standards on both accuracy and impartiality".[54]
On 7 March 2008, news anchor Geeta Guru-Murthy clarified significant errors in the BBC's coverage of the Mercaz HaRav massacre that had been exposed by media monitor Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Correspondent Nick Miles had informed viewers that "hours after the attack, Israeli bulldozers destroyed his [the perpetrator's] family home." This was not the case and other broadcasters showed the east Jerusalem home to be intact and the family commemorating their son's actions.[55]
On 14 March 2008, the BBC accepted that in an article on their website of an IDF operation that stated "The Israeli air force said it was targeting a rocket firing team... UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned Israel's attacks on Palestinian civilians, calling them inappropriate and disproportionate", they should have made reference to what [Ban] said about Palestinian rocket attacks as well as to the excessive use of force by Israel. The article was additionally amended to remove the reference of Israeli 'attacks on civilians' as Ban Ki-Moon's attributed comments were made weeks earlier to the UN Security Council, and not in reference to that particular attack, and in fact, he had never used such terminology.[55]
The BBC received intense criticism in January 2009 for its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies on behalf of the people of Gaza during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, on the grounds that it could compromise the BBC's journalistic impartiality. A number of protesters asserted that this showed pro-Israeli bias, while some analysts suggested that the BBC's decision in this matter derived from its concern to avoid anti-Israeli bias as analysed in the Balen report.[56] Parties criticising the decision, included Church of England archbishops, British government ministers and even some BBC employees. More than 11,000 complaints were filed in a three-day span. The BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, explained that the corporation had a duty to cover the Gaza dispute in a "balanced, objective way," and was concerned about endorsing something that could "suggest the backing one side"[57]
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, protested the BBC's decision by cancelling interviews scheduled with the company; ElBaradei claimed the refusal to air the aid appeal "violates the rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is right or wrong."[58] The BBC's chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, affirmed the need to broadcast "without affecting and impinging on the audience's perception of our impartiality" and that in this case, it was a "real issue."[59]
In response to perceived falsehoods and distortions in a BBC One's Panorama documentary entitled 'A Walk in the Park', transmitted in January 2010, British journalist Melanie Phillips penned an open letter in news magazine The Spectator to the Secretary of State for Culture, Jeremy Hunt, accusing the BBC of "flagrantly biased reporting of Israel" and urged the BBC to confront the "prejudice and inertia which are combining to turn its reporting on Israel into crude pro-Arab propaganda, and thus risk destroying the integrity of an institution."[60]
In March 2011, Member of Parliament Louise Bagshawe criticised the inaccuracies and omissions in BBC's coverage of the Itamar massacre and questioned the BBC's decision not to broadcast this incident on television and barely on radio, and its apparent bias against Israel.[61] In his July 2012 testimony to the Parliament, the outgoing Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson admitted that BBC "got it wrong".[62]
A BBC Editorial Standards Findings issued in July 2011 found that a broadcast on Today on 27 September 2010 that stated ""At midnight last night, the moratorium on Israelis building new settlements in the West Bank came to an end. It had lasted for ten months", had breached the Accuracy guideline in respect of the requirement to present output "in clear, precise language", as in fact the moratorium on building new settlements had been in existence since the early 1990s and remained in place.[63]
In December 2011, the BBC caused further controversy after censoring the word 'Palestine' from a song played on BBC Radio 1Xtra.[64][65]
More controversy was caused in April 2012 when the BBC broadcast news of 2,500 Palestinian prisoners who were on hunger strike, with very little overall coverage.[66][67] This resulted in two protests outside the BBC buildings in Glasgow[68][unreliable source?] and in London.[69][unreliable source?]
During the 2012 Olympics, on their country profiles pages, the BBC listed "East Jerusalem" as the capital of Palestine, and did not list a capital at all for Israel. After public outrage and a letter from Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev, the BBC listed a "Seat of Government" for Israel in Jerusalem, while adding that most foreign embassies "are in Tel Aviv". It made a parallel change to the listing for "Palestine", listing "East Jerusalem" as the "Intended seat of government".[70]
In a response to a reader's criticism on the issue, the BBC replied that the complaints that prompted the changes were "generated by online lobby activity."[71] The BBC was also noted for having no coverage whatsoever about the campaign[72][unreliable source?] for the IOC to commemorate the 11 killed Israeli athletes from the Munich massacre in the 1972 Summer Olympics, which was met with repeated refusal by IOC President Jacques Rogge, despite the issue receiving much press by other major news networks.[73][74]
According to the poll conducted by Jewish Policy Research on more than 4,000 respondents, nearly 80% of British Jews believes that BBC is biased against Israel. Only 14% of British Jews believes that BBC coverage of Israel is "balanced".[75]
In 2013, the BBC scheduled to broadcast a documentary film, Jerusalem: an Archaeological Mystery Story, but pulled the film "off the schedule at the last minute." The film "theorizes that many Jews did not leave Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple, and that many modern-day Palestinians may be in part descended from those Jews."[76] Simon Plosker of HonestReporting believed that the decision was made not to offend people who are ideologically opposed to Israel by broadcasting a documentary about Jewish history in the region. The BBC's explanation for the sudden schedule change was that the film did not fit with the theme of the season, which was archeology.
