Fwd: BBC's Israeli coverage confuses cause and effect -- former BBC correspondant Tim Llewellyn

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk <at> gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 11:17 AM
Subject: Fwd: [R-G] BBC's Israeli coverage confuses cause and effect --
former BBC correspondant Tim Llewellyn
To: a-list <at> greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

The reporting of the BBC World News is quite other than it was in 2008.  It
was pulled from the Netherlands media time for many months.  When it
returned it returned in three separate BBC programs, One and Two and World.
 The world reporting was and is different from what it was.  Maybe why it
was pulled completely....It now mirrors closer and closer, CNN reporting
which is mainly advertising, U.S. propaganda and 'human interest' with
'actual' interaction with viewers. Openly offering the only correct
interpretations of world news.    Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad <at> gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 31, 2011 at 7:30 PM
Subject: [R-G] BBC's Israeli coverage confuses cause and effect -- former
BBC correspondant Tim Llewellyn
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk <at> gmail.com>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/23/bbc-israeli-conflict-coverage

*The Guardian

                                       23 May 2011

BBC is 'confusing cause and effect' in its Israeli coverage

I covered the Middle East for the BBC from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s,
and am aggrieved by my ex-employer's continuing inability to describe in a
just and contextualised way the conflict between military occupier and
militarily occupied. There is no attempt to properly convey cause and
effect, to report the misery, violence and pillage that demean and deny
freedom to the Palestinians and provoke their (limited) actions.

Tim Llewellyn
*
British broadcasters' coverage of the Arab awakening over recent months has
been brave and honest. These are difficult and dangerous stories. But the
BBC – and in this article I am going to concentrate on the BBC, because it
is the broadcaster we are taxed to enable and sets worldwide standards of
fairness – and its teams have made every effort to report with balance and
application.

However, the BBC coverage of Israel and Palestine, where another state
continually kills and oppresses Arabs, is replete with imbalance and
distortion.

I covered the Middle East for the BBC from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s,
and am aggrieved by my ex-employer's continuing inability to describe in a
just and contextualised way the conflict between military occupier and
militarily occupied. There is no attempt to properly convey cause and
effect, to report the misery, violence and pillage that demean and deny
freedom to the Palestinians and provoke their (limited) actions.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry, in their book More Bad News from Israel, prove by
textual analysis and follow-up interviews with viewers and listeners that I
am right – and so are an increasing number of people who are becoming aware
that the BBC sells them short on Israel. Philo and Berry's book, an updated
edition of Bad News From Israel (2004), examines coverage of the Israeli
blitz on Gaza, analysing BBC TV and ITV early evening bulletins between its
beginning on 27 December 2008, and the ceasefire on 17 January 2009.

Siege and blockade

They find that the Israeli explanation of why it went to war on a mainly
defenceless Gazan population is the one broadly accepted by the BBC. It was
a "response" to Palestinian rockets. The Palestinian case, that the Israelis
violated a ceasefire that had held for nearly five months in November 2008,
and that the Gazans had endured many years of intensifying siege and
blockade, which had reduced them to stagnation and penury, was rarely put,
if at all. "The story was unpacked," the authors write, "in the manner of
the Israeli view."

In the bulletins they examined, the BBC gave 421.5 lines of text to Israeli
explanations of why they attacked Gaza: the "need for security", "enemy
rockets", "to stop the smuggling of weapons". The BBC devoted 14.25 lines to
references to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories
and 10.5 lines to the blockade. The BBC repeatedly stressed the word
[Israeli] "retaliation", and also implied that police stations bombed by the
Israelis were military targets, describing other casualties as "civilian".
It described these civilian installations as "targets". Newspapers such as
the Guardian did point out the distinction.

"The offer that Hamas was said to have made, to halt this exchange [rockets
v shells and air strikes] … was almost completely absent from the coverage,"
say the authors. They cite a BBC reporter saying: "Israel feels itself
surrounded by enemies, with reason." They add: "We have not found a
commentary noting that 'Palestinians feel themselves to be subject to a
brutal military occupation, with reason.' Israel's official view is given as
fact, they say, but the Palestinian view, on the rare occasions it is found
at all, is not. Israelis "state", Palestinians "claim".

When the BBC and ITV did start reporting the horrific civilian casualties in
Gaza and the use of phosphorus, Israeli spokespersons were immediately on
hand to deny, explain or obfuscate. The Palestinians, especially Hamas, were
rarely able to answer allegations. The Palestinians in situ usually lacked
the resources or opportunity to make their case. The many articulate
Palestinians in London available to help were rarely called on, whereas, as
one BBC insider said, "the Israeli ambassador was practically camped at TV
Centre".

More than two years on, the BBC continues to confuse cause and effect –
Israeli attacks are always reported as retaliation to Palestinian violence
or rockets, and the idea that Palestinian rockets, however ineffective, are
armed resistance to Israel's hammering from land, sea and air is rarely
broadcast. The daily indignities and brutalities of the siege and the
occupation and the shelling and shooting of civilians are virtually absent
from BBC consciousness unless an attack on Israel sparks interest.

Headline news

Philo and Berry quote the BBC correspondent Paul Adams, a Middle East
expert: what is missing from the coverage, he says, is the view that the
Palestinians are engaged in a war of national liberation, trying to throw
off an occupying force. Any Israeli casualty is headline news, shown in high
quality images. BBC teams are based in West Jerusalem, de facto Israeli
territory, and are on hand. Arab casualties may be shown in reports of a
funeral, usually agency film, the victim anonymous. The Israelis, it seems,
are for the BBC "people like us". The Arabs are "the other".

Philo and Berry go on to interview viewers and listeners, all in higher
education. They find that these focus groups were largely unaware of the
Israeli occupation, often believing the Palestinians are the occupiers. Few
knew that Hamas had been democratically elected in January 2006. "I had the
impression they were a terrorist group from watching the BBC," said one
respondent. In most cases, the assumption was that Palestinian rockets
brought the invasion onto their own people's heads.

To complain means the official complaints procedure and dealing with the
army of lawyers and layers of bureaucracy the BBC now deploys to see off all
but the most assiduous. Editors and producers rarely respond individually to
complaints and, if they do, do so with question-raising answers and
self-justification.

For example, the BBC consistently describes illegal Israeli settlements as
"held to be illegal". But they are illegal. Even the Foreign Office says so.
The BBC always adds "Israel disputes this." Well it would, wouldn't it? Why
these caveats? Why this reporting of a shout of denial from the convicted
prisoner in the dock?

More than a month after I made an official complaint about this I have had
no reply or acknowledgement. People who complained about Panorama's travesty
of a documentary on the deaths caused when Israeli commandos boarded the
Mavi Marmara, part of the Gaza aid flotilla, had to go through an obstacle
course of form-filling and stonewalling.

The BBC Trust found the programme guilty on some counts but said it had not
breached BBC guidelines of accuracy and impartiality. Why negotiate all this
to end up with such contortionist, self-serving judgments?

Final arbiter

The BBC is on the defensive: the castle wall is the labyrinthine complaints
procedure. It must be time for an independent body like Ofcom to be the
final arbiter on BBC journalism, not the BBC itself. The BBC Trust, the
highest court of appeal in these matters, is now chaired by Lord Patten, who
has told us all how closely he intends to work with the director general,
Mark Thompson: judge and potential defendant.

Why is BBC reporting like this? The book addresses this in Chapter 4. In my
view, the rot set in during 2001, after 9/11. Israel and its friends were
quick to capitalise on "terror" and "Arabs" and massively enhanced their
propaganda effort here, gaining access to BBC staff at all levels. BBC
managers and editors do not like being shouted at, and they are soft toys
when someone makes a loud and apparently convincing case. The Palestinians
have no such machinery. As one BBC producer says in More Bad News: "We all
fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy."

The BBC's main Middle East bureau in west Jerusalem is liable to Israeli
pressure, and it is in Israel that the BBC perspective on the regional
conflict is formed.

Editorially, Israeli spokesmen are easily available and producers love that.
As Peter Oborne pointed out on Channel 4 in late 2009, each of our three
main political parties is amenable to the "Friends of Israel" lobby. Our
coalition leadership duo have both pledged themselves publicly to Israel. So
did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The BBC, like a well-kicked hound, does not in its post-Hutton malaise wish
to antagonise politicians. It goes with reporting that's as low-profile as
possible on this most sensitive of issues. It lives in horror of being
accused of anti-semitism, Israel's ultimate smear. Reporters and editors
know they have to pitch the Israel story in a certain manner to get it on
the air – in effect, self-censorship.

Perhaps the most overwhelming distortion of the BBC in its coverage of
Israel and Palestine is what I term "spurious equivalence": that the
Palestinians and Israelis are two equal sides "at war" over "disputed"
territory and may the best man win. Or, come on chaps, shouldn't reason
prevail? The BBC knows that the Palestinians are a people fighting for
independence, but its coverage does not tell it like it is.

In 2006, an independent panel appointed by the BBC governors assessed
impartiality in coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Their review came
after many complaints and the first edition of this book, which examined in
similar form the BBC's distorted reporting of the Al-Aqsa (second) intifada
and the subsequent Israeli bombardments and invasion of the cities of the
West Bank.

The commission confirmed many of the Philo/Berry criticisms: "BBC output
does not consistently give a full and fair account of the conflict. In some
ways the picture is incomplete and, in that sense, misleading."

Five years on, it remains so, and the BBC has put the commission's report
under "File and Forget".

Tim Llewellyn was BBC Middle East correspondent from 1976-80 and 1987-92.
More Bad News from Israel, by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, is published in
paperback by Pluto Press at £15
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