A Biased BBC reader notes;
“Besides the BBC’s usual practice of making Israel always look bad, it is interesting to note how when there is a news story that inescapably shows Israel in an absolutely positive light, the BBC does its best to not report it. The recent Melcom building collapse in Ghana resulting Israel’s quick dispatch of an expert rescue team is a good example.
Here is what the Ghanans themselves say in praising Israel’s efforts:
http://www.allghananews.com/general-news/6568-president-congratulates-israeli-government-for-rescue-mission
The BBC’s story totally ignores Israel’s heroic efforts, which had earned the praise of Ghana’s President. There is only one reference to an Israeli rescue team being present, but you’d have to look very hard to find it, buried deep within the article directly under the heading, ‘Bad concrete mix’:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20250494
David, David – don’t you realise that this is a
JewishIsraeli plot to divert attention from the genocide being perpetrated in Occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Don’t be surprised if it turns out that Mossad was involved in the building’s collapse.At the very least, BBC editorial policy will prevent them from reporting it lest they draw massive complaints about being an outlet for Israeli propaganda. Any story which might even remotely portray Israel in a positive light must be considered in those terms. Editorial policy comes before news value in these cases.
They get complaints from both sides, you know.
It is much, much worse. Those anti-Semitic b******* at th Telegraph and Sky didn’t even mention Israel at all. Why have they not updated their stories? This is clearly a media conspiracy to paint Israel in a bad light.
The fact that the BBC did mention Israel, and buried it next to the first cross head in the article thereby making it one of the most read parts of the story is overwhelming evidence of the organisation’s virulent hatred of Israel. This alone justifies the closing down of the BBC.
Absolutely right. The story here is the 9 deaths and what caused the tragedy. Israel team is mentioned. I can confirm it isn’t in Sky’s coverage.
So no bias by omission here.
So we can expect to see the Balen report pretty soon then?
If not, why not?
“making it one of the most read parts of the story”
Can we have your explanation of this please.
And I would have thought what the President said, addressing journalists, was quite important, no?
And I will immediately tell the Telegraph and Sky that they ill no longer get the billions from tax, no longer!
This is feature writing 101. Jim and Nicked know that, according to their rules, the audience will read the headline, the lede, and then skip to the next bolded heading. The fact that only they seem to read this way these days and most people no longer behave like newspaper readers of the 1950s doesn’t enter into it. They know better than we do, the end.
You must have attended a different media course than I did. The most read part of the story is the headline, followed by the first paragraph. The further the story goes the less likely it is to be read.
By the twelfth paragraph (BTW why is every sentence a paragraph on its own?) few people are still paying attention.
‘You must have attended a different media course than I did.’
Or… maybe… it was a ‘different time’.
So much more that was ‘unique’ then as now.
The BBC recently tried the ‘headline doesn’t matter so long as the actual story is in the Beware of the Leopard cabinet’, and even the Trust couldn’t swallow that one given the facts (so, so sacred to some).
But I do at least get to see Jackie Pallo and Mick McManus in action again.
Attend it ? I wrote the course. What you say is true in print, but on line it is different. As for 1950s I have no idea, I wasn’t around then. But I was around for the Eyetracker heat mapping experiments looking at how people consume on line media. So yes, we do know better because unlike people on this site we have these things called facts. You should try them out one day, I promise you it will change your life. No more conjecture, no more anecdata; it will be revelationary.
So like I say, burying it next to a key piece of screen furniture. That’s the way to make sure no one reads it.
But if in doubt and your first line of attack fails, you can always resort to a fall back of “whataboutery” and shout “Balen Report” enough times in an attempt to deflect attention away from the bollocks that was posted.
See, it worked.
“unlike people on this site we have these things called facts. You should try them out one day, I promise you it will change your life. No more conjecture, no more anecdata; it will be revelationary.”
Is that the royal “we” or do you mean “we” as in we BBC journalists who in accordance with our usual high standards broadcast a programme declaring to the nation that a senior Tory politician (close to Margaret Thatcher you know) rapes children.
We as in people who believe in facts. Seriously try it. It will change your life.
Since you seem keen to offer advice my tip to you is avoid being patronising in forums where most of the posters assumed (until you corrected them) that you are still at school.
‘We as in people who believe in facts’
Given who you appear (here, a lot) to defend, maybe now a good time to clarify you mean a ‘we people’ (as a undefined collective) who believe in facts, but not, as such, checking them?
That ‘belief’ thing I keep getting from CECUT directors as a blow off… explained but not excused.
My university library is closed on the weekend but the quick google search I made of Eyetracking doesn’t show anything about online tracking of media that mimics print such as the BBC article. The way people scan a search engine page or a new Internet page is quite different to the patterns when they take time to read an article.
To whose research are you refering?
The subhead that Nicked Emus claimed was a key piece of screen furniture dragging readers eyes to Israeli contribution has been removed.
Whether this is because it was completely misleading as to the content that follows or because the BBC was engaged in a quiet piece of damage control is unknown.
I thought Nicked had taken permanent leave of this site? (see prior thread)
Ah, the irresistible, seductive power of Biased BBC, on a bigger roll than ever. At the current rate of growth it will need a new open thread every hour!
Woo-hoo!
If this is a “good example” of how the BBC “does its best to not report” Israel’s rescue efforts then they’re not doing a very good job. I hope you “like” my use of “quotes” there. I believe this is “traditional” in such forums.
If a Biased BBC reader had gone looking for the BBC’s online coverage to see if they’d minimised Israel’s involvement what would have satisfied them it hadn’t? A headline & a picture?
And if the article had both, what would you have thought? You’d shrug and move on to next example, forgetting this one but remembering the examples you did think were valid. There’s some kind of word for it, I’m too tired to remember. You should look it up.
Look at more BBC coverage of the disaster here too. They do their ‘best’ not to mention Israel again, and again fail:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20268290
Think thats the more up to date one.
I do remember having a laugh at a previous posting when the Chilean miners were trapped. Something along the lines that the story wasn’t that they’d all been rescued alive, but that the US had sent a rescue team. This meant the Beeb hated Americans.
Bit paranoid like.
Why can’t you see the Balen report?
You can ask that question when you’ve finished reading this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/2011/02/balen_report_the_case_continue.html
Love to Israel and Ghana.
That link explaining that the BBC is hiding the Balen report is old news, nearly two years old, so that answers nothing. What we need to know is why, nearly at the end of 2012 there has been no further progress. The BBC have clearly something to hide and will spare no amount of our money to continue to hide it.
‘I hope you “like” my use of “quotes” there. I believe this is “traditional” in such forums.’
And the BBC subbing room too, let’s not forget.
http://bbcwatch.org/2012/11/09/context-free-reporting-on-the-bbc-news-website/
With some accused of being on commission, it’s nice to find a new name chipping in besides a few regulars. Where does everyone find the time?
Could be worse. The Israeli rescue team could have been accused of organ trafficking.
Same thing happened with the Haiti Earthquake a few years ago. Israel sent a field hospital. No one was allowed to mention it. Sad really.
The BBC did
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8459090.stm
on the tv news bulletins?
can’t recall hearing it for some reason……
George Alagiah reporter on and interviewed an Israeli rescue team in action and they were clearly identified as such.
George Alagiah reported on and interviewed an Israeli rescue team in action and they were clearly identified as such.
if you say so
but again,if the bbc is so even handed about Israel,why not just publish Balen and end all the arguments?
I think we know the answer to that one,don’t we?
Unfortunately Jim, everyone here knows (and most have actual experience) of trying to find BBC stories even when the news is on the same day and not being able to. This link proves absolutely nothing except that there is now a page that has some survivors tales that include references to US and Israeli help. This might not have been ‘easy access’ when it mattered.
The absence of this angle in the initial BBC coverage was noted here at the time. Mostly in the comments, so unfortunately not presently available as evidence.
Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn: “Zionists are scattered at strategic points throughout British business.”
The reputation of the Jewish community was dragged through the gutter at last night’s book launch of The Battle for Public Opinion in Europe: Changing Perceptions of the Palestine-Israel Conflict. The event was staged by anti-Israel pressure group Middle East Monitor at the University of London’s Senate House.
The panelists were Tim Llewellyn (former BBC Middle East correspondent and now adviser to Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding), Jackie Rowland (Al Jazeera correspondent) and Seumas Milne (The Guardian associate editor). Yasmin Alibhai-Browne (The Independent) chaired the event.
Llewellyn and Rowland described a persistent manipulation of the British broadcast media by a well-moneyed pro-Jewish lobby. Llewellyn said, inter alia, that:
“The BBC is very sparing in the amount of delegations or visitors it allows from the Palestinian side. Whereas from remarks that have been heard from the head of BBC News, Helen Boaden, the British Board of Deputies (of British Jews), for example, practically lives at the BBC. They’re there all the time.”
And:
“I was there (at the BBC) when we weren’t interfered with. But the last 10-12 years, since the beginning of the second Intifada, has coincided with Israel’s decision to mount a tremendously well organised, careful, assiduous and extremely well financed propaganda campaign in this country, especially in Britain.
The BBC has completely and utterly become feeble and has misreported, in my view; misrepresenting the situation in Israel-Palestine. It has done this maybe because of intense Israeli and pro-Israeli pressure from within this country, from political elements like the Friends of Israel of our three main political parties.
Also through the higher level of pro-Israel Zionists who are scattered at strategic points throughout the British establishment, throughout British business and among the people whose voices are respected.
The propaganda can sometimes be extremely intense, it can be bitter, it can be angry, it could be violent, it can be other forms of coercion. But it’s something the suits at the BBC find very hard to resist. So what has developed over the past 10 years at the BBC, and at other broadcasting institutions like ITN, not so much Channel 4, is a kind of self-censorship.
It is known now by the reporters if they are reporting on an atrocity by the Israelis, in the occupied territories or elsewhere, that they have to add on to the end of their story some kind of appeasing story of how terrible the Palestinians are or how the Israelis have suffered.”
And:
“The pressure of this Israeli campaign has had a tremendous effect, especially at the institutional level of the BBC and inside the political parties. These people are extremely tough, tough minded. I have just read a book by Anthony Lerman called The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist. If you studied the internecine warfare that goes on inside the Jewish community between the different groups; the anti-Zionists, the Zionists, the liberal Zionists, the non-Zionists, it is vitriolic, it is dreadful, I mean what chance have we got outside that community.”
Llewellyn even described Jews as “an alien people”. He said:
“The situation in Palestine now is the direct result of British deviousness, betrayal…dividing Syria in at least three parts; Lebanon, Syria as it is now, and Palestine, and setting the stage for the imposition and the implanting of an alien country, an alien people in that region.”
Rowland described how the BBC’s obligation for accountability, because it is publicly funded, has been “used and exploited by very well organised pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish lobby groups.”
She said that she knew someone who worked in the complaints department of the BBC who told her “that 85% of the complaints he dealt with were complaints by pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish lobby groups complaining about the perceived bias of the BBC’s Middle East coverage.”
She said this gives an idea of “how well organised, well funded people use the idea of public accountability to tie up a lot of BBC resources on one very narrow focus.”
Alibhai-Browne told of how she had been given a rent free home in England by Professor Hugh Blaschko for seven years after she fled Uganda and how he had said to her that “Israel will bring the worst out in us Jewish people”.
Alibahi-Browne also compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.
Milne said “there are well funded and well organised organisations that campaign in support of Israel. If you’re editing in these area you will find pressure and campaigning constantly by those groups.”
During the Q&A I couldn’t resist mentioning, seeing she was in the audience, that I took the footage that contributed to Jenny Tonge’s exit from the Liberal Democrats. In a bizarre outburst right at the end she took to the microphone to announce:
“I’d like to say, I hope he hasn’t gone, a big, big ‘thank you’ to Richard Millett, the Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the entire pro-Israel lobby who have relentlessly attacked me for eight years but making sure that the Palestinian cause gets heard.”
I have no problem at all with the Palestinian cause getting heard. The main problem for the Palestinians is that it is heard via the likes of Tonge, Milne, Rowland, Alibhai-Browne and Llewellyn.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to clarify exactly what Helen Boaden did say that led to Llewellyn’s accusation that the Board of Deputies of British Jews “practically lives at the BBC”.
http://richardmillett.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/bbc-jeremy-bowen-updates-profile-biased-tweeting/
BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen updates profile after biased Tweeting.
Soon after my BBCWatch article about Jeremy Bowen forwarding to his 21,000 Twitter followers anti-Israel activist Joseph Dana’s one-sided narrative about the Israeli police using tear gas and stun grenades on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Bowen updated his Twitter profile (Hat tip IsraelitKan).
The profile for @BowenBBC now reads “BBC Middle East Editor. Retweets aren’t endorsements.” instead of “BBC Middle East Editor.”
Let’s hope Bowen doesn’t think that extra sentence gives him carte blanche to retweet anti-Israel propaganda at leisure.
Go to BBCWatch to see Bowen’s Twitter profile change in full technicolour, and more.
A tiny success but maybe the first step of a long journey to try to make the BBC more objective in the way it reports Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens. One day the BBC might even refer to “the terrorist group Hamas whose Charter calls for the murder of Jews everywhere”, instead of merely “the militants Hamas”.
Meanwhile, the launch of BBCWatch, including my article, was neatly picked up by Jewish News One, the world’s first Jewish-interest news channel in English. Click below to view video:
just lifted from the blog
obviously no video link etc etc
If the
Elders of ZionBoard of Deputies of British Jews really do practically live there and have such key access, they’re doing a seriously crap job of trying to influence the BBC.clearly terminally incompetent 😉
Can you imagine what the BBC would be like if the Board of Deputies wasn’t running it?
The book they were launching was part edited by Daud Abdullah, and published by his Middle East Monitor (MEMO) Publishers. Why are these ‘impartial’ hacks apparently quite at home in such company?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaelweiss/100084962/why-is-amnesty-hosting-a-hamas-friendly-publisher-of-racists/
It’s amazing how often the Jewish effort to put its case is described as well funded. The orders of magnitude larger Arab funding is never described as such.
I think we should all take note that despite the semi BBC connection and references to the BBC this was not a BBC event or even BBC reporting on the event.