To the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP
Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport
Dear Secretary of State,
I am addressing this letter to you because of a matter of public concern so great that I believe it must be tackled by you personally. The issue is the BBC, and its coverage of Israel and the Middle East.
As you know, this has been the subject of considerable controversy for many years, with repeated concerns about a perceived institutionalised hostility towards Israel in BBC reporting – so much so that the BBC itself commissioned an inquiry by Malcolm Balen into whether the BBC’s coverage had fallen short of the necessary standards of objectivity and truthfulness. The BBC has not only chosen to keep Balen’s report secret, but has even spent thousands of pounds of licence-fee payers’ money on court actions to ensure that this document, paid for out of the public purse and on a matter of public interest, remains hidden from public view.
Such is the background. You may of course take the view that such concerns are overblown by supporters of Israel whose own objectivity is in question. You may also believe that it is for the BBC to ensure that its own house is in order, and that the government should be wary of being seen to interfere with the management of the BBC’s affairs.
If so, I urge you to watch this remarkable video presentation by CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. CAMERA has been sufficiently alarmed by the BBC’s flagrantly biased reporting of Israel – particularly bearing in mind the BBC’s unrivalled reach and influence throughout the world – to have seen fit on more than one occasion to analyse the distortions, untruths and malice of its coverage.
As you will see from this latest video presentation, the matter is now larger and more disturbing even than the twisted reporting of Israel by BBC journalists. It is also that the BBC has shown itself to be wholly unwilling or unable to enforce its own guidelines on truthfulness, objectivity and fairness.
The specific report in question was BBC One’s Panorama on the subject of Jerusalem, entitled ‘A Walk in the Park’ and which was transmitted in January 2010. As CAMERA systematically documents the reporter, Jane Corbin, presented issues entirely from the perspective of Arabs hostile to Israel but whose allegations were accepted without challenge, while the Israelis were presented in the worst possible light.
The falsehoods and distortions which resulted from Corbin’s approach were really quite astounding. For example, she expressed outrage that Israeli archaeology was uncovering evidence to show that Jerusalem had ancient Jewish roots which preceded any Arab presence. The false suggestion was made and left unchallenged that the Israelis were doing this to erase Palestinian history and take over the Muslim holy sites. But Israeli archaeology is merely uncovering evidence of the historical fact that Jerusalem was the capital of the ancient Jewish kingdom long before any Arabs arrived on the scene.
Corbin makes no acknowledgement of this at all. Instead she refers to the Temple Mount and its mosques solely as a Muslim holy site, even though the Jewish Temple preceded by hundreds of years the mosques subsequently built on the site, and really is at the very core of Jewish religious belief. And there was no Israeli voice in the documentary to point this out and answer the Arab assertions.
This vicious distortion of both ancient history and Israeli motivation was merely one of many such departures from basic journalistic standards. Other examples chronicled by CAMERA included Panorama’s false claim that Arabs were being evicted by settlers in east Jerusalem; the claim that Arab house demolitions were rising in number even though they had actually fallen during the previous year; and the complete failure to record the terrorist murders of Jews in Jerusalem, illustrating violence in the city instead by focusing solely on an Arab who had been injured by a Jew.
And yet in the face of this clear evidence of serious and serial breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on accuracy, fairness, impartiality and so on the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee blandly batted away every single one of these complaints. On the false claims about archaeology and the Temple Mount, the committee stated for example that it was not considered necessary to include ‘Israeli grievances against Palestinian politicisation of archaeology... the committee considered that this aspect of the film had been duly impartial...’ and that the audience ‘would not have been misled’. On the misuse of statistics about house demolitions, the committee decided that this was a ‘reasonable use of the figures’ and further context was not necessary; on the failure to report the murder of Jews in the city, that it ‘did not agree that this was one-sided’. And so on and on.
The situation revealed by this video is therefore this: that faced with unequivocal evidence of a comprehensive breach of BBC editorial guidelines and just about every basic rule in the journalistic handbook, the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee has revealed that it thinks it is not necessary for BBC journalists to report both sides of an issue, not necessary to ensure that context is provided to avoid giving a false impression, not necessary to be accurate, fair and truthful – in short, not necessary to keep the BBC’s own editorial guidelines.
In a reply sent to people who have complained about the committee’s ruling in the wake of the CAMERA video, Francesca O’Brien, Head of Editorial Standards at the BBC Trust, has written:
The Trust, as the sovereign body within the BBC, is responsible for setting and upholding the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, which set out the standards all BBC output should meet. There is a three stage process in place to deal with instances where audiences feel there has been a breach of the Guidelines. This requires that complaints must be dealt with in the first instance by the BBC’s management; the Trust’s role in this process is to consider appeals from complainants should they be dissatisfied with the response that they have received from the BBC’s management.In cases where the Trust has decided that an appeal does qualify for consideration, we employ an independent editorial adviser to investigate the facts of the case and analyse the evidence from both sides in the appeal - in the appeal about “A Walk in the Park”, the adviser therefore analysed evidence from the BBC and CAMERA. The independent adviser’s report is then provided to the complainant and to the BBC for comment on such matters as errors of fact. Any comments plus the original report prepared by the independent editorial adviser and a copy of the programme then go to the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust for decision.Ensuring the impartiality and accuracy of BBC journalism is a key priority for the Trust; it is essential to its independence that the BBC retains the public’s trust as an impartial purveyor of news and programming. Considering appeals about the BBC’s journalism is one of the ways the Trust fulfils its responsibility to ensure editorial standards are upheld.
I am sure that, once you have watched the CAMERA video for yourself, you will realise that this is an egregiously inadequate response and that the BBC Trust has revealed itself to be wholly unable to do the job which Parliament has given it: namely to police any breaches of its own editorial guidelines.
The BBC is the most powerful and influential broadcaster in the world. Its reputation for integrity and objectivity means that its journalism is trusted to be fair and accurate. It therefore influences attitudes more than any other media outlet. ‘A Walk in the Park’ was not merely profoundly unfair and inaccurate. It served to incite hatred against Israel by presenting its actions entirely falsely as malevolently aggressive, and by quite wickedly falsifying history to negate the legitimacy and strength of Israel’s claim to Jerusalem.
I need hardly tell you that on this of all issues, the likely consequences of such incitement could not be more grave. Those who watched this travesty and who have scant knowledge of Israel or of Jewish history will have been grievously misled; the already incendiary atmosphere in which Israel is being demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised will become even more combustible; and at the extreme, even more hatred and violence towards the Jewish people, already running at record levels, will occur.
In recent weeks there have been many more instances of the BBC’s bias against Israel. If you visit the Just Journalism website, you will see evidence that the BBC has been responding to the recent enormous escalation of rocket attacks from Gaza upon southern Israel by focusing its reporting instead on Israel’s counter-strikes, thus giving the false impression that the escalation in violence is being driven by Israel.
In the light of all this, it seems to me imperative that the government should take urgent steps to ensure that the BBC finally confronts 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 which was once one of Britain’s greatest creations.
Yours etc,
Melanie Phillips
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