The BBC's presentation of Israel

There's a new report on behalf of BBCWatch.com by Trevor Asserson and Cassie Williams. It's entitled The Documentary Campaign 2000-2004, and it examines television documentaries on BBC1 and BBC2 during the period November 4 2000-June 7 2004. It finds that:

BBC documentaries featuring the Middle East over the last 43 Months (3.5 years) have been overwhelming[ly] negative in their depiction of Israel or positive of Palestinians, with a considerable amount of time and space being given to programme makers with views known to be antithetical to Israel. Of 19 documentaries, two were categorised as "unknown", because we could not obtain a transcript or video or obtain reliable accounts of the content. Of the remaining 17, we considered that 1 left a favourable impression of Israel, 1 was balanced and 15 left a negative impression of Israel or a positive one of Palestinians.

The report does not question the BBC's right to broadcast programmes of the kind it does:

Certainly it is legitimate for the BBC to broadcast programmes critical of Israel. The Israeli media does so quite freely. It would be remiss of the BBC if it did not. Nothing in this report is intended as a criticism of the BBC in general terms for broadcasting such programmes. We merely criticise the failure to do so in a balanced way.

The overall imbalance is inconsistent with the BBC's duty (under its own charter) of impartial coverage of news and current affairs, and...

... a clear failure of the BBC's obligations to "provide a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter"... and the separate requirement that "no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or under represented on the BBC".

The authors of the report reject a charge of anti-Semitism against the BBC, as also the idea that there might be a conscious policy, at the top, aimed against Israel:

We do not accuse the BBC of deliberately deciding at a senior management level to vilify Israel in this way. We consider this highly improbable. However the accumulation of programme maker, commissioning editor and other management decisions has produced [a] huge imbalance. The fact that it has occurred and that the imbalance has been allowed to continue unchecked for so long does point to systemic weaknesses in BBC editorial and management control. In this respect we consider that our findings are entirely consistent with the findings of systemic problems within the BBC highlighted in the Hutton report published earlier this year.

They also say:

On one (albeit very crude) analysis we calculate that one death in the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict attracts 187 times as much documentary attention as a death or 'disappearance' in the other comparable humanitarian and political stories.

They conclude:

[W]e find that the BBC is in persistent breach of its duties of fairness, accuracy and impartiality when it covers the Middle East. The overwhelming concentration on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict amounts to discrimination against all the other humanitarian and political causes around the world which also merit attention.

Within the programmes made on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there is an overwhelming bias against Israel. This is particularly worrying because it has been such a long running bias. The BBC cannot argue that it is a temporary discrepancy, which will be remedied over time. What has occurred amounts to a campaign of vilification of Israel, which has persisted for some three and half years.

It's a long report, and I've read the whole of it, though quickly and on trains. The bulk of it is taken up with an analysis of the programmes reported on.