Tom Griffin (London, OK): In The Times today, Liberal Conspiracy's Sunny Hundal lays into the BBC over its refusal to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee's humanitarian appeal for Gaza:
The truth is that the BBC has become afraid of its own shadow. It has become so cowed by accusations of anti-Israeli bias that it has become unsure of what impartiality even means. It has become so cowed by sniping from the Right that it has lost conviction in the integrity of its own journalism. The anti-BBC brigade in the press and politics will use any excuse to undermine the corporation. And to assauge those critics, the corporation has sacrificed its own understanding of impartiality.
A number of bloggers have recalled an episode from 2005 as evidence of spinelessness in the BBC's recent coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In April that year, the Jerusalem Post wrote:
Israeli officials have expressed dismay that BBC reporter Orla Guerin, who has come under sharp attack for what some perceive as an anti-Israeli bias in her coverage, will receive an MBE honour from the British government for "outstanding service to broadcasting".
Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky, who last year wrote a formal letter of complaint to the BBC over Guerin's coverage, said it is a pity that the absence of anti-Semitism was not a criterion for the award.
If it were, he said, Guerin would not be receiving the honour. The MBE stands for Member of the British Empire, one of a number of honours issued each year by the queen.
"It is very sad that something as important as anti-Semitism is not taken into consideration when issuing this award, especially in Britain where the incidents of anti-Semitism are on the rise," Sharansky said.
In November that year, New Statesman editor John Kampfner offered an analysis of the BBC's corporate loss of nerve that suggested pressure like Sharansky's was paying off:
The BBC has also created a position of Middle East bureau chief, a London-based journalist whose role is to introduce greater "context" into coverage from the field. The man appointed, Jeremy Bowen, is experienced and robust. However, several of the corporation's top foreign correspondents fear that more is at work here than an editorial rearrangement; they suspect that the Israeli government's dogged lobbying of the BBC to replace or muzzle its Jerusalem-based correspondent, Orla Guerin, is finally bearing fruit.
The Evening Standard reported further developments a couple of days later.:
HAS THE BBC caved into pressure from the Israelis? The Beeb is pulling out two of its most controversial reporters from the country. Orla Guerin is moving to Johannesburg while Barbara Plett has a new role in Islamabad.
The Israeli Government has been fiercely critical of Guerin accusing her of "a deep-seated bias against Israel" - comments echoed by Jewish commentators such as Barbara Amiel in Britain.
The Independent added a new angle two days later:
The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she 'started to cry' when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.
Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hardine Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country's political class.
Sources at the Beeb also suspect that it heralds a 'softening' to the corporation's unofficial editorial line on the Middle East.
The paper quoted a BBC source as saying that Thompson had "a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors."
It's true that Thompson also met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and that Guerin may have been overdue a rotation to another assignment, as the Guardian suggested at the time.
Nevertheless, Thompson's predecessor Greg Dyke thought the timing distinctly unfortunate:
At the very least the BBC should have foreseen the suspicions that would arise from the two events - Thompson's visit and Guerin's departure - and separated them by several months. As it is, the timing of the announcement to move Guerin inevitably raises the question of how much pressure the Israeli Government put on the BBC, which in turn allows some to question the BBC's impartiality.
The Gaza controversy suggests that Kampfner's judgement on the Guerin controversy four years ago is still valid:
The audience knows that BBC journalism needs rigour, but also knows it needs backbone. That is something it lost the day Lord Hutton delivered his verdict, and it has yet to recover.
