Mick Hartley

Tom Gross at Sapir:

A few months before I graduated from Oxford, I was interviewed for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s prestigious two-year journalist trainee course. This was the best way at the time to secure a job at Britain’s most respected news broadcaster. A committee of five interviewed me. The chair asked whether there was anything I would have changed about a recent edition of BBC One’s then-flagship Nine O’Clock News.

In a calm and reasoned way, I said that although the BBC could not report on everything in its half-hour bulletin and had to be selective about which international items to cover alongside British ones, it had struck me that Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Iraqi Kurds at Halabja deserved to be much higher up on BBC News than it had been.

I pointed out that this horrific act was the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian target since World War II. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Kurdish children and adults had been gassed to death. Yet the BBC had only mentioned it in passing about 20 minutes into its news bulletin, after a light-hearted item about Prince Charles. I added that the BBC’s main news competitor in Britain at the time, ITN, had led its evening news bulletin that day with a five-minute report on the gassing of the Kurds.

There was silence in the room. The members of the BBC interviewing panel glanced at one another with expressions of bemusement. The chair then turned and asked me, with a slight scowl, “Are you a Zionist?”

And then, before I could answer, my interview came to an end.

A comprehensive look at the BBC's decades-old bias against Israel. Worth reading in full.

Yet, as the biggest and arguably most influential news organization in the world, broadcasting in dozens of languages on multiple TV and radio platforms as well as online, to a combined audience of about half a billion people, the BBC may be Israel’s most problematic antagonist among Western media. Its power and prominence are further guaranteed by the lavish funding it enjoys as a public broadcaster, funded by a license fee from every television owner in Britain, whether or not he or she actually watches the BBC. For its audience of hundreds of millions, including world leaders, it retains an unrivaled reputation for accuracy and impartiality — an increasingly rare phenomenon in this era of fake or partisan news.

This reputation is not deserved. And while the BBC is regarded as biased on many issues (Brexit, for instance) in a way that has angered large sections of the British public, when it comes to Israel, its distortions and one-sidedness are in a league of their own.