More on the BBC and its problem with Israel, from the Telegraph:
A former senior producer on Panorama has accused the BBC of bias in its coverage of the conflict in Gaza.
Phil Craig, who spent two decades working for the corporation, claimed a “new, more radical generation” had taken over the broadcaster.
The veteran producer, who was later chief creative officer of Discovery Networks International and head of factual for the Australian broadcaster ABC, warned that output from the BBC was being “insufficiently policed”.
Speaking at the Battle of Ideas festival last Saturday, he said: “I’m afraid as I saw what played out in Gaza, my career-long faith in the BBC, just ebbed away. In its fairness and objectivity.”
Mr Craig, who was recruited by the BBC from Cambridge University, where he read history, added: “Of course, news makes mistakes. We all know news coverage, it can be faulted. There are wars, people spin them, both sides spin, and there’s propaganda.
“But all the mistakes in this particular war seem to be in the same direction. Mistakes of hiring people with incredibly partisan views or maybe even hiring people who were actually part of Hamas. The most outrageous of all, the October hospital moment.”
Mr Craig was referring to the criticism the BBC faced for its coverage of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, when a correspondent speculated on air that an Israeli air strike was probably to blame. Western intelligence agencies later concluded that a misfired Hamas rocket was to blame.
He said: “It really worried me. I suspect the thing that caused all this is group think. It’s a new generation, perhaps, a new, more radical generation, young people, activists, people insufficiently policed, insufficiently guided, old principles not being enforced in the way they have been on us.”…
He later told The Telegraph he had watched the BBC’s coverage of the alleged hospital strike with “mounting alarm and dismay, and noted how it helped fan fires all around the world, including literal fires at synagogues”.
He added: “Anyone who has ever worked for the corporation’s news operation knows its global influence, and in this case it was deployed in entirely the wrong way.”
The Al-Ahli hospital strike was the one where Jeremy Bowen admitted he got it wrong, but “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting. The facts count for nothing when the deeper significance of Israel’s true evil must be exposed.
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