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Tuesday 4 September 2007

More BBC bias re Israel - another omission

Once again the BBC show bias by omitting news.

How much coverage would there have been if Israel had yesterday launched 7 rockets against a town in the Palestinian territories? How much sneering by a BBC reporter would the BBC have broadcast? How many "why oh why" opinion pieces would we have heard?

On Monday 7 Kassam rockets were launched by Islamic Jihad from Gaza, one landing near a day care centre. Islamic Jihad said that the rocket attack was "a present for the start of the new school year," so it appears that the targeting of schools and day care centers was deliberate. You can see video of the reaction to the attack here -





Have you seen anything about this on the BBC? This is not an isolated rocket attack, thousands of rockets have been fired, just at Sderot, over the last seven years and the BBC fail to report this because the narrative is that the Israelis are the aggressor and the Palestinians the victims.


The attack has been reported on other news outlets including Iranian TV but not on the BBC. A contributor, David Preiser, to Biased BBC comments that "Clearly the latest rocket hit at S'derot does not meet BBC criteria for a news event. Not enough Israelis died. In fact, no Jews died this time, so it qualifies as a non-incident. Over 100 attacks per week happen in the area, all coming from Gaza, and this is almost never mentioned in any reports about the region. This is because not enough Jews are killed to qualify as a story that the BBC feels like telling. I think pounce has made similar observations. It's almost enough to make one suspect that the BBC has a tacit minimum body count requirement before they can report on an incident. Naturally, this is rationalized by repeating to themselves and anyone that will listen that this is down to the imbalance in the total number of deaths between Israelis and Palestinians since the last Intifada or in whatever time frame works for them. For example, let's say that X number of Palestinians have died in the last week versus Y number of Israelis. X is greater than Y, so the ratio X:Y is unfair. Ergo, it's not an incident unless enough Israelis died to balance it out. Nobody died this time, no story. Not enough die per week, so no trend to report, either." A very good set of points, maybe the BBC would like to comment...

1 comment:

Michael said...

Oh, no, you're not bitter against the BBC at all...

An excellent post. Judging by their reporting, the BBC staff wouldn't know morality if it slapped them in the face.