BBC biased in favour of Israel!?

Whilst researching for a piece on Ken Livingstone and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, I came across this article on "Sourcewatch" about "Labour Friends of Israel". In it Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) is described as "a Westminster based lobby group working within the British Labour Party to promote the State of Israel". There is much on the funding of the Labour party by LFI members and trips to Israel, the tone is very censorious but no more than I would expect from Sourcewatch. However the sentence that caught my eye was in the "Taming the Media" section. It reads "LFI has used its influence to intimidate British media into adopting an openly pro-Israel position. A recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group revealed the systematic bias in BBC and ITV’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict which often reproduces the official Israeli narrative uncritically, whereas very little time or detail is devoted to the Palestinian side." Yes Glasgow University's Media Group thinks that the BBC is biased in favour of Israel! I think that says a lot about the politics of the Glasgow University Media Group. The Sourcewatch article continues "Some, who dared to criticize the Israeli position have faced bans, as Faisal Bodi, of BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight did. According to Bodi, LFI members play a "crucial propaganda role, carrying the flag for Israel in parliament, and lobbying editors to toe the Israeli line". Tim Llewellyn, a Veteran Middle East correspondent for the BBC, has gone to the extent of calling BBC’s reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict downright “dishonest”. He has attributed it to the “unremitting and productive” efforts by “Israel's many influential and well organised friends". However, this still did not preclude LFI’s Andrew Dismore from expressing “concern” about the BBC for being “anti-Israeli and biased towards the Palestinians." This charge could not have been more frivolous given that BBC has referred to Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘capital’ – a view otherwise shared outside of Israel by two out of the world’s nearly two hundred countries."

Maybe a trip to Biased BBC or a look at parts of USS Neverdock, this Stephen Pollard article, thisHonest Reporting article (and many others) or maybe this piece from Martin Walker in the Times.