The Way of Izvestia: BBC as a Metaphor for State Propaganda

'The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.' Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC's coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. This partiality to truth, justice, freedom, compassion and tolerance it deems 'within the consensus about basic moral values'. It is this consensus that the BBC spurned when it refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC)'s video appeal to help the people of Gaza.

The presumption that underlies the decision is that the BBC has always been impartial when it comes to Israel-Palestine. An exhaustive 2004 study by the Glasgow University Media Group – Bad News from Israel – shows that the BBC's coverage is systematically biased in favour of Israel. It excludes context and history to focus on day-to-day events; it invariably inverts reality to frame these as Palestinian 'provocation' against Israeli 'retaliation'. The context is always Israeli 'security', and in interviews the Israeli perspective predominates. There is also a marked difference in the language used to describe casualties on either side; and despite the far more numerous Palestinian victims, Israeli casualties receive more air time.

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The politics of bollocks

Supporters of the new US president refuse to admit that the "man of change" is, in fact, changing very little. It's time the Obama lovers grew up.

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Let banks fail, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz

The Government should allow every distressed bank to go bankrupt and set up a fresh banking system under temporary state control rather than cripple the country by propping up a corrupt edifice, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist.

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New Map of Land Stolen by Israeli Settlers from Palestine
Mondo Exclusive: Google map of Israeli settlements from leaked database

The "Spiegel settlement database" is already creating waves in Israel. Israeli NGO Yesh Din has announced they will use the database to help Palestinians sue Israel for reparations and the removal of settlements from privately owned land...

...what the new leaked database reveals is that, in addition to taking control of all the public land that belongs to the Palestinian people and using it for Jews only, in addition to the million of dunums confiscated "legally" from private Palestinian owners, Israeli authorities also took some land from a few dozen owners without attention to legal niceties.

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To my mind and, it appears, to millions of others, the BBC is increasingly biased towards Israel in this conflict

Thompson has been discredited and must resign. The BBC must reverse its decision and until it does, I urge a mass boycott of the corporation. We must do all we can to assist the people of Gaza, especially by isolating the Israeli military state through a complete economic, academic and cultural boycott. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

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These are the people Mark Thompson, Director General and editor-in-chief of the BBC, wants to protect with his false impartality...