British Bias Corporation

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Today's weather is horrible.

It will not deter Drogheda Stands With Palestine later this morning from shivering in solidarity with the besieged of Gaza. Besides, as it is Ireland we are advised not to complain about the weather as it will change in fifteen minutes anyway. This is a country where climate change takes place four times a day.

As wet and windy as it has been, the storm we have possesses nothing of the strength of the hurricane that is currently pounding the BBC whose head of news and director general both resigned this week. Jonathan Cook, if we may borrow the analogy, in a recent weather report, observed that:

The BBC’s now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it’s too ‘leftwing’.

The top flight departures came in the wake of a Daily Telegraph exposé which revealed the 2021 BBC manipulation of camera footage for the purposes of presenting Donald Trump in a negative light. Seriously, if they had left the man now being ridiculed as Donica Lewinsky to his own devices, he would have generated more negative publicity than a child protection conference for rapist reverends.

That the axe fell their way was not down to the crime of manufactured news but because of the powerful figure it was manufactured against. Again, let Jonathan Cook explain:

The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets.

If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.

Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.

This brings us into the dark Zionist heart in the BBC that pumps a malign narrative packaged as news around the public's circulatory system.

When, in May this year, Ramita Navi turned up uninvited to a meeting of BBC executives, they were discombobulated. As explained in the Observer:

They had not invited her because, as it turned out, the point of the meeting was to set her up as the fall guy.

Navi had been one of the executive directors of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. It was a forensic investigation into the Israeli destruction of the Gazan health system. By the time she arrived as an uninvited guest at the meeting the documentary had been delayed for the sixth time. In her words:

the BBC was anxious because it had another Gaza film on its hands: one showing that doctors, medics and hospitals were being targeted and killed by Israel, made by a production company working hand in glove with two of its own journalists . . . An executive called and told us that those at the top of BBC News were ‘very jumpy and paranoid about Gaza’

The documentary was important because, again to cite Navi:

The BBC’s coverage was not showing what people could see on their phones: the killing of children, the targeting of hospitals, the erasing of entire families.

Those in leadership at the BBC trusted neither Amnesty International or The United Nations. Israel was its preferred source for information. As one BBC producer put it: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”

The obstacles encountered by Ramita Navi are emblematic of the malaise of structural and ideological bias that permeates the culture of BBC management.

In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:

Across the BBC’s coverage, a clear dynamic has emerged: the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives. The data shows that the BBC has consistently failed to report Israel’s war on Gaza with required impartiality.

Of course, the Labour government led by Der Starmer wants no such thing as impartiality or accuracy in reporting the genocide. Culture Secretary, Lousy Liza Nandy, responding in July to the broadcasting of another documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, whined that:

I have been very clear that people must be held accountable for the decisions that were taken . . .I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired?

Hopefully that reference to accountability comes back to haunt her and Der Starmer for their government's role in facilitating and enabling genocide. To conclude with Jonathan Cook:

The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.