While American Jews are familiar with the hostility and inaccuracy that have plagued reporting on the Jewish state in the New York Times and other major media outlets, in the United Kingdom the issue takes on a different character, as the principle offender is the state-run British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which has a near-monopoly on broadcast news. This summer, the BBC gained a new director, Tim Davie, who has expressed an emphatic commitment to bringing impartiality to reporting. Manfred Gerstenfeld sees at least the potential for change:
The British Jewish lawyer Trevor Asserson, now living in Israel, invested his own money from 2000 to 2004 in four well-documented studies detailing the BBC’s systematic bias against Israel. He concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by a widespread antipathy toward the country. This distorted reporting creates an atmosphere in which anti-Semitism can thrive.
Asserson noted that the BBC’s monopoly derives from a legally binding contract with the British government. He defined the BBC’s fifteen legal obligations under its charter and then showed instances in which the BBC breached many to most of the guidelines.
Asserson’s reports had some effect. In November 2003, the BBC created a senior editorial post to advise on its Middle East coverage. A former editor of the BBC’s 9:00 News, Malcolm Balen, was selected for the position. . . . In 2004, Balen undertook an internal inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The report was never released, which led to a series of legal battles. After eight years, the [British] Supreme Court decided that the Balen report is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC had, however, to disclose its legal costs on the matter, which were about half-a-million dollars at the time.
One wonders why, if the inquiry found that its reporting was impartial, the BBC would spend so much to keep it secret.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/bbc-bias-israel/