Since October, the Israeli satirical show Eretz Nehederet (“It’s a Wonderful Country”) has repeatedly mocked the BBC for its coverage of the war, in one memorable sketch presenting a fawning interview with the Hamas strongman Yahya Sinwar. It has singled out the state-backed media company for good reason: not only is it one of the worst offenders among news outlets worldwide, but it is also regarded more highly than most of its competitors and has a truly global reach, including channels in a variety of languages.
The veteran British journalist Tom Gross takes a good look at the BBC’s many failures in covering Israel. Perhaps most clarifying is a story he tells about interviewing for a journalism training course it offered many years ago. His interviewers asked what he would change about the previous night’s broadcast, and he replied that more attention should have been paid to Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iraqi Kurds:
I pointed out that this horrific act was the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian target since World War II. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Kurdish children and adults had been gassed to death. Yet the BBC had only mentioned it in passing about twenty minutes into its news bulletin, after a light-hearted item about Prince Charles.
There was silence in the room. The members of the BBC interviewing panel glanced at one another with expressions of bemusement. The chair then turned and asked me, with a slight scowl, “Are you a Zionist?”
And then, before I could answer, my interview came to an end. . . . At no point in my BBC interview or application process had I mentioned Israelis, Palestinians, or Jews. In what was the pre-Google era, my family background is not something that the BBC could easily have discovered. . . . It was the BBC that brought up the subject of Zionism. Needless to say, I wasn’t granted a place on the BBC trainee course.
Looking back at various attempts to reform the institution over the past decade, Gross concludes that the network’s problems are “longstanding, profound, and seemingly ineradicable.” He suggests that the best remedy might be the most obvious: the British government should stop funding it.
Read more on Sapir: https://sapirjournal.org/friends-and-foes/2024/03/the-bbc/