There are all kinds of anti-Israel bias in news reporting, from the honest one-sidedness found, for example, on Aljazeera or Pacifica Radio, to the subtle manipulation by selective use of emotional content as practiced by NPR.
The BBC is somewhere in between, including correspondent Barbara Plett who famously ‘started to cry’ when the helicopter carrying mortally ill Yasser Arafat took off from Ramallah.
And of course there was Alan Johnston, who did his best to ‘tell the Palestinian story’ from Gaza until one of the militias, in an act of profound ingratitude, kidnapped him and held him for ransom over several months.
But anecdotal evidence of bias is just that. The BBC claims (as does NPR) that overall their reportage is balanced. Now Honest Reporting has analyzed the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past half-year, and showed conclusively that the style used in headlines and text, and the voices — Israeli or Palestinian — chosen to present the human side of the news, are steeply slanted in one direction.
You can read Honest Reporting’s critique of the BBC here.
Technorati Tags: BBC, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Plett, Johnston
Thanks for the link to the article – now it’s ‘proven’.