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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