BBC Fighting To Hide Its Bias?

via The Telegraph

Funny how the whole public's right to know thing doesn't matter when it comes to the BBC. They are using public funds and fighting to the end to keep secret a report which potentially points out their bias in coverage of the Middle East.

The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage.

The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.

The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

Comments

[redherkey]

I had the BBC on while trying to sleep the other night and heard an interview that made me sit right up in shock.

The interview was with a Palestinian terrorist group spokesperson and the BBC interviewer was determined to present her interview guest as a creative, compassionate and non-threatening person. Questions consisted of queries about his favorite reading list, including western philosophy and popular magazines, his hobbies and the nice people who were his friends in the west that showed him to not be a blood-thirsty, Jew-hating killer. Definitely one of those "See? We can all be friends" interviews where the sheep tries to convince other sheep that wolves are nice guys.

When asked about if he had Western and Jewish friends, the terrorist was pretty clear about where Jews fit in their world-view and made extermination of the Jewish state a clear goal. Yet the BBC reporter continually tried to rephrase her question to find a way to make him sound less like the extremist he was - e.g. "Certainly you'd shake hands with a Jew and be friends, right?" kind of questioning.

If anyone knows the name of the terrorist interviewed, I'd be glad to know it and look the interview up. Be warned, it's terribly difficult to listen to.

[Phoenix]

Ugh. Just hearing your telling of it is enough to make me sick.

Funny. I read it and thought - the interviewer is the stupid one. Not the terrorist. What a disconnect.... Really rattles your intellect....