BBC blocks public outrage over Gaza

[Avid]

http://www.thelondondailynews.com/bl...za-p-2099.html

"The London Daily News has learned there is an informal news blackout at BBC Radio over the mounting public outrage following the Gaza incursion by Israeli troops.
According to sources, radio station phone in's have been screening out any callers wanting to talk about the Israeli air strikes and ground offensives in the Middle East.
The BBC's Have Your Say comment sites are being heavily moderated - its main board 'How can a truce be achieved in Gaza?' has had half of its 4,500 comments rejected on the basis of defamation, incitement to crime and hate, harassment, abuse, threats, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, homophobic or racially offensive language.
On the board 'Are the Israeli strikes on Gaza justified?' Half of the 5,000 comments have also been removed for breaking the House Rules stated above.

Radio ban
Producers and presenters have been told to 'stay away' from the subject despite thousands taking to the streets the past few weeks in protest and support of the military action that has seen 600 killed and just recently 40 dead from an air strike at a school.
The self imposed ban has also been reflected in commercial radio with stations like Talksport rarely wanting to broach the subject and many others clearly steering away from on-air debates on the topic. LBC has attempted to tackle the subject with on air debates.

Why?
Radio bosses are keen not to enflame the situation and leave themselves open to accusations of bias toward one side or another - the Beeb, still reeling from the Jonathan Ross affair is in no mood for any controversy.
Also there is a responsible editorial reason behind the scaling back of listener comment.
Today we reported on the increase of anti-Semitism on London’s streets, the attempted torching of a Synagogue, 24 attacks in total and the appearance of sickening graffiti saying "Kill Jews" and "Jews are scumbags" across the city.
By taking the heat out of the debate it cools an already charged atmosphere, though that will have no effect on the most agitated and likely to let their feelings spill out on the street in direct action.
The denying of debate in a public forum such as the BBC could also leave organisations open to accusations of curtailing freedom of expression.

'We'll kill Jews abroad'
Tension is high in London between Jewish areas of Golders Green, North Finchely, Stanmore, Stanford Hill and St John's Wood which are receiving extra "reassurance patrols" by police and Muslim areas of West Ham, Tower Hamlets, Southall, Hackney, Stoke Newington and Camden.
The heightened sensitivity on the airwaves and chat rooms comes in the wake of chilling comments by the Hamas leader that they will kill Jewish children anywhere in the world in revenge for the devastating attacks of the past few weeks. Mahmoud Zahar said:
"They have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine. They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people."
Speaking to the Times, Mark Gardner, of the Jewish charity Community Security Trust, warned Jews:
"When the Hamas leadership calls for revenge attacks on Jewish people, we have to be very, very concerned about what that means."

Violent embassy protests
Meanwhile pro-Palestinian protesters continue to mass outside the Israeli embassy in a demo they vow will last all week despite the plunging temperatures.

A wave of anti-Israeli feeling spread over the city this weekend when large rallies were held across the city culminating in angry exchanges and clashes with the police as they fought to protect the Kensington embassy from attack.
Hundreds of demonstrators ripped up and hurled barriers threw sticks and missiles and attempted to rush the building.
Roads were closed and police in riot gear had to contain the 5,000 strong crowds on Kensington High Street. Protesters burned the Israeli flag and labeled the country a terrorist state.
Police say they are working with Muslims to insure protests pass off peacefully with non confrontational stewarding methods.

Jews under attack across Europe
Jews are on their guard across the continent as young disaffected Muslims bring the conflict in the Middle East to the capitals of Europe.
In Paris on Saturday riot police had to separate the 25,000 pro-Palestinian and 4,000 pro-Israeli demonstrators outside the Israeli embassy.
The National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism in France reported petrol bomb and hate attacks on synagogues, there have been similar reports in Belgium."

So 'free speech' BBC is cowering, and not being fair for the voices of the UK!

[Humble Janitor]

I expect better from the Beeb. This is disappointing and shows that they could be in the pockets of Israel as well.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. The BBC is the only media organisation with it's own tax on the population (TV license) and the government is slavishly pro-Israel because of who controls them. This all comes back to the Rothschilds, same as it always does.

I was watching BBC news in the early stages of the second invasion of Iraq. They were interviewing someone from the states about what was happening. The guy they were talking too went off script and said "Of course, this war isn't about WMD's, it's about-"

He never got any further- the line was cut and without missing a beat the presenter (I can't remember his name, but I'll add it in when I find out) said "I'm sorry, we seem to have lost the connection," and went straight into the next headline.

NEVER expect fair and unbiased reporting from the BBC on ANYTHING.

Originally Posted by Steve_G

NEVER expect fair and unbiased reporting from ANY Major news network on ANYTHING.

You got that slightly wrong Steve so I've amended your last sentence

Originally Posted by Colin

You got that slightly wrong Steve so I've amended your last sentence

You were seconds quicker than me posting my clarification.

And my original statement about the BBC was accurate too. If they want to sue me, let them.

[Barron]

Agreed. The BBC also blacklisted and banned David Bellamy too as he was saying that the global warming/man made theory was all rubbish - see below:

"BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE (David Bellamy)"

Admin OptionsEdit Discussion Close Discussion Add Tags

Delete Discussion From Daily Express, November 5, 2008

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV.

A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm.

Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.

His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.

Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.

Full article here:
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpre.../bbc-shunned-m...

Originally Posted by Steve_G

He never got any further- the line was cut and without missing a beat the presenter (I can't remember his name, but I'll add it in when I find out) said "I'm sorry, we seem to have lost the connection," and went straight into the next headline.

Found him. His name is Matthew Amroliwala, but it could have been any one of them.

Just to hammer the point home....

http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk/Page...e.php?num=5645

Eyeless in Gaza with the BBC
BBC / 07-01-2009

On February 29 last year the BBC's website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a 'holocaust' on Gaza. Headlined "Israel warns of Gaza 'holocaust'" the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read "Gaza militants 'risking disaster'". (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai's comments). An Israeli threatening 'holocaust' may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state's criminal behaviour. With the 'holocaust' reference redacted, the new headline shifts culpability neatly into the hands of 'Gaza militants' instead.

One could argue that the BBC's radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel Lobby's well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as will be demonstrated in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel's image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship.



To establish evidence of the BBC's journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict, BBC's coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. More so than the quantitative bias – which was meticulously established by the Glasgow University Media Group in their study Bad News from Israel – it is the qualitative tilt that obscures the reality of the situation. This is often achieved by engendering a false parity by stretching the notion of journalistic balance to encompass power, culpability and legitimacy as well. The present conflict is no exception.

"Hamas leader killed in air strike", reads Thursday's headline on the BBC website. Notwithstanding the propriety of extrajudicial murder, there are fourteen paragraphs and the obligatory mention of the four dead Israelis before it is revealed that 'at least nine other people', including the assassinated leader's family were killed in the bombing of his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. The actual number is sixteen dead, eleven of them children; twelve more wounded, five of them children; ten houses destroyed, another twelve damaged – a veritable slaughter. Had a Hamas bombing killed or wounded 28 Israeli citizens including 16 children you'd be sure to see endless coverage – of the kind the BBC lavished on the disconsolate illegal settlers in 2005 as they were made to relinquish stolen real estate in Gaza. The BBC's Mike Sergeant, sitting in Jerusalem, would not concern himself with such sentimentality. There is no further mention of Palestinian civilian deaths. Their tragedy was no more than a sanguine message which Sergeant tells us will 'be seen as an indication that the Israeli military can target key members of the Hamas leadership'.
"Israel braced for Hamas response", blared the ominous headline on the next day's front page. With all references to Hamas in its coverage prefixed with 'militant' and invariably accompanied by images of blood and debris, the average viewer is very likely to assume the worst. It transpires what the world's fourth most powerful military is bracing itself for is merely a citizen's protest called by Hamas in the Occupied Territories. Further on we learn that Israel has been bombing such 'targets' as a mosque and a sleeping family.

The BBC's next headline on the same day – "Gaza facing 'critical emergency'" – is an improvement. It quotes Maxwell Gaylard, the UN's chief aid co-ordinator for the territory, highlighting the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis. Following this is a warning from Oxfam that the situation is getting worse by the day: clean water, fuel and food in short supply, hospitals overwhelmed with casualties, raw sewage pouring into the streets.

And then we get 'balance'.

Israel, we learn, has claimed Gaza has 'sufficient food and medicines'. It of course ought to be easy to verify which of the competing claims is valid, but that presumably would violate the 'usual BBC standards of impartiality'. There is also a more mundane reason why the BBC won't present its own findings, but it is tucked away in the very last paragraph of the article. Israel, we learn, 'is refusing to let international journalists into Gaza', including no doubt those of the BBC. The ethics of reporting would require that the BBC preface each of its reports with the disclaimer that it has no way of knowing what is going on in Gaza other than through the propaganda handouts of the Israeli military.

The final act of chicanery comes in the shape of a sidebar which lists the number of rockets fired by Palestinians for each day of the conflict. This is particularly odd in an article ostensibly about the consequences of the Israeli blockade and bombing, especially since no similar figures are produced for the number of bombs, missiles and artillery shells rained on the Gazans. The source the BBC uses is the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center based in Israel. What it does not mention however is that the 'private' think tank is a conveyor belt for Israeli military propaganda which, according to the Washington Post, 'has close ties with the country's military leadership and maintains an office at the Defense Ministry'. Any Palestinian claim on the other hand would not appear unless enclosed in quotation marks, even if independently verifiable.
The quotation marks are a useful distancing device deployed to show that the characterization may not be one shared by the BBC. This would be understandable if their application wereconsistent. It isn't. To take one telling example, after the Lebanon war when both Israel and Hizbullah were accused by Amnesty International of war crimes, only in the case of Israel did the BBC enclose the accusation in quotation marks.

It is through these subtle – and not so subtle – manipulations of language that the BBC has shielded its audience from the ugly realities of Occupied Palestine. In the BBC's reportage Palestinians 'die', Israelis are 'killed' (the latter implies agency, the former could have happened of natural causes); Palestinians 'provoke', Israelis 'retaliate'; Palestinians make 'claims', Israelis declare. Schools, mosques, universities and police stations become 'Hamas infrastructure'; militants 'clash' with F-16s and Apaches. 'Terrorism' is something Palestinians do, Israelis merely 'defend' themselves – invariably outside their borders. All debates, irrespective of fact or circumstance, are framed around Israel's 'security'. If the Apartheid wall is mentioned, it is in terms of its 'effectiveness'. In the odd event that you have an articulate Palestinian voice represented, the debate is rigged with a set-up video that is meant to put them on the defensive. When all else fails, there is the reliable 'both sides' argument – if reality won't accommodate the image of an even conflict, the BBC figures, language will.
Then there's the framing: Israel's violence is always analyzed in terms of its 'objectives'; Palestinian violence is of necessity senseless. This is no doubt how it must appear to the average reader since the word 'occupation' rarely appears in the BBC's coverage. It hasn't appeared once in the last twenty stories on Gaza on its website. And if occupation is mentioned rarely, then the UN resolutions almost never. The picture is even worse on television, where the Israeli point of view predominates.

While Matan Vilnai's threat of a holocaust is consigned to the memory hole, the statement invented and attributed to the Iranian president about wiping Israel off the map is still in play. It is this double standard which also allowed the BBC to cover the story of a British Jew joining the Israeli military as a life interest story – which may not be entirely surprising considering the BBC's man in Jerusalem, Tim Franks, is himself a graduate of Habonim Dror, a Zionist youth movement. It is this inhuman devaluation of Palestinian life that allowed the BBC at the peak of the criminal blockade in July 2007 to have two stories up on its website related to the occupied territories, both about animals – an eagle and a lioness.



While the BBC's refusal to by-line its online reports makes it hard to trace stories back to individual journalists, a revealing glimpse of the editorial context in which they work was offered by an article in the Observer by the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen – a man whose modest analytical skills are matched only by his historical illiteracy. With the BBC workhorse – 'both sides' – weaved into the very headline, Bowen piles inanity upon cliché, sedulously avoiding any mention of the occupation. He is no doubt aware that the fragile narrative he has constructed, where the conflagration begins with Hamas firing rockets into Israel, will collapse with the first mention of the occupation which predates both the rockets and Hamas. Bowen, who has been conveniently transported to Sderot – an Israeli PR ploy to 'embed' journalists within range of Hamas rockets in order to make them report with empathy – plays his part to the tee. On the other hand there is no mention of those at the receiving end of Israel's lethal ordinance. He mentions civilian casualties only in the context of the 'lot of bad publicity' they get for Israel. On the basis of this evidence, he then concludes 'it is probably fair to say that [Israel] does not hit every target it wants, otherwise many more would have died'. We then end with speculation on Israel's possible objectives. Despite 'both sides', there is no similar scrutiny of Hamas's objectives.

At a conference in London in 2004, a BBC journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories told me that when it comes to Israel the editorial parameters are so narrow that journalists soon learn to adapt their stories in order not to upset the editors. And editors likewise know not to upset their government-appointed managers. Since the days of Lord Reith, the BBC-founder who assured the establishment to 'trust [the BBC] not to be really impartial', on foreign policy the corporation has acted as little more than the propaganda arm of the state (whatever independence it had once enjoyed evaporated with the purge carried out by Tony Blair in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry). Contrary to the prevailing view in the US, where progressives don't tire of comparing it favourably against US media, the BBC's record of coverage in the Middle East is dismal. As media scholar David Miller revealed , during the Iraq war the representation of antiwar voices on the BBC was even lower than on its US counterparts. A Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung study found the corporation to have the lowest tolerance for dissent of the media in the five countries it analyzed. Just as its correspondents in Iraq celebrated the fall of Baghdad as a 'vindication' of Blair, its man in Washington Matt Frei threw all caution to the wind to exult: 'There is no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up with American military power.'

The BBC's partiality in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict is a mere reflection of the close affinity of successive British governments with Israel. Both Blair and his successor Gordon Brown have been members of the Israel Lobby group Labour Friends of Israel. The Foreign Minister David Miliband has kin who are settlers in the West Bank. All three major influence-peddling scandals in the past five years that engulfed the leadership of the ruling New Labour party involved money from wealthy Zionist Jews (all linked to the Labour Friends of Israel). If the BBC is not impartial, then the UK government most certainly is not. And the BBC, as is its wont, merely reflects the latter's tilt. This is blatant enough that, despite Israel Lobby pressure, the BBC's own Independent Panel concluded that its coverage of the Palestinian struggle was not 'full and fair' and that it presented an 'incomplete and in that sense misleading picture'.

But the gap between the alternate reality that the BBC inhabits and the reality on the ground witnessed and relayed by independent media is so great today that it has compelled John Pilger to write: 'For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state's commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever.'

[Avid]

Thanks for that Steve.
Here's another
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/41/BBC_coverage_of_Gaza_.html

"Many have been following the BBC World news channel (TV) last Sunday. They didn't interview a single Palestinian and they gave a full platform to Ehud Barak's press conference, declaring Israel's “peace intentions” behind the ground operation, a platform to the Israeli military spokesperson, a platform to Israeli officials and the Israeli spokesperson, Mark Regev, among other Israelis.

They broadcasted the interviews again but without Palestinian voices. They didn’t challenge Israeli propaganda or lies. There was no mention of the two years siege of Gaza; the least they could challenge the Israeli's with.

Please email and call the BBC to complain. Let’s bombard the BBC with emails and calls. It will make a difference if we get enough complaints. It takes only a minute to do so."

more on link

and
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wa...1466-22579789/

"Protesters against BBC Gaza coverage glue themselves to entrance barriers
Dec 31 2008 WalesOnline
Two protesters demonstrating against the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli bombing of Gaza glued themselves to entrance barriers at BBC Wales in Cardiff yesterday.
Bob Cottrell and Dee Murphy, of the Swansea-Palestine link group, were released after causing disruption in the foyer for almost three hours.
Another member of the group, Fiona Williams, claimed the BBC’s coverage of the bombing was pro-Israeli.
She said: “Hamas is referred to as a militant organisation, rather than the democratically-elected government, having been elected by a huge majority."

more on link

Many many more complaints about BBC coverage - google it!

[Delphi]

Interesting reporting by BBC radio 4 yesterday in that the news bulletins focused on the violent endings of the demos in London and Edinburgh, rather than why people were protesting, AND later in the evening had Prince Harry's 3 year old offensive language as the lead story instead.

Why?
Radio bosses are keen not to enflame the situation and leave themselves open to accusations of bias toward one side or another - the Beeb, still reeling from the Jonathan Ross affair is in no mood for any controversy.
Also there is a responsible editorial reason behind the scaling back of listener comment.
Today we reported on the increase of anti-Semitism on London’s streets, the attempted torching of a Synagogue, 24 attacks in total and the appearance of sickening graffiti saying "Kill Jews" and "Jews are scumbags" across the city.
By taking the heat out of the debate it cools an already charged atmosphere, though that will have no effect on the most agitated and likely to let their feelings spill out on the street in direct action.
The denying of debate in a public forum such as the BBC could also leave organisations open to accusations of curtailing freedom of expression..

All of these justifications/rationalisations overlook one simple fact: they are supposed to REPORT the news, NOT decide what it should be. If there are unpleasant consequences they should be reported too. Anything else is just another example of information control, therefore public opinion control, therefore mind control. It's mushroom reporting, keeping you in the dark and feeding you on ****.

The mainstream media is useful only because it lets you know what they want you to think, not as a source of information about what is really happening.