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| BBC online censured for anti-Israel bias
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The BBC’s Board of Governors has censured the corporation’s BBC online service for a misleading article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The article, published late last year, suggested the UN called for Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from territories seized during the six-day war when in fact it called for a negotiated "land for peace" settlement between Israel and "every state in the area".
The governors report, which specifically singled out the reporting of the UN resolution after the 1967 Israeli-Arab ’Six-day war’, stated that the piece on the BBC news website did not give a balanced view of events.
Absence of factual reporting
The UN Security Council 242 is very specific when it calls for a connection between a "withdrawal from territories" and all nations in the region’s "right to live in peace".
The wording of the resolution refers to "territories" and not "the territories" meaning that the resolution never calls on Israel to withdraw from all territory captured during the war.
At the time the British Ambassador who drafted the approved resolution, Lord Caradon said: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”
The BBC governors’ report concluded: "The committee considered that by selecting only references to Israel, the online article did not accurately reflect this balance and gave a biased impression. It therefore breached editorial standards on both accuracy and impartiality".
BBC under-fire
The BBC has frequently come under fire for what pro-Israel groups call biased reporting. In October 2004, BBC correspondent Barbara Plett reported on Yasser Arafat being transported to Paris for surgery said she "started to cry."
The BBC initially cleared Plett of any wrongdoing. Following an appeal, however, the BBC Board of Governors has upheld part of the complaint, stating that Plett’s comments "breached the requirements of due impartiality".
The BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden has apologized for what she described as an "editorial misjudgment". Boaden said it appeared Plett "unintentionally gave the impression of over-identifying with Yasser Arafat and his cause".
As a result of examples such as those mentioned, the BBC board of governors appointed an independent panel to examine the corporation’s reporting of the conflict.
Chaired by Sir Quentin Thomas, the president of the British Board of Film Classification, the panel includes Lord Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh and Stewart Purvis, the former ITN chief executive.
The panel’s task is to "assess the impartiality of BBC news and current affairs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with particular regard to accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias, actual or perceived".
The full report will be released in the next few weeks.
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