Israel Matzav

Time to hit the BBC when they're down: Release the Balen Report

Normally, I'm not a fan of hitting people when they're down. But in the case of the BBC, everything else has been tried and failed.

The BBC is down right now, because of a series of scandals that resulted in its director general, and its director of news and her deputy resigning. The scandal can best be described as Left-leaning media bias. This is from the first link.

Entwistle fell on his sword after being engulfed by a crisis that escalated following confirmation on Friday that the BBC had wrongly implicated Lord McAlpine, a former senior Tory politician, in a story about paedophilia. It was the second scandal to hit Newsnight in recent weeks.

In an extraordinary scene outside Broadcasting House, in central London, just after 9pm, Entwistle, flanked by the BBC Trust's chairman, Chris Patten, said he felt it was the "honourable" thing to do.

His resignation was accepted by Lord Patten who said it was one of the "saddest evenings of my public life" to see Entwistle end his 23-year career at the BBC in such ignominious circumstances.

Looking composed, but battle-weary, Entwistle read from a prepared statement: "In the light of the fact that the director general is also the editor in chief and ultimately responsible for all content; and in the light of the unacceptable journalistic standards of the Newsnight film broadcast on Friday 2 November, I have decided that the honourable thing to do is to step down from the post of director general," he said.

The first scandal involving the Beeb is described here.

The public in Britain is furious. There's a sampling of letters - admittedly from the more Right-leaning Daily Telegraph - here.  Note how many of them discuss how the Beeb has to be unbiased.

More importantly, there's an interview with Lord Patten here. Notice what he says about how the BBC has to cover itself between 1:10 - 1:28. He says that their credibility depends on telling the truth about themselves and about others however horrible it may be. And from that we come to the Balen Report.

In 2004, a report called the Balen Report was written in response to accusations of bias in the BBC's coverage of Israel. The report was written by by Malcolm Balen, a senior journalist, for Richard Sambrook, then BBC director of news. As of August 2011, the Beeb has spent more than £270,000 of taxpayer shillings to prevent the report from seeing the light of day. In February 2012, Britain's Supreme Court decided that the Balen Report need not be released to the public. Is covering up the Balen report consistent with what Patten (who is notoriously anti-Israel) calls 'telling the truth about ourselves and about others however horrible it may be'? I think not, and so do a lot of other people.

There's an online petition calling on the Beeb to release the Balen Report. You don't need to be a Brit to sign. We need to put pressure on the Beeb to come clean on its coverage of Israel, which is among its most biased (against Israel, of course). I urge you all to sign the petition. 

Labels: Balen report, BBC bias

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:21 AM