bbc shows its bias. even against its own.

As the  western establishment's propaganda arm  the Beeb's World Service gets its share  of Grants from The British Foreign Office  and  even  the American  State Department.  Expecting it to be objective and independent in its reporting about  what is happening in Palestine   is expecting too much, it seems. 

In a new low for the BBC’s objectively pro-Israel coverage, the British state broadcaster seems to be doing its best to downplay the murder by Israel of family members of one of its own cameramen.



One cannot possibly imagine the BBC underplaying the death of family of its own staff in a similar way if they had been killed by, say, Palestinian rocket fire. The blanket coverage given to the kidnapping of BBC journalist Alan Johnston in 2007 demonstrates that (he was eventually rescued by Hamas).



The problem is not one of individual journalists, but rather the institutional BBC deference to power and conventional wisdom — which in the Middle East means Israel, to the British, European and American establishments.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/when-bbc-ignores-israeli-murder-its-own-cameramans-baby-what-hope-other

In 2006, an independent panel of senior public figures published a report assessing the impartiality of the BBC’s coverage of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The panel, chaired by Sir Quentin Thomas, a senior figure in the British Home Office, found “identifiable shortcomings, particularly in respect of gaps in coverage, analysis, context and perspective and in the consistent maintenance of the BBC’s own editorial standards.”

The Thomas Report, as it became known, was quickly shoved under the carpet by the BBC, even though it had originally been commissioned by the corporation’s own governors, and business continued as usual (“Report of the Independent Panel for the BBC Governors on Impartiality of BBC Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” April 2006,available on the Internet Archive).

On the morning of 15 November, the day after Israel carried out the extrajudicial killing ofHamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari and unleashed a wave of terror against Gaza’s civilian population, the BBC put an article onto its website headlined: “Gaza rocket arsenal problem for Israel.”

The article goes into minute detail about what the BBC’s diplomatic and defense correspondent Jonathan Marcus describes as “the Palestinian rocket arsenal.”

In the last few days, the shortcomings highlighted in the report have never seemed so glaring.

Nowhere in the article, or elsewhere on the BBC, does Marcus investigate Israel’s weapons stockpile, which is funded to the tune of $3 billion a year by the United States.

There are no reams of paragraphs devoted to describing the different types of bombs, mortar shells, drones, fighter jets, gunboats, tanks, guns, nuclear warheads or white phosphorus shells that are in Israel’s arsenal. Yet, with the exception of nuclear missiles, all of these have been used at some point against the people of Gaza with devastating consequences.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-assaults-gaza-bbc-reporting-assaults-truth/11894