https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1946500209447514418

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

The gain from this manufactured row about BBC "partiality" for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – was set out in stark detail this week by the makers of a second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector. In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings. The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law. She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film. In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality. “The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.” Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel. Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards. BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”. Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza. The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza. This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.” If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer. This is an extract from my latest article How the BBC obscures UK complicity in Gaza genocide. Read more here: https://middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-bbc-obscures-uk-complicity-gaza-genocide

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