I Know They're Wrong, part 1.

I was just thinking about the report by the Glasgow Media Group claiming pro-Israel bias at the BBC and reflecting on how my views on media (specifically BBC) bias have developed as the months have passed since I started to take it seriously.

At first I was brashly confident, relying on a store of strong impressions and occasionally definitive insight gained over more than a decade of mild distrust of the Beeb. Then I went through a phase of panicky certainty, as I began to unfold more of the issues, admit some errors on my part, but cling successfully to aforementioned moments of definitiveness.

Now I emerge to a place where I can look the Glasgow Media Group in the eye, stick out a tongue and say (but only after putting the tongue back in) 'I know you're wrong'.

Thankfully, the G.M.G. provided links from their summary of their report to extracts from their much later published book, so we can check out their approach and prove what we 'know'.

I'll make a start here with the first of seven 'major findings'. The G.M.G. claim that Israelis get the lion's share of interviews with the Beeb- and support it statistically. They show that Palestinians get far fewer interviews- and this is supposed to indicate bias against them.

Personally I have never dwelt much on the number of interviews accorded the two parties. Our sympathies are not dictated by the number of faces we see from one side or the other, but by the character of the interviews, frequently dependent on lede reports and intros. Too often I have seen Israelis summoned like naughty children to face a schoolmarmish journalist.

It can often be that media people summon those they disagree with for interviews (think of Jeremy Paxman)- it makes for more sparks and better TV, as well as offering a kind of figleaf of statistical imbalance in favour of their bogeymen that is so naively accepted by the G.M.G..

As for the point they make that American politicians supportive of Israel are often interviewed, I would respond by saying that we often distrust American politicians, and that one of the best ways of undermining Israel is to have powerful Americans defending Israeli actions from a great distance on British TV. Besides, my question is always 'why not a British politician defending Israeli actions from a distance on British TV?' Is it that they know the British people, having experience of terrorism at home, will respond too well to a forthright authentic British voiced raised in Israel's defence?

Even the direct quote this excerpt cites, from ITV, indicates how leaden and inept their analysis is. They italicise most strangely:

'The presence in Jerusalem of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is further evidence that for now it's the Israelis who have the world's sympathy.'

Didn't they notice the construction 'for now'? Meaning that such sympathy was a temporary phenomenon; meaning the exception rather than the rule. They seem to prove the falseness of their own case there and then in their own publicity.