What a Difference a Jane Makes - to BBC balance on the Middle East

Regular readers of this blog (it feels good to use that phrase, and I cherish the hope there are a few!) will realise that the BBC is hardly my favourite broadcaster.  While acknowledging that there are many things the BBC does extremely well – after all, it should, since unlike its commercial rivals it has a huge enforced remuneration from licence-payers to finance its efforts – I loathe the BBC's leftist bias for many reasons: its obligation to be impartial, its antipathy towards British traditions, towards Judeo-Christian values, towards western interests, and towards Israel.

Not for a moment do I believe that all Al Beeb's employees share in such antipathy, but it is undoubtedly that ethos which dominates; it can be seen in all its ignominy on the BBC News website, which is run (if a photo that they once posted of themselves is any guide) by 20- and 30- somethings – a fact which I believe informs their view of Israel, for having been born well after 1967, they are imbued with the widespread narrative that Israel is a colonial oppressor and thus help to spread that narrative themselves. 

And let there be no mistaking the fact that Al Beeb has a leftist bias; some of its own presenters and executives have admitted as much.  Thus, Andrew Marr : "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people.” And Ben Stephenson: "We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking." (hat tip: Biased BBC)

So it was with trepidation that I switched on BBC One's Panorama last evening, to see "Death in the Med", an account of the Mavi Marmara affair presented by Jane Corbin.  Now, I haven't always been unequivocally admiring of her reportage (although, praise providence, she is no Jeremy Bowen), but here she got the tone and coverage absolutely correct.  She'd been given unprecedented access to the elite commando unit which raided the Mavi Marmara, and her reportage – in terms of style, airtime, and content – was meticulously fair to both sides.   I was pleased to see that she included intemperate words from the flotilla leader in her report, as well as an excerpt from a video clip of a participant on board, who said that he was fully prepared to die as a shahid (martyr), and footage of iron bars being fashioned out of fittings on board and Israelis being savagely beaten.  I do not believe that partisans of the Palestinian cause have any grounds for complaint either.  So thank you, Ms Corbin, for an exceptional piece of BBC journalism. 

Sometimes, in BBC reports from the Middle East, it's not so much what they say as the way they say it which betrays their bias against Israel.  As well as being a master of the snide remark, the oh-so-world-weary Jeremy Bowen is well-practised in the sneering vocal tone, in the eyebrow sardonically raised.  Jane Corbin had none of that.  Nor did she use the well-tried BBC device of giving the Israeli viewpoint last or begrudgingly, as in the "Israel says ..." which typically ends BBC reports after the Palestinian position has been highlighted.

I've taken a close look at the website of the BBC College of Journalism (CoJo), which is billed as “a smart way for the BBC to decide whether journalists are suitable – before the vacancies arise”.  I was alarmed by its assertion that "Impartiality is not the same as objectivity, neutrality or balance", but reassured by the excellent training video on that subject by well-known presenter Evan Davis.

Less reassuring is the fact that CoJo has linked to a video interview for the Frontline Club ("Championing Independent Journalism") given by Al Beeb's Jezza to CoJo head Vin Ray.   There's Bowen, proclaiming (yet again) that, following complaints from supporters of Israel, the BBC Trust was "wrong" in  finding him guilty of three inaccuracies and one breach of impartiality in his online article "How 1967 defined the Middle East" and of one inaccuracy in his From Our Own Correspondent report. There he is, adding "It doesn't really worry me" (and we all know that the Trust's rebuke has scarcely made Jezza break his anti-Israel stride).  There he is, admitting that "my emotions are very skin deep" and that "Of course I empathised enormously with the people there [Gaza] - who couldn't?" and describing Gaza as "a big prison camp". And there he is, regretting that he appeared during Cast Lead to be "pulling a few punches" and blaming that on the fact he and other foreign journalists had been prevented from reporting from there by the Israelis. "Had I got into Gaza I would have been much more powerful".  As for (sssssssh, you know who, "I know what they're going to be worked up about", Jezza tells the audience, so he tries "deliberately to spike their guns".

In an interview published in the Independent (11 December 2006) Bowen declared: "It's certainly the case that many Israelis and... many people in the British Jewish community regard us as, if not anti-Israel actively, then certainly pro-Palestinian. Some regard us as being actively anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic. ... The difficulty of reporting from the Middle East is that what people really want ... is for you to come down on their side."

Not so.  What people - we, the hard-pressed licence-payers – really want is for the BBC to abide by the terms of its Charter and its Producers' Guidelines.  We want the BBC to exhibit impartiality, to give both sides to a dispute an equal airing, and to display a non-judgmental style in its broadcasts (I suggest Bowen looks at Evan Davis's CoJo video for tips on what this entails).  Jane Corbin managed these things admirably in her Panorama report last evening.  Why, then, is impartiality beyond Bowen and his cohorts?