"Great Foreign Correspondents" (Cough, Splutter, Guffaw)

The impression given by his main photo on Twitter, which shows him in his old stomping ground, suggests strongly that the BBC's Jon Donnison has never reconciled himself to being sent from Gaza to this Land Down Under.

However, Australia's tough attitude towards illegal immigrants (whom the Green-Left and leftist media outlets including the ABC invariably term "asylum seekers") appears to have seized his imagination, to judge by the number of (left-leaning) tweets he's made about that topic recently.

Not for Donno an even-handed approach which explores the argument that most of these people being brought to Australia by people smugglers are not genuine asylum-seekers but economic migrants attempting to jump the queue of persons who have applied to settle here via legal channels.

Oh dear, no.

So it must have been with a great effort of will that when Donno finally got round to reporting the issue for his employer, he was relatively restrained: the two elderly ladies drinking their white wine spritzers in his local pub strike me as decidedly dodgy, though, the antipodean equivalents of those unnamed individuals whose opinions (neatly supporting the reporter's agenda) just happen to pepper many an Al Beeb report from Israel and the disputed territories.

Donno's apparent frustration at wanting to condemn the Australian government's policy towards the "asylum seekers" as he has on Twitter lurks between the lines.

 Like the rest of the Al Beeb crew, Donno seldom seems to venture outside the ABC/Guardian/Ha'aretz universe that reflects and bolsters his own notions, and when he does it's only to deride or deplore the opinions he finds expressed.

So notoriously biased and partisan were Donno's reports from Gaza that when I saw this brief video (admittedly not one of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' most inspired) I wondered whether he recognised himself.

Yep.  I reckon there's at least the smidgeon of a suggestion that he does.

Here's the tweet from Dalia Hatuqa, regarding the Foreign Press Association's jaundiced view of the video:

As for Al Beeb's incorrigible bias, many readers will have seen that Tzipi Livni kept her cool last week during a hectoring interview by the BBC's Evan Davis.

With honourable exceptions, the Beeboids (as one site that monitors BBC bias terms the BBC's employees) seem to think that they have an obligation and a right to behave in the mould described by one of their number, Andrew Marr, infamous among those of us who deplore the BBC's disgraceful disregard for the objectivity incumbent upon it by its Charter for breezily observing

"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. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias"

 (On his youthful far left background see here.)

 In his book My Trade (2004) which characterises the grotesquely partisan Orla Guerin and John Pilger as

 "great foreign correspondents" 

and suggests approvingly that  

"Perhaps it is because the anti-establishment instinct of the outsider is more useful than the sense of security enjoyed by a middle-class Briton"

Marr cheerily calls The Guardian's egregious Michael Adams (who became executive director of CAABU, the vociferously anti-Israel pressure group Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding)

"Another pioneer of the politically engaged foreign correspondent"

and dwells enthusiastically on Adams's anti-Israel reportage and on his criticism of the "pro-Israel lobby".

See the extract here

However, the scandal whereby the BBC Trust is empowered to decide allegations of bias in-house may soon be a thing of the past.  Read all about this breaking development here