Release The Balen Report: Please sign the petition to the BBC

C'mon, make Jezza's day!

The Zionist Federation has issued a petition for the release of the  BBC's long-suppressed Balen Report:

"We call upon the BBC to release the findings to the general public of the Balen report that looked into its Middle East coverage and allegations of bias against Israel by the BBC. The BBC has spent over a third of a million pounds on covering up these findings for eight years. We believe this is a misuse of BBC licence fee payers’ money. The BBC should be obligated to reveal to its licence fee payers all the findings of this report on its coverage of the Middle East.

The BBC trust has to ensure that the BBC provides accurate and impartial news. The remit of the Balen report was to examine the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East. By covering up these findings it stops the Trust is not seen to be ensuring that the BBC is a purveyor of accurate and impartial news. The BBC must be accountable to the public it serves. The report should be released without delay. Otherwise, we can only assume that the BBC has something to hide."

To read more and sign the petition see here and please share the petition with your friends!

The Balen Report: Wanted – A Whistleblower

Nearly £333,000 of licence-payers' money is now known, thanks to The Commentator, which used the Freedom of Information Act to do some digging, to have been squandered by the institutionally leftist BBC in its determined fight through the courts to keep the Balen Report away from public scrutiny.

As The Commentator observes in an exclusive explosive exposé  issued at the weekend, the total sum spent by the BBC is likely to be even higher.
 

 "The BBC has a special obligation to be accountable. It is publicly funded – in the UK, by the licence fee – and therefore all of its journalists have a responsibility to deal openly and fairly with its audiences."

So opens one of the self-righteous self-congratulatory items in the "Standards" section on the website of the BBC's so-called College of Journalism (CoJo).  The blurb on the introductory page states:

"BBC journalism is built on a number of editorial standards including truth and accuracy, impartiality, accountability, public interest and independence.

In this section, BBC director of news Helen Boaden outlines why the BBC’s ethics and values underpin everything its journalists do."

 The specific item I refer to above and below is headed "Accountability":

 "By far the most important accountability we have is towards the audience, and it’s when we lose sight of that that we get into trouble ....

 .... Accountability isn’t just about responding – or not responding – to complaints. You shouldn’t see complaints as a nuisance. Nor should you believe that it’s a sign of weakness if you’ve got something wrong.

If you receive a complaint it’s important to deal with it according to the complaints procedure that is in place.

As a BBC journalist you should be prepared to listen to your audience, understand why they might want you to explain what you’ve done and, if you have made a mistake, acknowledge it and be willing to learn from it.

Dealing with complaints properly and openly is an important part of building and maintaining trust.

However hard you strive to be accurate, fair and impartial, you will get things wrong from time to time...."

Observes another BBC bigwig on the same site:

"There are many reasons why Wikileaks is a 'Good Thing'. Any force for transparency has to be better than one for secrecy."

 Any force for transparency except releasing the Balen Report, it seems.

Columnist Alex Singleton wrote yesterday:

"It's time for the BBC to give up. We already know that it's biased towards the Left. But the corporation looks ridiculous in its endless attempts to stop the publication of an inquiry into its coverage of Israel....

You probably won't hear this on the BBC, but there is a truth about Israel that the Left has been blinded to. It is that Israel is a virtuous country....

Sadly the debate has been skewed by nutty Left-wing websites who ignore the truth about the Israel and print endless false accusations against the country.....

When the BBC is bombarded by the constant email campaigns of these people who pervert reality, I suspect they really do believe that their coverage is even-handed."

Clearly, unless the BBC has a change of heart in its top echelons, the Balen Report will continue to be suppressed.

Unless somebody at Al Beeb is prepared to be a whistleblower.

(As for that complaints procedure of which Ms Boaden boasts: I was given short shrift when I complained, a decade ago, about two reports by Orla Guerin, the arrogant official in charge of complaints snottily informing me that he refused to investigate my grievances since the fact that I was complaining about two separate reports within a short time of each other suggested that the "problem" lay with me and not with the reporter!  I'm still awaiting a reply to a complaint I made back in 2009 about perceived bias in Jeremy Bowen's online "Diary" during Cast Lead, despite explicitly requesting a response! Little wonder that some frustrated people in the same position have dubbed the BBC "Bin and Bypass Complaints"!)

Yet More Bowen Arrows For Israel From Yet More BBC Quivers?

Middle East editor Bowen, at present on "book-writing leave"

Last week was quite a week for apologies by the BBC.  Having a complaints procedure that occurs entirely in-house, the arrogant "national broadcaster" with the "stand and deliver" method of funding rarely upholds complaints. The favoured method of dealing with allegations of bias from members of the public is for the flunkey responsible to issue to the hapless complainant the verbal equivalent of the two-fingered salute. 

But following a complaint by Conservative MP Louise Mensch, outgoing Director-General Mark Thompson has admitted that the Corporation erred in its lack of coverage of the Itamar massacre, blaming the concurrent big stories (the strife in Libya and the Japanese tsunami) for the deficiency:

"News editors were under a lot of pressure.  Having said that, it was certainly an atrocity which should have been covered across our news bulletins that day."

Meanwhile, a former BBC television news editor, Aziz Rashid, head of the BBC's Regional and Local Programmes in England's north-west, who axed Radio Manchester's Jewish show without bothering to consult Jewish communal leaders, has apologised to a delegation of the latter for the curt way in which he dealt with complaints from Jewish listeners, aghast at the disappearance of the radio slot.

But this is Al Beeb we're talking about.  And so, despite the sorries, the tsorres remains.

Now, the BBC Trust  has made public the findings of a generally favourable, indeed in some respects adulatory, report of the Corporation's coverage of the so-called Arab Spring, and the Al Beeb website is not slow to pass the news on.

(Funny that Al Beeb trumpets the findings of this, the Mortimer Report  –  Edward Mortimer is described as "Middle East expert and former UN Director of Communications"  – yet is so cagey about the contents of the Balen Report, huh?  Gee, that Balen Report must have harsh things to say about Al Beeb's attitude to Israel.)

Regarding the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen (who, incidentally, tweeted last week that he's on "book-writing leave") the Mortimer Report makes recommendations that should concern all who have impartial reporting and the interests of Israel at heart.

To quote Ben Dowell in The Guardian:

'The BBC has promised to review the workload of its Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, following a BBC Trust report urging that he be encouraged to "travel a little less".

Bowen, who has been in the post for seven years, is taking too many foreign trips and needs to be centrally located where he can lend his expertise to the BBC's strategic thinking about its coverage of the region, a report by former UN director of communications Edward Mortimer concluded.

Mortimer's report into the accuracy and impartiality of the BBC's coverage of the Arab spring, published on Monday, urged executives to limit Bowen's travel "so that he would have more time to share his insight and provide them with overall strategic guidance"....

The report concluded: "There is clearly a tension here, or a gap not easily bridged between the role of an inspired leader on the ground who has a huge patch to cover and does it superlatively well, and the role of people running the news machine back at base who continually have to make choices in terms of people, resources and audience engagement, and who perhaps cannot always get the advice they need, at the moment when they need it, from an expert who is out in the field."....

In its written response BBC management said it will "review the balance " of Bowen's work and the "emphasis we place on his strategic guidance" and hinted that it may limit his work on documentary features.

"We also conclude that there are dangers in releasing key broadcasters, such as the Middle East editor, to work on current affairs documentaries in the middle of a major story," the BBC added.

"While this undoubtedly enriched the BBC's output of the Arab spring as a whole, it mean that for a period daily news editors had less contact with his expertise and guidance of the coverage than they would otherwise have had."....'

Read the rest by Dowell  here
The Mortimer Report is available here

BBC Man Says The T-Word & Meanwhile The Fight To See Al Beeb's Hidden Balen Report Renews

Hamas are "militants" in BBC-speak.  But a fortnight ago a BBC presenter used the T-word regarding the Middle East.

Yes, in an interview with James Barr, author of A Line in the Sand, Nick Higham said "terrorists" loud and clear.  And what's more he used the T-word twice.   If you don't believe me you can see the interview here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14406241

Alas, Nick wasn't talking about Hamas.  He didn't break ranks with the Corporation.  He was referring to "Jewish terrorists" in Mandate Palestine.

Okay. So, what else is new on the BBC front?

Well, there's one encouraging development...

The six-year attempt by lawyer Steven Sugar to force the determinedly resistant BBC to release the findings of editorial adviser Malcolm Balen's 20,000-word 2004 report concerning Al Beeb's coverage of the Middle East into the public domain was the lengthiest legal dispute of its kind so far in the time that  Britain's Freedom of Information Act has been operative.

Mr Sugar passed away last January, the month before an appeal hearing was due to be heard in the Supreme Court against a subsequently upheld High Court decision that "the BBC has no obligation to disclose information which they hold to any significant extent for the purposes of journalism, art or literature, whether or not the information is also held for other purposes".

Not for Al Beeb any notion that it has a  moral obligation to allow licence-payers concerned at its palpable anti-Israel bias (as reflected in the egregrious reportage by Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen [pictured] and others) to examine Mr Balen's findings.  Instead, a ruthless recourse to the letter of the law on the part of that odious hypocritical anachronistically-funded insitution, a fight throught the courts involving very heavy expenditure of tax-payers' money (something Al Beeb does so expertly all of the time - the junkets, the inflated salaries, the wasteful flying of newsreaders to foreign climes to read the autocue from some newsworthy location in which they already have a correspondent or two ...)

Now it's reported that Steven Sugar's mantle has fallen upon his widow, Fiona Paveley, who will be taking up the cudgels in the same worthy cause.  Splendid!  May her efforts succeed.

Better still, may Al Beeb do the decent thing and conceal the report no longer.

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8700047/Widow-takes-on-BBC-over-Israel-bias.html for the report and for the background see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/2011/02/balen_report_the_case_continue.html (hat tip: Biased BBC)

So Why Haven't You Released The Balen Report, Mr Thompson?

In an article on the BBC's online Editors' Blog section, an article first published in The Times, Al Beeb's director-general Mark Thompson opines:

"The ability of the BBC Trust to scrutinise BBC investigations and publish its findings, good or bad, means that our values and tradecraft are held constantly and openly to account." http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/07/investigative_journalism_in_th.html

Even allowing for the sanctimonious self-congratulatory puffery that all too often characterises the BBC, this statement takes the cake.

For Al Beeb's "values and tradecraft" as they bear upon the Arab-Israeli conflict have never been held "openly to account," since despite many requests the Corporation has fought tooth and nail, even in the highest court in the land and with the expenditure of enormous amounts of money (all money derived from that compulsory anachronistic burden on British television owners called the "licence fee" which finances it) to prevent the BBC-commissioned, licence-payer funded report by employee Malcolm Balen that investigated Al Beeb's coverage reaching the public gaze.

But there's been more evidence in recent days of the sheer hypocrisy that characterises the BBC.

In its coverage of the atrocitities in Norway it has not hesitated to employ the T-word that it is at such pains always to avoid when Arab terrorists carry out atrocities against Israelis.

Indeed, the BBC has no problem with using the T-word in relation to attacks on British soil.

It uses the T word freely on its CoJo (College of Journalism) website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/search/index.shtml?scope=cojo&q=terrorism&x=8&y=4
http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2010/07/barlings-london-remembering-ju.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/skills/writing-styles/journalism-tutor/terror-arrests.shtml

Yet whenever terrorists strike at Israel they are always defined as "militants".

It's all part and parcel of the BBC mindset that conceals the true nature of Hamas and of the Muslim Brotherhood from readers, viewers, and listeners.

Do we really need to see the internal Balen Report to know its findings, or learn why Al Beeb is so hell-bent on refusing to release it for public scrutiny?

I don't think so.  Do you?

Still, the accountability that Al Beeb demands of News Corp and others should certainly apply to Al Beeb itself.

Moral pressure should be kept up, Lord Patten and the BBC Trust (which has taken to touting for submissions from the public since Patten became chairman) should be bombarded with requests, until the odious Corporation is shamed into letting us see what Malcom Balen had to say about its reportage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Have You Affixed Your John Hancock Yet?

To this online petition requesting Al Beeb to come clean and tell us what's in the Balen Report that they've spent so much filthy lucre suppressing?

Anything that turns up the heat on the oh-so-biased BBC just has to be worthwhile.

See http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/04/a_bbc_petition.html

Ask Us No Questions and We’ll Tell You No Lies – Al Beeb, Israel, and the “Pimply Loners”

The scandalously feather-bedded and wasteful BBC (employer of dodgy Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, pictured here at a CoJo function in party mood) squandered over £270,000 of licence-payers’ money on legal fees in order to keep out of the public domain the 20,000-word internal report (2004) prepared by senior staffer Malcolm Balen regarding allegations of anti-Israel bias in Al Beeb’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Al Beeb was forced to disclose some weeks ago that it spent £264,000 on barristers’ fees and £6,156 fighting (all the way to the House of Lords, no less ) a thwarted attempt by Jewish solicitor Steven Sugar to force the release of the Balen Report under the same Act. “If we are not able to pursue our journalism freely and have honest debate and analysis over how we are covering important issues, then our ability to serve the public effectively will be diminished”, sniffed an Al Beeb spokesperson in relation to the suppressed report.

Since the Freedom of Information Act reached the Statute Book in 2005, Al Beeb has paid, using licence-payers' money, of course, for external legal advice regarding sixteen requests under the legislation, including “advice in relation to the publication of the register of interests for senior staff”. Al Beeb failed to respond to no less than fourteen of the total of seventeen requests about Jews and Israel made under the terms of the Act. These unanswered requests included five regarding the involvement of Jews with the running of the Corporation at top level (such as “How many Arab people does the BBC employ in a senior capacity, including directors, compared with Jewish employees?” and “How many people of the Jewish faith make up the BBC Trust”) and several relating to Operation Cast Lead. (To be fair, it seems to be a reasonable assumption, given their nature, that not all these questions were asked by supporters of Israel, but rather by Israel’s critics and foes.)

That Al Beeb holds the hard-pressed public who fund its biases and excesses in something approaching contempt is suggested by one of its highest-paid and best-known political pundits, Andrew Marr (the man who’s on record as admitting that Al Beeb “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”.)  He’s dismissed most “so-called citizen journalism” as “the spewing and rantings of very drunk people late at night”: “A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting”, says Marr (pictured).

I agree with him that “Terrible things are said on line because they are anonymous. People say things online that they wouldn’t dream of saying in person.” But that sort of thing seems to come from anonymous commentators on unmoderated or poorly moderated internet forums, rather than from bloggers themselves. The folk who run the superb website Biased BBC certainly don’t fit Mr Marr’s stereotyping. It’s lucky for us all that they devote so much time monitoring Al Beeb – in all its flagrant arrogant bias in all sorts of ways, not least Israel. More power to ‘em!