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Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2174641,00.html
The BBC Pro-Israeli?
(Times-UK)Martin Walker - * The official report for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict listed a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favor of Israel. * This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC's greatest hits remain fresh in the memory. There was the send-off for Yasser Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which concluded that the corrupt old brute was "the stuff of legends." * There was Orla Guerin's story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes." * There was the case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." * These examples are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians. The writer is the Editor of United Press International.