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Israel's PR Problem Is Much Bigger than Biased BBC Coverage

(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Stephen Pollard - "The British Jewish community has long been sounding the alarm regarding BBC misreporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; not just for years, but for decades," the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, told the BBC's director general, Tim Davie, last week. Rosenberg called for a "thematic review into the Corporation's reporting on Israel-Gaza since October 7, 2023," introducing a "one-strike" policy for BBC staff found to have "egregiously breached its rules of impartiality and/or antisemitism," and stopping its editorial practice of translating the Arabic word "Yahud," meaning Jew, as "Israeli" when used by Palestinians - all measures which the BBC should indeed implement immediately. But it would need far more than a series of new processes and editorial checks to change the culture that is the real cause of the BBC's bias against Israel and Jews. The problem is the mindset of those involved. The vast majority of the journalistic pool from which the BBC, Sky, ITV, and other news media draw their teams hold a default attitude toward Israel that it is a rogue state which kills Palestinians with impunity, with mainstream Israelis complicit, an issue that stretches far beyond the BBC. The writer was editor of the Jewish Chronicle (2008-2021).
2025-03-27 00:00:00
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