joebucks wrote: » So considering the influence Murdoch has over UK media and government, would it be fair to say that the British media is also biased in favor of Israel?
MEDIA Many supporters of Israel have come to believe that they are a beleaguered minority in Britain. They are convinced that press and politicians alike are ranged against them and that the media routinely distorts the actions and intentions of the Jewish state. This belief is sincerely held, but it is difficult to support on closer examination. Most of the mainstream British media takes a pro-Israel line. Rupert Murdoch, whose News International media empire controls between 30-40% of the British newspaper press27, makes no secret of his pro-Israeli sympathies. Indeed one wellregarded Times correspondent, Sam Kiley, took the extraordinary step of actually resigning from the paper because of interference with his work on the Middle East.28 In addition to the Murdoch press, the Telegraph Media Group and Express Newspapers have tended to support Israel. So has Associated Newspapers, though to a less obvious extent. There are, however, two important media organisations, which have consistently sought to report fairly from the Middle East and present the Palestinian point of view with equal force to the pro- Israeli government line. These are The Guardian and the BBC. These two organisations have been subjected to ceaseless pressure and at times harassment both from the Israeli government itself and from pressure groups. This chapter will document some of this pressure by chronicling some of the campaigns mounted by the pro-Israel lobby against The Guardian and the BBC. We will then turn our attention to the pro-Israel media lobby groups, of which the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is by some distance the most important. The Guardian The Guardian was more closely involved in the creation of Israel than any other British newspaper. Its editor C.P. Scott was instrumental in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, introducing Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement and later the first President of the state of Israel, to leading members of the British government. However, the paper now finds itself at the centre of an international campaign accusing it of anti-Zionism and even antisemitism. Through much of the last decade, the Guardian has been in dispute with the Israeli government and in particular the combative Israeli Government press office director, Danny Seaman. In 2002, Seaman publicly boasted that he had forced The Guardian to move correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg after she had been transferred to Washington. "We simply boycotted them,” claimed Seaman, “the editorial boards got the message and replaced their people.”29 Seaman is well known for using tactics such as denying or delaying visas to obstruct correspondents he sees as hostile to Israel. One reporter familiar with Seaman described him as a “bully” who was “at the forefront of the general harassment. Rusbridger wrote to Seaman insisting he withdraw his comments, only to be told by Seaman: “I will happily withdraw my comments about Ms. Goldenberg when your newspaper withdraws the biased, sometimes malicious and often incorrect reports which were filed by her during her unpleasant stay here.”30 Rusbridger insists he had total faith in Goldenberg’s reporting, for which she received numerous awards, and that “only the Israelis would see a move to Washington as a demotion.” 29http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=1574&q=1 30 Danny Seaman’s letter to Alan Rusbridger, 17th October 2002 24 In 2006 the Guardian was caught up in another row after publishing a controversial article by correspondent Chris McGreal comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. The episode reveals the workings of the pro-Israel lobby with the Israeli embassy coordinating the offensive. An emergency meeting was called at the Israeli ambassador’s residence with BICOM chairman Poju Zabludowicz, board of deputies president Henry Grunwald, community security trust chairman Gerald Ronson and Lord Janner of Labour Friends of Israel to plan the response. Ronson and Grunwald were dispatched to visit Alan Rusbridger in his office to convey their feelings. According to Rusbridger, Ronson didn’t even take his coat off: “He began by saying, I think his phrase was ‘I’ve always said opinions are like arseholes, everyone’s got one’, and then he effectively said ‘I’m in favour of free speech but there is a line which can’t be crossed and, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve crossed it, and you must stop this’.” Ronson accused The Guardian of being responsible for antisemitic attacks, a claim Rusbridger refused to accept: “I mean I didn’t want to get in a great row with Gerald Ronson, I just said I’d be interested in the evidence, I’m not sure how you make that causal connection between someone reading an article that is critical of the foreign policy of Israel and then thinking why don’t I go out and mug Jews on the streets of London. I just can’t believe that happens.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media watchdog, made a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, arguing that McGreal’s article was “based on materially false accusations”. The complaint was not upheld.31 Alan Rusbridger’s decision to run the Chris McGreal article was vindicated. The Guardian is not the only newspaper to come under pressure. and, according to Rusbridger, it works. He told us that “there are a lot of newspaper and broadcasting editors who have told me 31http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/index.html?article=NDE2NQ== 25 that they just don’t think it’s worth the hassle to challenge the Israeli line. They’ve had enough.” The BBC AND THE PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY The case of the BBC is extraordinary. The organisation has become a hate figure for pro-Israel groups, who resent its global reach and supposed sympathy for the Palestinians. We have spoken to BBC journalists and recently departed staff who say that rarely a week goes by without having to deal with complaints about their coverage of the Middle East. This year has been particularly difficult for the Corporation. The BBC refused to screen an aid appeal from Britain’s top charities for the people of Gaza, resulting in millions of pounds less money being raised. It reacted to pressure from pro-Israel pressure groups by publishing a report, which criticised its own Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. Finally, it refused to disclose a report by Malcolm Balen into its Middle East coverage which cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the licence fee payer. Through a Freedom of Information request we discovered the BBC had spent over a quarter of a million pounds on legal fees relating to the case.32 It is no surprise that at the start of the year the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, himself a former BBC reporter, remarked that “I’m afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally. Israel has a long reputation of bullying the BBC.” Bradshaw added that “I’m afraid the BBC has been cowed by this relentless and persistent pressure from the Israeli government and they should stand up against it.”33 1. The Balen Report. This report has its origins in the spring of 2003, when the BBC’s relationship with Israel completely broke down. The 32 Letter from BBC Information and Compliance, 10 November 2009 33 BBC Any Questions, 24th January 2009 26 Israeli government imposed visa restrictions on BBC journalists and refused access to Israeli government figures after a documentary about its nuclear weapons entitled “Israel’s Secret Weapon” was shown on BBC World. The Israeli Government press officer, Danny Seaman, compared it to “the worst of Nazi propaganda”.34 For a time Israel joined a small band of countries, including North Korea, Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan, which refused the BBC free access. When Ariel Sharon visited London in July 2003, BBC journalists were in the ludicrous position of being banned from attending the press conference.35 By the autumn, pressure on the BBC from pro-Israel groups and the Israeli government was so great that the head of BBC news Richard Sambrook felt obliged to act. Sambrook employed Malcolm Balen, a former head of ITV News and senior BBC executive, to write the now infamous Balen Report on the BBC’s Middle East coverage during the previous four years. In October, the High Court finally ruled that the BBC does not have to publish the report, which has become an obsession for Israel's supporters, who hold this up as the BBC trying to hide its anti-Israel bias.36 This is dubious. We have spoken to one of the very few people who have read the report. He says that far from concluding the BBC’s coverage was biased against Israel, it simply finds examples where more context should have been given. If anything, our source claims, the impression given is that the BBC is sympathetic to Israel. 2. Punishing Jeremy Bowen. 34http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/jul/01/israel.bbc 35http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/jul/11/bbc.television 36http://www.zionism--‐israel.com/log/archives/00000268.html;http://www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/BBC_Something_to_Hide$. asp 27 In April this year, in an important success for the pro-Israel lobby, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was criticized by the BBC Trust for breaching their rules of accuracy and impartiality in an online piece, and their rules of accuracy in a radio piece. Bowen’s critics have seized on his humiliation, demanding that he be sacked and insisting that the episode proved the BBC’s “chronically biased reporting”. The real story behind the BBC Trust’s criticism of Bowen reports is rather different: it demonstrates the pusillanimity of the BBC Trust and the energy and opportunism of the pro-Israel lobby. The story begins with an essay written by Bowen to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War for the BBC website.37 Though many people viewed Bowen’s essay as a fair and balanced account, erring if anything on the side of conventional wisdom, this was not the reaction of two passionate members of the Pro-Israel lobby, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation and Gilead Ini, who lobbies CAMERA, an American pro-Israel media watchdog organization.. Turner and Ini subjected Bowen’s article to line by line scrutiny, alleging some 24 instances of bias in his online article and a further four in a later report by Bowen from a controversial Israeli settlement called Har Homa. Turner and Ini’s complaints were rejected by the BBC’s editorial complaints unit, so they duly appealed to the BBC Trust. The meeting was chaired by David Liddiment who, to quote Jonathan Dimbleby, “is admired as a TV entertainment wizard and former director of programmes at ITV but whose experience of the dilemmas posed by news and current affairs, especially in relation to the bitterly contested complexities of the Middle East is, perforce, limited.”38 37http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6709173.stm 3 The BBC Trust found that Bowen had breached three accuracy and one impartiality guideline in his online report, and one accuracy guideline in his radio piece. This was a massive boost for the organizations to which Turner and Ini were attached. The Zionist Federation at once called for Bowen to be sacked, calling his position “untenable”, while adding that what they called his “biased coverage of Israel” had been a “significant contributor to the recent rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK to record levels.”39 Meanwhile, CAMERA claimed that the BBC Trust had exposed Bowen’s “unethical” approach to his work and insisted the BBC must now take “concrete steps” to combat its “chronically biased reporting” of the Middle East.40 These powerful attacks might have been justified if the BBC Trust had found Bowen guilty of egregious bias. In fact he was condemned for what were at best matters of opinion. In a majority of the cases, the complaints were found to have no merit, and where changes were made they changed the meaning very little.41http://zionistfederation.blogspot.com/2009/04/embargoed--‐until--‐1100--‐on--‐ thursday--‐16.html 40http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=12&x_article=1655 As Dimbleby concluded, “You don’t have to search far on the web to find Zionist publications, lobby groups and bloggers all over the world using distorted versions of the report to justify their ill-founded prejudice that the BBC has a deep-seated and long-standing bias against the state of Israel. Conversely, millions of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslims will by now have been confirmed in their — equally false — belief that the BBC is yet again running scared of Israeli propaganda… “Not only has Bowen’s hard-won reputation been sullied, but the BBC’s international status as the best source of trustworthy news in the world has been gratuitously — if unintentionally — undermined.” The Trust’s ruling was met with dismay in BBC newsrooms. A former BBC News editor, Charlie Beckett, told us “the BBC investigated Jeremy Bowen because they were under such extraordinary pressure... it struck a chill through the actual BBC newsroom because it signaled to them that they were under assault.” We can reveal that Jeremy Bowen had an article “Israel still bears a disastrous legacy” (31 May 2007) published a week earlier than his BBC piece (4 June 2007) in The Jewish Chronicle containing most of the contentious sentences. Indeed, even the problematic lines that led the BBC Trust to conclude there had been a breach of accuracy and impartiality, such as “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier” andhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/esc_bulletins/ 2009/mar.pdf 30 “The Israeli generals, mainly hugely self-confident sabras in their late 30s and early 40s, had been training to finish the unfinished business of 1948 for most of their careers” are still in Bowen’s article on The Jewish Chronicle’s website. Perhaps the BBC Trust’s interpretation of due impartiality is different to that of Britain’s Jewish community.42 The Gaza Humanitarian appeal The BBC has a long tradition of showing humanitarian appeals, including those that are seen as politically sensitive, such as the Lebanon appeal in 1982, and has helped raise tens of millions of pounds for people in need around the world. But in January 2009, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, took the unprecedented decision of breaking away from other broadcasters and refusing to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Appeal for Gaza, claiming it would compromise the BBC’s impartiality. ITV and Channel 4 screened the Gaza appeal, but Sky joined the BBC in refusing. The BBC’s decision had an undeniable impact. Brendan Gormley, Chief Executive of the DEC, told us that the appeal raised about half of the expected total: £7.5 million. In the first 48 hours of the appeal phone calls were down by 17,000 on the average. Thompson also cast doubt on the charities’ ability to deliver aid on the ground despite assurances from the DEC and his own charitable appeals advisers that this was not the case.43 We asked Charlie Beckett why the BBC had refused. He replied: “If there was no pro-Israeli lobby in this country then I 42http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=53009&ATypeId=1&search=true2&sr chstr=jeremy%20bowen&srchtxt=0&srchhead=1&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0& scsrch=0 43http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/01/bbc_and_the_gaza_appeal.ht ml 31 don’t think [screening the appeal] would have been seen as politically problematic. I don’t think it would be a serious political issue and concern for them if they didn’t have that pressure from an extraordinarily active, sophisticated, and persuasive lobby sticking up for the Israeli viewpoint.”
profitius wrote: » If the people doing it happen to be Jewish what are we supposed to do? Not point out the elephant in the room?
profitius wrote: » I never said or will never say ALL Jewish people are up to no good. Until I say that then I'd like not to be accused of something I'm not.
digme wrote: » king mob loves jews more than irish people woohooo
King Mob wrote: » Of course I love them, they're who I get my paycheck off of course. I mean why else would I suggest they not be assumed to be up to no good purely based on their heritage?
Brown Bomber wrote: » who has done that?
King Mob wrote: » The article we've been discussing for the last two pages? TMoreno?
Brown Bomber wrote: » It was Profitius. That article was about 90% of (somewhat dated apparently) claimed facts regarding media ownership/management in the US. And it was posted with a disclaimer by Profitus. He hasn't ever, from what I've seen posted anything at all anti-semitic. Why can't we discuss the contents without smearing each other?
Brown Bomber wrote: » Or why are we even discussing it all? It's a given. Jewish people in the US are hugely influential in the US media. Incredibly over represented based on numbers. It is accepted by prominent Jews within the media we are discussing. It's not up for debate. Which is why I suspect we are talking about racism rather than these facts.
profitius wrote: » Well heres something to think about. Maybe they want to control the media to influence people? Influence = power. Obama got elected and was the new messiah. Why? Because the media made him out to be. Obama is jewish!! I thought he was a muslim (or is that a different thread)
King Mob wrote: » Which is why I said the article. And I have pointed out exactly where it assumes that they are evil because they are Jewish.
King Mob wrote: » And can you point out where I said that there weren't a lot of Jews in the media?
ME Of course its working on the premise that Jewish people are heavily influential in the media industry in the US. I think only someone who is deeply ignorant would challenge that claim, which I don't believe you are.
YOU]And that premise has yet to actually be validated by you or anyone. My point is that it's racist to just assume they are all in on an evil plan together simply because they are Jewish.
King Mob wrote: » So why exactly is it a problem that there are a lot of Jews in the media?
Brown Bomber wrote: » It's not that they are Jews but any single interest group with disproportionate unfluence.
Brown Bomber wrote: » Some simple factsJews dominate the corridors of power in the US media Mass media has enormous powers of persuasion and influence on public opinion Israel is the Jewish state. Israel commits many war crimes and human rights abuses, has an illegal nuclear arsenal and is militarily expansionist and aggressive. The majority of well meaning, moral Americans would strongly object to this if they were aware of the reality. Israel is dependant on the US for it's very existence. http://wrmea.org/component/content/article/245-2008-november/3845-congress-watch-a-conservative-estimate-of-total-direct-us-aid-to-israel-almost-114-billion.htmlA Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: Almost $114 Billion US media is very clearly carries a pro-Israel bias.
joebucks wrote: » IMO any religious group having a dominance in the media is a bad thing.
King Mob wrote: » And there is my point exactly. How do you know that they are a single interest group? Their heritage perhaps? So because they are Jewish they therefore must be involved in a Israel conspiracy?
Brown Bomber wrote: » No you leaped from point 1 to 7 when in fact it was point 7 that leads me to connect it to point 1 (along with AIPAC, ADL etc). Unless you have a better explanation for pro Israel bias?
King Mob wrote: » And most of those people who you guys love to list aren't all part of a single religious group.
As far as most of the sources cited are concerned, having a Jewish name is enough to be lumped into the conspiracy.
joebucks wrote: » Which conspiracy is this?
King Mob wrote: » Maybe portraying Israelis as people and not snarling brainwashed psychopaths like you think they are isn't actually a bias?
King Mob wrote: » Maybe you're just way too biased in the other way?
King Mob wrote: » Maybe by reading similarly biased sources?
Brown Bomber wrote: » :rolleyes: Again with the petty name calling.
Brown Bomber wrote: » Have you considered that you may be the one who is biased?
Brown Bomber wrote: » I get my news on Israel/Palestine from Haaretz, I've even linked them a couple of times today. Also from human rights groups. Otherwise http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=68372830&postcount=10
Maybe you're just way too biased in the other way?
Maybe by reading similarly biased sources?
King Mob wrote: » I didn't call you a name. You do think Israelis are psychopaths:http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056002444
to produce or bring about by a course of action or behavior
King Mob wrote: » So then you'd agree sites like Jewwatch and Whiteworldnews would be examples of biased sources
Lab_Mouse wrote: » BB off topic but why dont you start threads on the politics forum about israel as opposed to here?
Brown Bomber wrote: » First you lied and now your moving the goalposts. Why don't you just be honest with everyone and admit your hissyfit was based on
King Mob wrote: » That's a very good question joe. I doubt the people writing these articles know themselves. They sorta just stick to implying that those dastardly Jews are up to something, cause they're Jewish.
The best way to demonstrate the hidden influence of the chosen people would be for Jon Stewart and others to join me in calling for Rick Sanchez's reinstatement. If it then didn't happen, it would help us understand who really pulls the strings around here.
studiorat wrote: » Eh, I must have missed your answer there Black Ulan.
studiorat wrote: » What site did the article link to as the Original Story?
studiorat wrote: » Why did Profiterole's article link to it in the first place?
studiorat wrote: » The forum actually contains articles, which are locked, probably because they are all paranoid... However why can't a forum be a source? A crappy source, but still a source none the less. Fess up, Profiterole posted an article from a white supremacist forum and didn't realize he's been duped by the new alternative media the US Nazi's.
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Brown Bomber wrote: » I'm gonna put you out of your misery anyway. This appears to be the original source. The POST in THE FORUM that your are fetishing over linked to this site.http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/six-jewish-companies-own-96-of-the-worlds-media/
meglome wrote: » Had a quick look at that. Serious question, what exactly is a Jewish company?
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