No Change at the BBC

By Michael Woodbridge:

On Tuesday 16^th April, James Harding, the former editor of The Times, was named as the new Head of News at the BBC.

Harding is to replace Helen Boaden, who stepped aside after criticism of the way in which the BBC handled the reporting of child sex-abuse claims made against the late TV host Jimmy Savile. The BBC has been criticized over its decision to cancel a show which examined claims that Savile abused children and previously, this scandal had also led to the resignation of the BBC’s then Director General, George Entwistle.

According to the new BBC Director General, Tony Hall, “James [Harding] has a very impressive track record as a journalist, editor and leader. I believe James will give News a renewed sense of purpose as it moves on from what has been an undeniably difficult chapter.”

James Harding became editor of The Times in 2007 at the age of 38, but resigned last December in the wake of the disruption caused by the Murdoch hacking scandal. Mr. Harding will receive a salary of £340,000 per annum upon taking up the new post on August 12^th.

However, it might take more than Mr. Hall’s endorsement of James Harding to reassure the British public that the BBC is about to shed it’s disgraceful reputation for bias. During his tenure as Times Editor the paper was notorious for it’s pro-Israeli distortions, not least in its reporting of events in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries.

As a self-identifying Jew James Harding has spoken candidly to the Jewish Chronicle about the pressures of being a Jewish editor. He was interviewed by former Sunday Express editor Eve Pollard at a Jewish event, discussing his career, anti-Semitism and the media, and British reporting of the Middle East. “I am pro-Israel,” he said.

“I believe in the state of Israel. I would have had a real problem if I had been coming to a paper with a history of being anti-Israel.

“And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is pro-Israel.”

When on occasion he has been accused by his co-Religionists of not being sufficiently pro Jewish or pro Zionist he relates how he particularly enjoys writing back beginning his letter with, “Dear estranged relative …”

So while it may safely be said that the BBC is about to tighten it’s grip still further on dissident opinion, Tim Llewellyn, the former BBC Middle East correspondent, says it wasn’t always so. He is reported to have stated at a book launch in 2012, “I was there (at the BBC) when we weren’t interfered with. But the last 10-12 years, since the beginning of the second Intifada, Israel has decided to mount a tremendously well organised, careful, assiduous and extremely well financed propaganda campaign, especially in Britain.

“The BBC has completely and utterly become feeble and has misreported, in my view; misrepresenting the situation in Israel-Palestine. It has done this maybe because of intense Jewish and pro-Israeli pressure from within this country, from political elements like the Friends of Israel of our three main political parties.

“The propaganda can sometimes be extremely intense, it can be bitter, it can be angry, it could be violent, it can be other forms of coercion. But it’s something the suits at the BBC find very hard to resist. So what has developed over the past 10 years at the BBC, and at other broadcasting institutions like ITN, not so much Channel 4, is a kind of self-censorship.

“It is known now by the reporters if they are reporting on an atrocity by the Israelis, in the occupied territories or elsewhere, that they have to add on to the end of their story some kind of appeasing story of how terrible the Palestinians are or how the Israelis have suffered.”

Llewellyn is reported to have said, furthermore, that:

“The BBC is very sparing in the amount of delegations or visitors it allows from the Palestinian side. Whereas from remarks that have been heard from the head of BBC News, Helen Boaden, the British Board of Deputies (of British Jews), for example, practically lives at the BBC. They’re there all the time.”

At the same event, Jackie Rowland, from Al Jazeera broadcasting, described how the BBC’s obligation for accountability, because of its public funding, has been “used and exploited by very well organised pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish lobby groups.”

She said that she knew someone who worked in the complaints department of the BBC who told her “that 85% of the complaints he dealt with were complaints by pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish lobby groups complaining about the perceived bias of the BBC’s Middle East coverage.”

Many of us have long since learned not to take at face value anything the Times or the BBC might report about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and now with the appointment of James Harding as News Director at the BBC, it would appear to be ‘business as usual’.

While some nationalists may not be unduly concerned about fairness and the objectivity of our mass media in their reporting of events in the Middle East, the key implication of such strongly pro-Israeli bias within the media, is that it tends to confirm our worst suspicions regarding the scope that exists for minority ethnic groups in general, and for Jewish groups in particular, to covertly exercise influence over British politicians and the general public, pressuring them to pursue policies, which while legitimate from the perspective of the minority groups in question, are almost invariably inimical to the interests of we indigenous British. Policies such as permitting uncontrolled mass Third World immigration, the introduction of laws outlawing racial preference and the suppressing of our freedom of speech on issues such as race and nationality, for example.

By Michael Woodbridge © 2013

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