Expanding Horizons
The BBC is set to spend £25m of taxpayers’ money every year on funding the creation of a new Arabic television station which it claims will provide news ‘without fear or favour’. Yeah right.
If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.
Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?
At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:
There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.
Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.
