The BBC, biased towards Israel? You must be joking
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The BBC has been accused of bias in its coverage of Gaza. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But wait. There’s a twist.
This time, it’s been accused of bias towards Israel.
The accusation comes from none other than a group of the BBC’s own reporters. Eight of them, all unnamed, have sent a letter to the Qatari news organisation Al Jazeera, alleging that, on the BBC, “humanising coverage of Palestinian civilians has been lacking”, and that “the positions taken by governments in the UK and US have undue influence on coverage”.
The letter is no doubt heartfelt. I wonder, though, if there are one or two tiny things its writers have overlooked.
Perhaps, for example, they’ve forgotten about the BBC’s refusal to refer to Hamas as terrorists – even though, in Britain, that’s how Hamas is officially classified. They may also have forgotten about the time one of the BBC’s news anchors misreported a story from Reuters to suggest that Israel was “targeting” medical staff. And the time one of its correspondents said it was “hard to see” how anyone but the Israelis could have caused an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. (UK intelligence sources believe that it was actually caused by a wayward Palestinian rocket.)
Only the other day, the BBC’s best-paid presenter, Gary Lineker, urged his 8.9million followers on Twitter/X to watch a video in which an academic accuses Israel of committing “textbook genocide”. So, if the BBC does indeed favour Israel, this bias does not appear to be shared by all its top staff.
In my view, though, the most memorable moment of the BBC’s coverage came when Jeremy Bowen, its International Editor, was discussing the stash of assault rifles that had been discovered inside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital. Apparently, the stash did not necessarily prove Israel had been right to say Hamas uses hospitals as military bases. According to Mr Bowen, it was “not inconceivable” that the weapons instead belonged to “the security department of the hospital”.
Well, of course. Every hospital in the world equips its staff with Kalashnikovs. That’s how the NHS plans to get its waiting lists down.
Are Remainers really brainier?
A new study purports to show that people who voted Remain in 2016 are more intelligent than people who voted Leave. To say the least, this is a provocative claim. But it also strikes me as somewhat unlikely.
After all, if Remainers are so dazzlingly ingenious, how come they didn’t win?
With such an immense advantage over their opponents, the referendum campaign should have been a doddle. Thanks to their vastly superior brainpower, they should effortlessly have outwitted Dominic Cummings and his band of fellow simpletons. Mysteriously, however, they didn’t.
Mind you, the study doesn’t say that every Remainer is more intelligent than every Leaver. It just says that Remainers are more intelligent overall. So I suppose it’s possible that the staff of the Remain campaign were drawn exclusively from the small minority of stupid Remainers, while all the millions of intelligent Remainers were otherwise occupied with their careers as brain surgeons, rocket scientists, Nobel Prize-winning poets, Match of the Day presenters, etc.
But if so, why didn’t the intelligent Remainers notice that the stupid Remainers were running such a disastrously incompetent campaign, and order them to change tack? Were the intelligent Remainers all too busy curing cancer, translating Finnegans Wake into Old Norse and reciting Pi to eight million decimal places?
The other possibility, of course, is that Remain campaigners were simply too clever for their own good. Their genius lulled them into a false sense of security. As a result, they got lazy, and lost. Just like the hare who stopped for a nap during his race with the tortoise.
Then again, the moral of that fable is not merely that the hare is complacent. It’s that he’s an idiot.
Mrs Hunt’s unhappy birthday
I wouldn’t want to be in Jeremy Hunt’s shoes. But not because he’s finding it so hard to get the economy going. It’s because this week, he forgot to buy his wife a birthday present.
“I didn’t even get her a card,” the Chancellor confessed, during an interview on LBC radio. “I feel incredibly guilty.”
This isn’t the first time poor Lucia has been let down by her husband’s faulty memory. Remarkably, he once managed to forget what nationality she is. During a trip to Beijing as Foreign Secretary, he told local dignitaries that his wife was Japanese. She’s Chinese.
How on earth any man could contrive to get his wife’s nationality wrong, I’ve no idea. Whatever faults I may have as a husband, at least I’ve never said, “Please, let me introduce my wife. She’s from Kuala Lumpur. Sorry, no – I mean Kent.”
Still, God bless Lucia. She’s clearly a very kind and forgiving woman. Let’s just hope she and her husband are never invited to appear on Mr and Mrs – the TV game show in which couples are tested on how much they know about each other.
“Jeremy, here’s your first question. What is your wife’s name?”
“Ooh, that’s a tricky one. Hang on, wait a minute, I’m sure I know this. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Er... Lizzie? Linda? Morag? Myfanwy? Saoirse? Svetlana? Parvati? Yetunde?”
Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 7am every Tuesday and Saturday
