The many journalists who have been desperately trying to draw attention to the BBC's horrific anti-Israel bias for years can finally take a breather: Louise Bagshawe, best-selling chick-lit author turned politician, has come to the rescue. As the JC reported last week (and again this), she has fought an ongoing battle with the BBC public affairs team regarding the channel's lack of coverage of the Fogel family massacre, of which she only learned via Twitter due to their virtually non-existent reporting of the murders (the BBC only mentioned the Fogels in passing in other articles and omitted many details).
Whilst I am always glad to see coverage of the BBC's anti-Israel bias, especially from high-profile figures like Bagshawe, I can't help but marvel at her naivety. As she notes herself, "the BBC has long been accused of anti-Israel bias" – so it took a three-month old little girl to have her head sawn off only to be met with silence from the BBC for you to actually believe these accusations of bias?
No, not quite. "As the mother of three children, one the same age as little Eldad...I was stunned at the BBC's seeming lack of care...as a mother, I am shocked at the silence. As a politician, I am dismayed at the apparent bias and indifference."
The BBC's "seeming lack of care" and "apparent bias and indifference"? Come on, Louise, you've come this far – why not go a step further and call a spade a spade: the BBC is institutionally biased. Period. There's nothing "seeming" about it.
You don't need to be a mother or a politician to see this, but perhaps you do need to rely on something other than the BBC as your source of information.
Yes, the BBC could also be described as careless and indifferent – there's not a committee that actively decides not to report on the murder of Israeli children, or to withhold the true number of unprovoked attacks on Israel - but it is important to realise that this indifference stems from the sinister reality that anti-Israel bias has become so engrained within the BBC that it's now simply the norm.
Once in a while someone like Louise Bagshawe will stumble across an article via Twitter, discover a family was slaughtered, including a child of the same age as her own and it will therefore strike a chord. She will wonder why she didn't hear about it from the BBC, she'll maybe kick up a bit of a fuss, write a letter of complaint, but soon that family will be forgotten and everyone will go back to being blissfully unaware.
Because, after all, as Bagshawe was told by Lord Patten, the new chairman of the BBC Trust during his confirmation hearing on the day before the Fogel murders, "bias against Israel doesn't exist within the BBC".
He assured her that if it did, he would ultimately "take it to the BBC Trust", and in the name of political neutrality said he would give up his membership of a Palestinian aid organisation. How reassuring.
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