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Сorporate media of all stripes have rushed to support the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran, throwing objectivity and accuracy by the wayside in order to manufacture consent for regime change.

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, bombing cities across the country, assassinating its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and openly stating their goal was overthrowing the government.

Despite this, media have gone out of their way to present the actions as the U.S. protecting itself, describing them as “defensive strikes,” and to frame Iran as the aggressor. “Iran chooses chaos” ran the headline of the New York Times’ newsletter, portraying the Islamic Republic as the primary actor.

The Free Press used similarly Orwellian concepts. “War is Iranians’ best chance at peace,” presenting U.S./Israeli crimes as an act of mercy on its long-suffering population.

Meanwhile, under the new leadership of self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, CBS News has transformed itself into a mouthpiece for the Israeli Defense Forces, interviewing IDF Brigadier General Effie Defrin, and uncritically presenting Israel’s war as “aimed at preventing a wider global threat.”

Across the West, corporate media have employed the same tactics of using the passive voice and not naming the perpetrator when describing U.S./Israeli aggression. A perfect encapsulation of this was the BBC’s headline, “At least 153 dead after reported strike on school, Iran says,” that made it sound as if the children died in a lightning strike or a labor dispute, rather than that they were bombed by hostile foreign powers.

Israeli casualties were given more sympathetic coverage than their Iranian counterparts, while media regularly toned down the language used to describe Israeli actions to make them sound more reasonable, and did the opposite with Iran. The Washington Post, for example, wrote (emphasis added) “Israel urges evacuation of south Beirut suburbs; Iran threatens revenge on U.S. over warship.” Thus, Israel was treated as making a good faith attempt to reduce civilian casualties, while the Iranian response to their ship being attacked and sunk in international waters was presented as menacing.

Another common tactic of delegitimization media use is to describe the Iranian as a “regime” (e.g., Bloomberg, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CNN, NBC News). The word “regime” immediately discredits a government, and cues the reader to oppose it. The phrase “Israeli regime” is virtually never used, unless in a quote from Iranian officials.

Earlier this week, large numbers of Israeli troops re-invaded southern Lebanon. Media attempted to find ways to present the operation as legitimate, including euphemistically using the phrase “cross over into Lebanon” to describe the invasion, or even blaming Hezbollah for the violence. CNN, for instance, wrote that, “Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into the war on Iran,” and that “Hezbollah just restarted the fight that Israel was waiting to finish,” thereby flipping the realities of who was attacking whom.

There have also been a number of fawning profiles of Israeli leaders. “Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career was built on conflict avoidance—then, October 7 transformed and radicalized him,” wrote The Atlantic. In Britain, the coverage from some quarters was even more positive. “Netanyahu is the great war leader of our age” The Daily Telegraph stated, describing the prime minister as a “genius.”

The Daily Telegraph’s Monday front page headline read “Britain backs war on Iran,” with a picture of diaspora Iranians cheering on the bombing of their country. The reality, however, is far less jingoistic. A YouGov poll published the same day found that only 28% of U.K. citizens support U.S./Israeli actions, with 49% expressing their opposition to them. Nevertheless, BBC anchor Nick Robinson suggested, on air, that protests against the U.S./Israeli attacks should be banned across the U.K.

This sort of mentality should come as no surprise, given BBC leadership’s stated positions on Israel. The corporation’s Middle East editor, Raffi Berg, is a former CIA operative and Mossad collaborator who has a signed letter of recommendation from Netanyahu on his office wall.

Anonymous BBC employees speaking to Drop Site News claimed that Berg’s “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel.” They went on to allege that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

If true, the sort of top-down pro-Israel bias at the BBC closely mirrors that of American outlets. A leaked 2023 New York Times memo revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.

CNN employees face similar pressure. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the company’s C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

German media conglomerate Axel Springer, meanwhile – owner of outlets such as Politico and Business Insider – requires its employees to sign what amounts to a loyalty oath to support “the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel.” The company fired a Lebanese employee who, through internal channels, questioned the requirement.

American newsrooms are also filled with former Israel lobbyists. A MintPress News investigation found hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA working in top newsrooms across the country, writing and producing America’s news – including on Israel-Palestine. These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News.

There are even ex-Israeli spies writing our news. Another MintPress report revealed a network of former agents of IDF intelligence outfit, Unit 8200, working in America’s newsrooms, including at CNN and Axios.

Therefore, with American newsrooms presided over and staffed in no small part by pro-Israel zealots, it is far from a surprise that their coverage closely mirrors the outlook and biases of Washington and Tel Aviv.

And now, with CNN, CBS News, and TikTok owned by CIA asset Larry Ellison, the IDF’s largest private funder and a close personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, we should only expect the propaganda to be dialed up to eleven.

Original article: mintpressnews.com

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Britain is taking an increasingly sinister role in fueling the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. It seems that as Uncle Sam is growing weary of the slaughter, the British butler is stepping in to take up the mantle.

A large part of that role is ramping up information warfare, or propaganda, which the British state has been a past master of over the centuries. Britain’s military is in such sad disrepair these days that it has to rely on other devices.

In our editorial last week, we looked at how Britain recently tried to poison delicate diplomatic efforts for finding a settlement to the conflict by launching far-fetched claims that Russia had assassinated the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny by injecting him with a lethal South American frog toxin. That psyops bid coincided with the second anniversary of Navalny’s death. A telltale sign is how those fleeting headlines have now vanished into oblivion.

This week, the BBC, the state-owned broadcaster, fired another salvo of propaganda, this time from an interview with Ukraine’s nominal president, Vladimir Zelensky. The interview was timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the eruption of hostilities in Ukraine with Russia.

“Zelensky tells BBC Putin has started WW3 and must be stopped,” was the headline.

This was not a sit-down interlocution with some low-level journalist. It was conducted by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor.

Zelensky was permitted to spout his slander without any pushback or questioning, which can only mean that the BBC was deliberately serving as a platform to amplify provocative messaging.

The Ukrainian leader, whose presidential mandate expired nearly two years ago and who continues to stay in power solely by martial decree (that is, dictatorship), asserted the usual NATO propaganda narrative that Ukraine is defending the whole of Europe from Russian aggression.

“Putin has already started it [World War Three]… the question is how to stop Russia because Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life.”

At a later point in the interview, Zelensky urged the United States “to stop the Russians.”

The BBC described Zelensky as a “resilient” wartime leader carrying the burden of his nation. At no point was the former comedian-actor asked about the mounting evidence of embezzlement of Western public money among his ruling circle.

At no point did the BBC question how Ukraine was infiltrated by the CIA, MI6, and other NATO intelligence to install a NeoNazi regime in 2014 to act as a spearhead against Russia that led to the eruption of hostilities in February 2022.

Instead, the British broadcaster indulged in dignifying futile war rhetoric. Zelensky said he believed that Ukraine would win against Russia eventually and that it would reclaim all its territory back to the 1991 borders, implying even the return of Crimea.

This is tantamount to the British undermining ongoing diplomatic talks convened by the Trump administration. Russia is adamant that a peaceful settlement must involve the recognition of Crimea, Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as historic Russian territories.

In effect, the British are keeping the conflict going by portraying Russia as an evil aggressor with no just cause, and emboldening the Kiev regime to continue the reckless slaughter.

This is deja vu of the inimical intervention by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April 2022, when an early peace deal to end the conflict was scuppered by Johnson cajoling the Kiev regime to keep fighting. A weeks-long conflict became a four-year war with millions of casualties.

London’s repeated dangling of the proposal to send troops to Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing” is another ploy to sabotage a negotiated peace deal.

Another sinister development was the claim this week by Russian foreign intelligence that Britain and France were endeavoring to covertly ship components of nuclear weapons to Ukraine. Russian lawmakers are formally urging British, French, and German parliamentarians to investigate the grave claims. If the Kiev regime gets its hands on such weapons, then the implications are potentially catastrophic. We have already seen how this regime is prepared to bomb oil infrastructure serving Hungary and Slovakia, and shell Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporozhye in desperate acts of terroristic blackmail.

While the Americans under Trump seem to realize that the proxy war in Ukraine is a dead-end, not so the British and other European warmongering, Russophobic elites. They need the war to continue because they have invested so much political capital in “justifying” the proxy war that to admit defeat now would be politically disastrous.

The British state is already facing deep inherent crises from its moribund economy and the fallout from the Epstein pedophile scandal, which has shaken the British establishment to its core. The arrest of a senior British royal and a former government minister over their alleged crimes with Epstein’s network is something that the BBC would rather play down, especially as the BBC is itself implicated in the pedophile network through former presenter and royal fixer, Jimmy Savile, as our columnist Raphael Machado noted in an article this week.

The BBC’s interview with the corrupt puppet president Zelensky this week was shameless war propaganda. A case could be made that the state broadcaster is criminally inciting aggression. If the NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine is not settled, there is a looming danger of it spiralling into a nuclear Third World War.

No wonder the Western news media and the BBC in particular are held in such contempt by the public in recent years. The “Beeb’s” advertising slogan is “the world’s most trusted news source.” That needs updating… to the “most busted” news source.

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Who was it who said that the first casualty of war is truth? In the Ukraine war, could it be that Pokrovsk—a crucial town in the Donbas—is the epitome of that adage? Many Western analysts sympathetic to Russia, even Americans, have been claiming for weeks that this strategic town has fallen to the Russian army, when the reality is that it is very close to falling—but not yet. Ukraine is holding on and, in all fairness, has put up a formidable fight. But the truth is they simply don’t have the numbers of battle-hardened soldiers, and it is infantry numbers that ultimately matter. Russia has encircled the city except for a part of the north, where the last remnants of hardcore Ukrainian soldiers are holding out.

Much has been made in Western media about Russian casualties, but little if anything is reported about Ukrainian losses in mainstream outlets. For that, you have to go to social media—like footage of a recent raid involving three American-piloted Black Hawk helicopters, which were shot down, with all Ukrainian special forces on board believed to have perished.

How much of the Pokrovsk story is told—or misrepresented—through journalists’ reporting? Quite a bit, in fact. One recent report by the BBC on December 9 is starting to draw attention in Russia for a number of odd reasons, primarily because of how revealing the dispatch was, despite its clear objective of misleading the Ukrainian army and its people.

The report was, in many ways, very poor journalism. In war zones, correspondents are often placed in a logistics or operations room, which the host army offers as a kind of privilege—it’s the heart of the action, with live feeds from monitors and commanders shouting into radios. This happened to me in Afghanistan in 2008 with the British army, and I can relate to the “live” feel of it, as well as being at the centre of communications. But at least then, everything was in English.

In Pokrovsk, a BBC correspondent took up the same offer. His report didn’t make any bold statements or provide clear facts, figures, or claims—except for one, which may have been a slip-up by the Ukrainian ministry responsible for manufacturing such “news.” A Ukrainian soldier revealed that the army was still holding part of the town’s north and had 300 soldiers there. Three hundred. What an extraordinary admission to make to the press, given that troop numbers are critical intelligence—if they were true.

We’ll never know for sure, because the nature of such BBC reporting is to do the least amount of due diligence possible when covering wars in which London has a stake. The same disinformation operates on a colossal scale in the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza, as a recent investigation revealed—exposing the extent of editorial influence over the language used in such reports.

We can assume the same in Ukraine. The BBC’s report on the Ukrainian army’s control centre lacked credibility on every level. It felt as though the whole point of the segment was to boost morale among Ukrainian soldiers across the country by suggesting their comrades were still holding out. One interviewee even implied as much, while the camera framed him against a neo-Nazi flag in the background. A nice touch.

The entire piece seemed constructed around a commander on the radio telling a soldier on the front line to step out of a building and wave a Ukrainian flag—just to make a point to the BBC journalist. Look: a soldier. With a flag. Surely this proves Pokrovsk hasn’t fallen and reports of Russian dominance are wildly exaggerated!

Such amateur dramatics is presented as old-school reporting, and with an English middle-class accent narrating, it can almost feel like journalism. But the piece was, at best, a diary entry—and it was written up verbatim as such on the BBC’s website. The BBC’s reporting in Gaza, and earlier in Syria, has been so shamefully biased—and in some cases fabricated—that this Ukraine “man with a flag” report must be categorised accordingly. Nothing to see here.

Given the timing of the report—nine days before the EU shamefully signed off on a €90 billion loan to keep the war going in Ukraine via its national budget—the segment put a brave face on Ukraine’s dire situation. Still fighting. But for how long? Ukraine has maintained a drone campaign there with some impressive results, but it will eventually face the same fate German units in northwest France faced during the Allied invasion of 1944. The Germans fought incredibly well, and their tanks—Panthers and Tigers—were superior to those of the Allies. But in the end, they were simply outnumbered. This will be Ukraine’s fate in Pokrovsk, whether they can hold on for a few more weeks or a few more months.

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Starmer’s government has set the most dangerous of precedents: it can now outlaw any political group it chooses as a terrorist organisation – and thereby make it impossible to defend it

The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.

And lo behold, here we are.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.

Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.

But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the Act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.

It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision.

When it was introduced, six years ago, Section 12 made it impossible to write or speak in ways that might encourage support for groups whose central aim was using violence against people to achieve their aims.

The law effectively required journalists and others to adopt a blanket condemnatory approach to proscribed militant groups. That had its own drawbacks. It made it difficult, and possibly a terrorist offence, to discuss or analyse these organisations and their goals in relation to international law, which, for example, allows armed resistance – violence – against an occupying army.

But these problems have grown exponentially since the Conservatives proscribed Hamas’ political wing in 2021 and the government of Keir Starmer proscribed Palestine Action in 2025, the first time in British history a direction-action group targeting property had been declared a terrorist group.

Now journalists, human rights activists and lawyers face a a legal minefield every time they try to talk about the Gaza genocide, the trials of people accused of belonging to Palestine Action, or the hunger strikes of those on remand over attacks on weapons factories supplying killer drones to Israel.

Why? Because saying truthful things about any of these matters – if they could lead a reader or listener to take a more favourable view of Palestine Action or the political wing of Hamas – are now a terrorist offence. Any journalist, human rights activist or lawyer making factual observations risks 14 years behind bars.

Few seem to have understood quite what impact this is having on public coverage of these major issues.

A month and a half into the hunger strike by eight members of Palestine Action – the point at which people are likely to start dying – the BBC News at Ten finally broke its silence on the matter. That was despite the hunger strike being the largest in UK history in nearly half a century.

There are clear political reasons why the BBC had avoided this topic for so long. It prefers not to deal with matters that directly confront the legitimacy of the government, which funds it. The BBC is effectively the British state broadcaster.

But in a naturally spineless organisation like the BBC, the legal consequences have clearly weighed heavily too. In a recent short segment on the hunger strike, BBC correspondent Dominic Casciani carefully hedged his words and admitted to facing legal difficulties reporting on the strike.

In these circumstances, news organisations make one of two choices. They simply ignore factual things because it is legally too dangerous to speak truthfully about them. Or they lie about factual things because it is legally safe – and politically opportune – to speak untruthfully about them.

The so-called “liberal” parts of the media, including the BBC, tend to opt for the former; the red-tops usually opt for the latter.

The government itself is taking full advantage of this lacuna in reporting, injecting its own self-serving deceptions into the coverage, knowing that there will be – can be – no meaningful pushback.

Take just one example. The government has proscribed Palestine Action on the grounds that it is a terrorist organisation. It has justified its decision by implying, without producing a shred of evidence, that the group is funded by Iran, and that its real agenda is not just criminal damage against arms factories but against individuals.

Any effort to counter this government disinformation, by definition, violates Section 12 of the Terrorism Act and risks 14 years’ imprisonment.

Were I to conduct an investigation, for example, definitively showing that Palestine Action was not funded by Iran – proving that the government was lying – it would be a terror offence to publish that truthful information. Why? Because it would almost certainly “encourage support” for Palestine Action. There is no fact or truth exemption in the legislation.

Similarly, the government has suggested that the current “Filton Trial” – which includes discussions of events in which a police officer was injured during a struggle over the sledgehammers being used to destroy the Elbit factory’s weapons-producing machinery – demonstrates that Palestine Action was not just targeting property but individuals too.

Were I to try to make the case that the alleged actions of one individual – only one person is charged with assault – prove nothing about the aims of the organisation as a whole, I would be risking a terrorism conviction and 14 years’ imprisonment. Which is one, very strong reason not to make such an argument.

But in the absence of such arguments, the reality is that social media is awash with posts from people echoing outrageous official disinformation. This spreads unchallenged because to challenge it is now cast as a terrorism offence.

In truth, since proscription, any statements about the political aims of a deeply political organisation like Palestine Action occupy a grey area of the law.

Is it a terrorism offence to point out the fact, as I have done above, that Palestine Action targeted Elbit factories that send killer drones to Israel for use in Gaza. In doing so, may I have “recklessly” encouraged you to support Palestine Action?

Can I express any kind of positive view about the hunger strikers or their actions without violating the law?

The truth is that the law’s greyness is its very point. It maximises the chilling effect on those who are supposed to serve as the public’s watchdogs on power: journalists, human rights groups, lawyers.

It allows the government – through complaint police forces – to selectively pick off those dissenting individuals it doesn’t like, those without institutional backing, to make examples of them. This is not conjecture. It is already happening.

Investigative journalist Asa Winstanley describes the raid on his home by counter-terrorism police.

Those ‘media professionals’ who fail to speak out against this latest assault on journalism are not journalists. They are courtiers and stenographers.https://t.co/qaGrk11Tgw

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 21, 2024

The abuse of the Terrorism Act discourages research, analysis and critical thinking. It forces all journalists, human rights activists and lawyers to become lapdogs of the government. It creates a void into which the government can spin events to its own advantage, in which it can avoid accountability and in which it can punish those who dissent. It is the very antithesis of democratic behaviour.

This ought to appall anyone who cares about the truth, about public debate, about scrutiny. Because they have all been thrown out of the window.

And in proscribing Palestine Action, the government has set the most dangerous of precedents: it can outlaw any political group it chooses as a terrorist organisation and thereby make it impossible to defend that group.

That is what authoritarian governments do. That is exactly where Britain is now.

Original article:  www.jonathan-cook.net

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Os propagandistas do imperialismo tentaram, certa vez, refutar Margarita Simonyan quando ela respondeu a um repórter ocidental, que questionou o jornalismo da RT. Ela afirmou que não havia diferença entre o financiamento da RT pelo governo russo e o financiamento da BBC pelo governo britânico.

“Que absurdo! É óbvio que a BBC recebe fundos públicos para dizer a verdade, somente a verdade e nada mais que a verdade, enquanto Putin paga os funcionários da RT para espalharem mentiras e propaganda pró-Kremlin!”, latiram.

A BBC tem um longo histórico de cobertura para atividades de espionagem e propaganda dos interesses do imperialismo britânico. Na verdade, ela foi criada para isso. Mas como, no mundo fantástico inventado pela própria BBC e suas sucursais, o Reino Unido é uma democracia, a imprensa seria absolutamente independente em sua linha editorial e estaria integralmente preocupada com difundir informação séria e imparcial. Já a Rússia, ah, ela não passa de uma autocracia bárbara e toda a sociedade estaria subordinada aos interesses do czar Vladimir Putin. Logo, a RT seria um veículo de pura propaganda a serviço do imperialismo russo, ao contrário da BBC.

No artigo anterior, vimos um exemplo de manipulação de uma das mais atrozes guerras das últimas décadas, justamente por parte da neutra, imparcial e informativa BBC. Agora veremos a abordagem da RT sobre o mesmo tema, também analisando um documentário. Como a RT foi criada apenas em 2005, ela não poderia ter realizado uma cobertura das guerras na Iugoslávia. Mas o filme em questão recupera as histórias daquela guerra.

Produzido em 2010, Sérvia ferida é um documentário televisivo, assim como A morte da Iugoslávia. Mas sua angulação é diferente: a partir de depoimentos de testemunhas oculares, o documentário procura contar histórias de vida e não explicar detalhadamente a história oficial da guerra.

Abordando os bombardeios da OTAN na Iugoslávia em 1999 a partir do ponto de vista da população sérvia, a película resgata o sofrimento daquele povo e não tem a intenção de parecer imparcial, ao “ouvir os dois lados”. Seu discurso é claro e, nesse sentido, transparente: vai contar um lado da história, o lado que não é lembrado pela história oficial da guerra de 1999, o lado das vítimas sérvias.

Além disso, devem também ser ressaltadas as motivações políticas de Sérvia ferida. Como um documentário produzido e veiculado pela RT, os pontos de vista transmitidos acabam por representar as aspirações e pensamentos russos, como um contraponto ao sistema propagandístico do imperialismo, como a BBC, cuja programação atende às necessidades das nações imperialistas.

A narrativa, ao recordar as atrocidades cometidas pelas forças da OTAN na Iugoslávia em 1999, é uma advertência sobre possíveis novas ações como aquela, desta vez contra a própria Rússia. Isso porque a Aliança Atlântica, após o término da Guerra Fria e a incorporação de países do Leste Europeu, começou a instalar bases e realizar exercícios militares próximos às fronteiras com a Rússia e as tensões com as potências ocidentais, especialmente os EUA, são frequentes.

Ao contrário do documentário da BBC, Sérvia ferida não mostra o conflito armado como resultado de ódios étnicos mantidos por culturas atrasadas e sim por condições concretas que pioraram a qualidade de vida das pessoas, o que desencadeou uma crise política em que grupos radicais se aproveitaram para espalhar seus preconceitos e outros, interessados em recursos financeiros que viriam com o domínio de territórios, conseguiram levar adiante seus projetos políticos.

O político sérvio Zoran Andjelkovic declara ao documentário que os EUA não estavam contentes com a Iugoslávia unida e soberana e que para eles é mais conveniente controlar países pequenos. Essa é a mais pura verdade, que a BBC jamais admitiu durante aquelas guerras.

Então passa-se a abordar o conflito no Kosovo, em que é relatado o surgimento do Exército de Libertação do Kosovo e são mostradas imagens de seus milicianos armados marchando, enquanto a voice over descreve que eles atacavam civis da minoria sérvia e a polícia e as imagens mostram vítimas sérvias e carros destruídos. Neste momento, a voice over diz que as autoridades de Belgrado decidiram “cumprir a ordem constitucional” de intervir militarmente no Kosovo. No início dessa sequência, o narrador afirma que “forças estrangeiras ajudaram a equipar o Exército de Libertação do Kosovo” mas não apresenta provas nem indícios e não procura se aprofundar no assunto – embora as afirmações possam perfeitamente ser embasadas em documentação disponível na Internet.

Após essa sequência, o documentário começa a abordar a intervenção da OTAN, como narra a voice over: “Ao ver que a situação não mudaria, a OTAN decidiu intervir no caso.” Ao longo da narrativa, não são feitas entrevistas com representantes da Aliança, somente são mostradas partes de discursos da época. Um militar iugoslavo retirado descreve algumas das operações e “conquistas” do exército iugoslavo na defesa do país. Um político também dá seu depoimento sobre suas atividades contra os bombardeios, apesar de ser opositor do então governo de Milosevic.

Os hipócritas que trabalham nos grandes jornais ocidentais dirão: onde está a imparcialidade? Por que o documentário não ouviu “o outro lado”? Ora, já estamos fartos de toda a bajulação da OTAN pelos filmes e documentários internacionais. Já estamos fartos de ouvir o lado dos opressores. O que falta é saber a versão dos oprimidos. E a RT sempre se propôs a isso – é exatamente por isso que incomoda tanto os jornalistas “imparciais” do ocidente.

Durante o documentário, uma série de imagens retrata o poderio militar da OTAN e também as destruições nas cidades e povoados. Apresenta o número de mortos e feridos em vários ataques. Os entrevistados relatam seu sofrimento, principalmente psicológico, porque podiam ouvir o barulho dos mísseis passando poucos metros de suas casas e a qualquer momento poderiam ser atingidos. Uma das entrevistadas, Marina Jovanovic, tem a história mais triste: aos 15 anos, deixou Belgrado para fugir dos bombardeios e se refugiou no interior da Iugoslávia. Quando ia a uma igreja com seus amigos, aviões da OTAN dispararam mísseis contra eles. Ela ficou gravemente ferida e uma de suas melhores amigas morreu, junto a quase duas dezenas de pessoas. Quando ela lembra da amiga, seus olhos ficam marejados e a câmera dá um close em seu rosto e também faz um plano detalhe de seus olhos. Na época da guerra, Marina queria ser jornalista, mas depois decidiu ser médica.

Feridos, mortos, explosões, deslocamento de refugiados e pessoas chorando são algumas das imagens mostradas enquanto o documentário relata as consequências dos seguidos bombardeios contra os civis. É denunciado o uso de armas químicas por parte da OTAN, como bombas de fragmentação e urânio empobrecido. Um ex-correspondente da TV sérvia apresenta indícios em vídeo desses crimes. Imagens e depoimentos são mostrados, inclusive o de um médico que, anos depois, ainda estava cuidando das vítimas da OTAN no Kosovo. Os depoimentos finais de três entrevistados são apresentados com imagens em preto e branco, ao falarem quais foram as consequências “cinzentas” dos bombardeios.

São mostradas e relatadas as consequências dos bombardeios destrutivos sobre edifícios civis ainda com as marcas da guerra. Imagens de arquivo dos bombardeios e da destruição são mostradas enquanto a voice over questiona: “O que essas pessoas pagaram com suas vidas e sua saúde? A OTAN realmente conseguiu realizar seus objetivos (deter a campanha de terror contra os civis no Kosovo, prevenir outras catástrofes e acabar com a instabilidade na região)?” No final do documentário, a voice over questiona, após os eventos terem sido mostrados ao longo do filme: “O tempo passou. Alguém poderia se perguntar se a OTAN conseguiu seus principais objetivos. Por acaso não é uma catástrofe de índole humana o destino de dezenas de milhares de sérvios do Kosovo? O Kosovo parou de ser um foco de tensão da instabilidade? Por acaso acabou o terror contra a população civil nessa região?” Enquanto isso, são mostradas imagens de soldados da OTAN, manifestantes sérvios e uma idosa desesperada. “No entanto, há um objetivo alcançado: a unida, forte e independente Iugoslávia deixou de existir”, completa o narrador.

A RT assume claramente um lado. A BBC esconde o seu lado. Quem é mais honesta? E qual lado é o correto? O imperialismo destruidor de vidas e de nações frágeis, o qual a BBC representa passando-se por “imparcial”? Ou o lado das vítimas das guerras imperialistas, das vidas perdidas pelos massacres da OTAN, dos que sempre sofreram, por séculos, com a expansão militar do imperialismo?

A RT pode até mesmo ser um órgão de propaganda. Mas quem não espalha propaganda? A questão é: qual propaganda está do lado certo da história? A da BBC é que não está. Essa é a verdadeira diferença entre RT e BBC.

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O documentário A morte da Iugoslávia é uma demonstração paradigmática do profissionalismo da maior rede de TV do mundo para praticar aquilo para o qual foi criada: manipular os conflitos internacionais. Dividida em seis episódios, a série foi produzida imediatamente após a assinatura do Acordo de Dayton, em novembro de 1995. O vasto arquivo de imagens de vídeo, fotos e gravações de áudio, algumas delas inéditas; entrevistas exclusivas, filmagens de câmeras de segurança, das forças armadas, de cinegrafistas amadores e até produções por computação gráfica, como mapas geográficos, indicam que só uma verdadeira indústria da propaganda imperialista pode realizar algo desse tamanho.

O documentário apresenta as características tradicionais de um produto jornalístico, com entrevistas com os principais agentes da guerra na antiga Iugoslávia, difundindo diversos pontos de vista, partes investigativas, objetividade e imparcialidade (a priori), atualidade (uma vez que foi veiculado ainda no fervor das tensões imediatamente após a guerra). Entretanto, apesar de A morte da Iugoslávia aparentar ser um documentário imparcial, neutro, que não favorece nenhum lado do conflito, uma análise mais detalhada revela a manipulação. Algumas vezes tácita e outras vezes enfática, a tomada de posicionamento é feita tanto por meio da voice over como também pela seleção das falas dos entrevistados, da montagem, das imagens e da angulação, do direcionamento tomado em algumas partes do documentário.

O discurso do filme apresenta frequentemente os dirigentes sérvios, especialmente Slobodan Milosevic, como culpados pelas guerras. A responsabilidade pelo surgimento das tensões étnicas é colocada quase que exclusivamente sobre o líder sérvio. “O presidente sérvio, Slobodan Milosevic, foi o primeiro a inflamar o seu povo”, afirma a voice over no início do segundo episódio. Uma ilustração disso é a cena inicial do documentário. Ela mostra imagens aéreas de Belgrado, transmitidas pela TV iugoslava, onde uma multidão de sérvios se reúne para um comício de Milosevic, em 1988. Teclas de piano dão o tom de suspense e temor do ato.

A câmera posicionada de baixo para cima (contra-plongée) e seu discurso do alto do palanque apresentam Milosevic como o grande líder dos sérvios, inflamando seu nacionalismo para a batalha que virá, enquanto a massa de pessoas grita “Slobo, Slobo, Slobo”. Ao mesmo tempo, a voice over afirma que ele é acusado como responsável por todas as guerras na Iugoslávia, pelos quais foi absolvido mais tarde. Esses minutos iniciais servem como discurso persuasivo para apresentar Milosevic como culpado de antemão pelas atrocidades que serão relatadas ao longo do documentário. A partir daí, a tendência do público é ver Milosevic de forma preconceituosa e seus depoimentos não servirão para mais nada senão confirmar esses estereótipos.

Ao longo do documentário, as autoridades do governo central da Iugoslávia são vistas como as agressoras das outras repúblicas e dos outros grupos étnicos, mesmo que seja sutil essa representação. São os repressores, belicistas, manipuladores, instigadores, conspiradores, opressores.

Durante toda a série coloca-se os sérvios na posição de “vilões”, algumas vezes de forma branda, outras de forma mais enfática. Seus discursos nacionalistas inflamados são mostrados algumas vezes, mas isso não é feito em nenhum momento com os nacionalistas croatas ou bósnios, que também cometeram crimes. Os separatistas sérvios são extremistas, mas os croatas e bósnios não, apesar de suas autoridades envolvidas nas guerras serem ultranacionalistas e mesmo fascistas, como o presidente croata Franjo Tudjman. O documentário não questiona os interesses por trás da divisão da Iugoslávia.

O discurso do documentário também procura sempre ligar Milosevic aos grupos extremistas. Por exemplo, quando a voice over afirma que os servo-croatas queriam expulsar os croatas dos territórios em que eram maioria, para se unirem à Iugoslávia. “Para isso, aliados extremistas do presidente Milosevic se preparam para provocar um conflito entre sérvios e croatas.” Também fala em forças militares de Milosevic e autoridades extremistas próximas a Tudjman, presidente da Croácia.

Milosevic ainda é descrito como o comandante dos crimes cometidos pelas milícias servo-bósnias lideradas por Radovan Karadzic. O quarto episódio da série começa com palavras de defesa de Milosevic, falando que não apoia hostilidades. A forma como a declaração aparece, de repente, no início do episódio, passa a impressão de que ele está se defendendo de um crime que realmente cometeu. Aparecem imagens de destruição na Bósnia e a voice over afirma que o político sempre disse que não se envolveu nas atrocidades na Bósnia mas que as testemunhas contra ele dizem o contrário. Em outro momento, no quinto episódio, o documentário ressalta que Milosevic era “o homem por trás dos servo bósnios”. Mas a data descrita é abril de 1993, quando o líder iugoslavo já havia rompido com os extremistas de Karadzic, como foi constatado pelo Tribunal de Haia. Mesmo dois anos após esse rompimento, Milosevic ainda é tachado como “financiador” de Karadzic, no sexto episódio.

O que se entende é que Milosevic e Karadzic mantêm estreitas relações, o que leva a crer que o presidente iugoslavo esteve envolvido nos crimes do líder extremista. Além disso, muitas vezes os servo-bósnios são chamados apenas de sérvios, o que confunde a audiência e o público acaba imaginando que a Sérvia é a grande vilã, responsável pelos crimes dos servo-bósnios que, como observado, àquela altura atuavam independentes de Belgrado.

A Eslovênia, primeira república a se separar da Iugoslávia, é vista como uma região moderna, democrática, ocidentalizada, civilizada, onde há mais liberdade do que nas outras regiões da federação. O nacionalismo esloveno não aparece em ocasião alguma, seus dirigentes políticos são pacíficos opositores do autoritarismo de Belgrado e somente querem a independência de seu povo.

A Croácia, segunda república a declarar independência da Iugoslávia, também é apresentada como uma região próspera, democrática e liberal. O problema é que, segundo o documentário dá a entender, os croatas de origem sérvia queriam permanecer na Iugoslávia e então eles causaram as tensões.

De acordo com as palavras da narração, “as ameaças sérvias provocaram respostas do povo da Croácia”. Pelo que se entende, a minoria sérvia apoiada pelo governo iugoslavo de Milosevic foi a responsável pelo início dessa guerra, porque “Milosevic queria incendiar o resto da Croácia”, conforme narra a voice over. Em outra ocasião, o documentário afirma que as autoridades croatas “temiam que a Sérvia, maior república da Iugoslávia, os esmagasse”.

Em certos momentos, a voice over afirma que as ações do governo e do exército iugoslavos contaram com apoio da imprensa sérvia. No entanto, não fala que o noticiário imperialista do qual faz parte a BBC preparou a futura intervenção nos Bálcãs. E mais: o próprio discurso do documentário indica uma ineficiência da ONU no combate aos sérvios e servo-bósnios e sugere uma intervenção armada do Ocidente na região. Quando a intervenção da OTAN ocorre, o documentário não adota uma postura minimamente questionadora das possíveis consequências que essa ação teria para a população civil iugoslava.

A comunidade internacional, principalmente os EUA, é apresentada como mediadora diplomática. Em nenhum momento os interesses geopolíticos e econômicos nem as operações secretas por trás das negociações são questionados. A propina oferecida pelo primeiro-ministro da Itália ao presidente de Montenegro para que votasse pelo desmembramento da Iugoslávia não é tratada com a mínima preocupação.

Ao longo de toda a série, o Ocidente é retratado como civilizado e sua intervenção nos Bálcãs é para “botar ordem na casa”, porque os incivilizados iugoslavos não conseguem se entender. Os EUA são apresentados sempre como diplomáticos, democráticos, humanistas, conciliadores, agindo de boa-fé e tentam ensinar os bons modos aos bárbaros eslavos, principalmente aos sérvios.

Trinta anos depois, esse mesmo discurso da BBC se repete. A “ameaça russa”, essa barbárie eslava, contamina seus aliados da Europa Oriental. Dentre eles, o presidente sérvio Aleksandar Vucic, apresentado como um autocrata pró-russo, uma espécie de herdeiro de Milosevic. E os servo-bósnios seriam os responsáveis pelas tensões que ameaçam a volta da guerra na Bósnia, com Milorad Dodik sendo visto como sucessor de Karadzic pelos mais histéricos propagandistas do imperialismo. Como antes, são estes últimos que, no final das contas, estão pavimentando o caminho para a guerra.

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Yet another BBC scandal. In recent times, the BBC has had to endure so many of them ranging from paedophile cover-ups right through to gender pay gaps that it leads many in the UK to wonder who is running this unique, publicly funded broadcaster which once upon a time was often called ‘independent’. Both the director general and head of news resign on the same day over allegations of bias, following revelations that a flagship documentary program called Panorama misled its own audience. The main thrust of the complaint was that Panorama deliberately edited a speech by Trump in January 2021 which made him look like he was inciting violence in the U.S. capital.

At first glance this seems like the Trump administration flexing its muscles on its main ally in the world which has become weak and happy to play the victim to the playground bully. Can the resignations be taken seriously, or were they forced upon Tim Davie and Deborah Turness to avert a greater opprobrium at what can only be described as an all time low for the BBC?

Conspiracy theorists will of course have a field day on looking at other reasons why this culling of the two top positions in British television had to happen, with some perhaps pointing at the Israeli lobby (given what many consider to be too bias coverage of the Palestinians during the genocide).

But as the internet explodes with anecdotal evidence of BBC gaffes and hypocrisy ranging from when a BBC reporter in NYC reported the collapse of Building seven 20 minutes before it actually went down through to its Middle East editor being a rampant Zionist who has pledged allegiance to Israel – who then is suing a social media commentator who dared to call him bias, most of us are missing the point about this latest story.

The truth is that such a scandal was certain to erupt given how Panorama, as a documentary series, is so badly produced, with such a vociferous political agenda. The show itself has had to weather a number of storms over the years which have thrown a spotlight on it and what its role really is. In my own personal experience of working for the show as a freelance foreign correspondent working on an investigation, while I was based in the Middle East, I was shocked to experience first hand how unjournalistic it operated. It almost seemed to have a phobia of making news stories which affect the lives of millions in preference for hidden agendas on its own political level, sometimes even down to office politics or based on the foibles of those who work for it.

In 2017 I tracked down one of Britain’s largest drug baron’s hiding in Greece which Panorama bosses were keen to get to. But I was shocked to discover that his story, of how he was protected in the 80s by Jack Straw, while he was allowed to become the number one importer of heroin into the country was cancelled, as it didn’t work for the show’s producer who was obsessed with finding an angle which proved corruption within the UK customs authority – based on a previous show which spectacularly failed to prove it. Our man, who had been hiding for over 20 years fearing arrest warrants the UK had on him (unable to enter the country) was ready to come to the UK to talk and even prepared to show Panorama the identities of the top ten heroin importers in the country, some of whom were being protected by the customs agencies. Given Panorama’s reputation for being an amazing documentary show which unearthed huge scoops, I was quite shocked that this was rejected. At this point I realised not everything at Panorama is what it seems and that there were dark, political, nefarious players at the BBC who were using the show as a political tool for their own purposes. Panorama isn’t interested in scoops. It seems to have a phobia of great journalism in preference for a political ideology all of its own, seemingly serving the interests of the deep state.

The fact that Panorama bosses went ahead and doctored footage of Trump’s speech doesn’t shock people like me at all. What is more shocking is that there doesn’t seem to be a watchdog which has any teeth capable of probing the program, and doing a thorough investigation into its operations to find out who is really behind it and what other stunts it has pulled. We need an investigation into the documentary series itself to lift the lid on BBC graft and to hold those to account for the dirty work that it does for BBC bosses (and their bosses who are part of the deep state which actually runs the country).

In 2019, John Sweeney, one of its top journalists, left Panorama under a cloud of shameful allegations about him rigging a show against far-right figure Tommy Robinson. He resigned from the BBC after the right wing activist secretly filmed him which revealed a number of embarrassing things about the journalist who Robinson claimed had approached former colleagues who were offered cash to defame him, based on the journalist’s prepared narrative. At the time Sweeney claimed that the secret filming was really only about his drink problem and that he was subsequently threatened in the street by Robinson supporters, leading him to turn to getting psychiatric help. The show that he had been working on about Robinson was obviously canned. Those with a better memory might counter that the journalist had a history of mental illness which became public knowledge when he had what appeared to be a mental breakdown during a documentary about Scientology. In recent years he has been seen making monologue films sporting a bushy beard ranting about the Russian leader, while adorning what appears to be an orange tea cosy on his head and using foul language.

Is Sweeney a sick man who is free of an institution which has an even graver illness? What exactly is Panorama and how does it work? Now that we have seen its true side and the tawdry extent of its corruption, it is high time that a full investigation is carried out into all of these examples of malpractice to get to the bottom of one of the greatest mysteries in British media. The amount of press coverage that the present scandal about Trump’s speech is getting is disproportionate to the John Sweeney secret filming as the former BBC journalist who called himself a ‘trooper’ just about pulled every dirty trick in the book to stitch up Tommy Robinson which should really tell us a lot about the anti-journalistic culture of Panorama which allowed such dirty tricks to happen.

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The BBC is in turmoil, its director-general and head of news forced to resign after a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph highlighted editorial malpractice at the state broadcaster’s flagship news programme Panorama. The documentary had spliced together two separate clips of Donald Trump speaking on 6 January 2021, shortly before a riot at the Capitol building in Washington. The speech’s sentiments that day may not have been much misrepresented, but its contents technically were.

But Panorama, and the BBC more generally, have been exposed peddling far worse misinformation. In those cases, there have been precisely no consequences for such out-in-the-open journalistic abuses.

The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets. This is just the latest, particularly damaging skirmish in a years-long battle by the right to bring down the BBC – while, in the meantime, ensuring that the corporation turns even more pliant than it already is in promoting the right’s interests.

We are now in a death loop in which the BBC becomes ever more craven to the billionaires, thereby shifting the political centre of gravity ever further rightwards. Much of the British public have been convinced by the billionaire-owned media that the BBC is actually “leftwing”. And as a result, the right grows ever more confident in advancing the billionaires’ self-interested agenda, knowing there will be no pushback.

British politics, as Keir Starmer illustrates only too keenly, is in exactly the same death loop. The billionaires are in charge, whoever leads. The main political battle is over image-laundering: where to direct the hate.

Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Starmer wants us hating chiefly on those who criticise him from the left, such as opponents of his support for Israel’s genocide. Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Nigel Farage wants us hating chiefly on the immigrants. But, of course, both hate the left and immigrants.

If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.

Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.

Israel is also the laboratory where they can test and refine the surveillance technology, the weapons and the policing methods they will need if they are to keep their own publics controlled and subdued as austerity bites ever deeper. Gaza may be coming to street near you soon.

Here are two examples of crimes against journalism from Panorama that illustrate what you can get away with as long as you keep the billionaires happy.

The first gave Israel cover for the crimes it committed against peace activists trying to bring aid to Gaza in 2010 – thereby setting the tone for subsequent coverage that would ultimately lead to, and justify, the Gaza genocide.

The second marshalled disinformation to cement Jeremy Corbyn’s reputation as a supposed “antisemite” in the immediate run-up to 2019 general election. Starmer would go on to use the confected antisemitism row to seize control of Labour, oust Corbyn, approve as opposition leader of Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population, and back Israel’s genocide as prime minister.

Death in the Med (2010)

In 2010 reporter Jane Corbin fronted Panorama’s “Death in the Med”, about an Israeli commando raid a few months earlier on the lead aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in a humanitarian flotilla that was trying to reach Gaza, despite an illegal Israeli blockade.

(The programme now serves as an unwelcome reminder that the “conflict” between Israel and Hamas did not begin on 7 October 2023, as the western media would have us believe. For the proceeding 17 years, Israel had been trapping the people of Gaza inside the tiny enclave while blocking food and medicine from reaching them – what Israel referred to as “putting them on a diet”.)

The commandos attacked the ship in international waters and killed nine activists on board, several with close-range shots to the head. The illegality of invading a ship in international waters was not mentioned by Panorama, nor were the execution-style killings. Instead the programme featured “exclusive” interviews with some of the commandos, largely presenting them as the victims.

Ludicrously, Israel had accused the activists of belonging to al-Qaeda. A central justification for its violent raid was footage Israel had produced suggesting that it was the commandos who had been attacked by the peace activists, not the other way round. Israel also released a radio communication in which an activist could supposedly be heard, shortly before the raid, telling the commandos to “Go back to Auschwitz”. Corbin referred to this as a “warning sign”.

Panorama made no mention of the fact that Israel had seized all media equipment from the journalists and activists onboard the Marmara. The activists were forcibly taken to Israel, where they were held incommunicado for several days. The purpose was clear: to ensure that Israel exclusively controlled the narrative while the Mavi Marmara incident was making headlines.

Early on, the Foreign Press Association in Israel warned that the Israeli military was “selectively using footage to bolster its claims that commandos opened fire only after being attacked”. The Committee to Protect Journalists similarly denounced Israel’s editing and distribution of the footage it had confiscated.

By the time Panorama aired “Death in the Med” three months later, the Israeli-imposed fog had lifted further. Israel had been forced to make a “correction”, admitting that it had doctored the incendiary “Auschwitz” recording and that it had no idea who had made the comment. The voice was from someone with a strong southern US accent, but none of the people on the Marmara with access to the radio were American.

It was quite extraordinary that the programme posed as the central question whether this was a case of “self-defence or excessive force” by Israel. Israel had no right to “defend” itself in international waters from unarmed peace activists. But the question was even more preposterous given all the critically important evidence that emerged subsequently but that Panorama chose to ignore.

Instead, Jane Corbin excitedly joined Israeli commandos on a “training operation” and breathlessly interviewed some of the men who had attacked the Marmara. Corbin’s introduction gave a taste of her approach:

They called it Operation Sea Breeze, but what these Israeli naval commandos encountered on the Mavi Marmara was anything but a breeze. It caused a storm of international condemnation. But did Israel fall into a trap, and what was the real agenda of some of those people who call themselves peace activists?

This is a staple of journalistic malpractice from the BBC when it comes to Israel. Appear to offer contrasting possibilities, while actually offering only one – the one that encourages sympathy for Israel. According to Panorama, either heavily armed Israeli commandos were lured into a “trap” (presumably by peace activists bent on violence), or the peace activists were not as peaceful as they seemed (because they were actually bent on violence).

Panorama was effectively helping Israel to justify an act of piracy on the high seas, the siege of Gaza, and the murder of nine humanitarian activists.

Is Labour Antisemitic? (2019)

In the run-up to the 2019 election, Panorama broadcast a special, hour-long episode on the state of the Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. For the programme-makers, the question mark in the title was entirely redundant. Panorama was bent on proving that Labour was indeed antisemitic, whatever the evidence.

Corbyn, the first leader of a major British political party to place the right of Palestinians to be free of Israel’s illegal occupation ahead of Israel’s supposed “right” to continuing its illegal occupation, had been the target of relentless criticism since he was elected leader in 2015. The media accused him of overseeing – and encouraging – a supposed “plague of antisemitism” among party members.

To anyone who was paying attention at the time, those allegations seemed, at the very least, to be highly convenient, particularly given that the British establishment was all too obviously rattled by the risk that a politician who was an avowed socialist and was calling for a wide-scale redistribution of wealth might become prime minister.

But the malicious purpose of the antisemitism smears should be far clearer by now. Millions of Britons who have gone out to protest against the Gaza genocide have been defamed as antisemites. As have students setting up encampments to stop their universities from colluding with the genocide. As have Jews who oppose Israel’s genocide. As have the West Midlands police for trying to stop Israeli football hooligans, many of them likely to be Israeli soldiers who have helped carry out the genocide, from bringing their brand of racist violence to the UK’s streets. We could go on.

The Panorama programme on Corbyn made its case through serial misrepresentations – too many to document here. But the case against the Panorama episode is dealt with fully in this documentary here.

Those deceptions included a series of interviews with unidentified “party members” who claimed to have faced antisemitism in Labour. What Panorama did not tell viewers was that these talking heads belonged to an aggressively pro-Israel lobby group inside Labour called the Jewish Labour Movement.

By the time Panorama aired its programme, senior members of the JLM had already been exposed in a series of filmed investigations by an undercover Al-Jazeera reporter. The series had shown the JLM’s leaders, such as Ella Rose, who featured prominently in the Panorama special, conspiring with the Israeli embassy to oust Corbyn as Labour leader. None of this important context was mentioned in the Panorama programme.

Nor did the BBC interview the significant number of Jewish Labour party members – many of them in the group Jewish Voice for Labour – who disputed the JLM’s claim that the party was antisemitic. Many of these pro-Corbyn Jews – branded the “wrong kind of Jews” by the media – regarded the JLM as effectively an anti-Corbyn, entryist group.

Other examples of journalistic malpractice included an email from a top Corbyn adviser, Seumas Milne, which had been misleadingly edited by Panorama – echoes of the Trump episode – to wrongly suggest he was interfering in disciplinary hearings and doing so to protect antisemites.

An interview with a JLM member, Izzy Lenga, was also edited misleadingly – to put it charitably – to suggest she had been subjected to horrifying antisemitic abuse in Labour, such as comments that “Hitler was right”.

In fact, that was not true, as the clip below, from al Al-Jazeera exposé, shows. The antisemitic comments Lenga referenced had happened four years earlier, when she was at university, and had nothing to do with the Labour party. At the time, Lenga had told the Daily Mail about neo-Nazis placing “Hitler is right” posters around her campus.

The BBC issued a correction – a minor one, hidden away on its corrections page – three years later. It was barely noticed and came long after the damage had been done to Corbyn.

Notably, Lenga’s unedited quote, cited in the correction, shows that Panorama’s editors were fully aware of what had really happened to Lenga. Their doctoring of the interview looks designed to deceive viewers, encouraging them to think Corbyn presided over an institutionally racist Labour party. That deception happened just weeks before a general election.

Similarly, Panorama misrepresented an interview with two pro-Corbyn party members in Liverpool under investigation by Labour for antisemitism. The programme failed to mention that both women were Jewish. That fact would have substantially undermined the premise of Panorama’s programme.

Instead the documentary concentrated on the fact that the man interviewing them, Ben Westerman, was Jewish. He claimed to Panorama that he was on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse from the pair. He said the women had asked: “Where are you from? Are you from Israel?”

He told Panorama: “What can you say to that? You are assumed to be in cahoots with the Israeli government. It’s this obsession with the fact.. that it spills over all the time into antisemitism.”

However, as the same Al-Jazeera exposé revealed, the women had taped the interview, with Westerman’s consent. The recording shows they made no such comment. One, Rica Bird, can be heard asking at the end of the interview: “I’m just curious because I haven’t been in the Labour party very long, and I’ve certainly never been to anything like this informal interview before. So I’m just curious about, like, what branch are you in?”

Panorama is the BBC’s flagship news investigations programme. It spends months working on programmes and has a huge budget. Westerman’s claim that the women had been antisemitic needed to be checked with them. They had a right to respond to his allegations. The fact they themselves were Jewish made his claims even less plausible.

Had Panorama done the most elementary fact-checking – checks that any journalism student would be expected to do – its researchers would quickly have learnt from the women that the interview was recorded. The recording would have shown that Westerman’s claims were untrue.

Proper checks weren’t done in the case of “Death in the Med” or “Is Labour Antisemitic?” because Panorama editors knew that no one in power would care. Defaming peace activists trying to bring aid to a besieged population; smearing a socialist standing to be prime minister. No one would hold the BBC to account.

Why? Because those weren’t errors by the BBC. That’s its job. That is what it is there to do. It is there to uphold narratives that support the interests of the British establishment, as its founder, Lord Reith, explained in the 1920s. “They [the government] know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

The fact that the BBC is now in hot water for editing a Trump speech – altering its contents without altering its sentiments – is a sign that its senior staff have been misreading the political climate. The establishment itself is now at war – over strategy. Between the traditional right, desperately trying to enforce a crumbling popular, liberal consensus, and the MAGA far-right trying to exploit the crumbling consensus to their own advantage.

It is a sign that the far right is now too far in the ascendant to be given even a small taste of the treatment regularly faced by the left or Israel’s critics. The far right – backed by, and serving, the billionaires – is winning. Time for the BBC to catch up, and bow even lower.

Original article: jonathan-cook.net

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Leaked documents reveal how a shadowy BBC unit is “embedding” staff in foreign media outlets to “contest the information space” and generate “behaviour change” in favor of London’s geopolitical objectives.

Though BBC Media Action (BBCMA) portrays itself as the “international charity” of the British state broadcaster, files show the group frequently carries out politically-charged projects overseas with government funding. Furthermore, the group consistently trades upon the BBC’s reputation and its intimate “links” with the British state broadcaster when pitching for contracts with donors, including the Foreign Office, which operates in tandem with MI6.

The leaks reveal that BBCMA’s work is explicitly “driven by a social and behaviour change communication approach.” The organization’s “project design” is informed by “psychology, social psychology, sociology, education and communication,” and consideration of “the specific factors that can be influenced by media and communication that could lead to changes in behaviours, social norms and systems” in foreign countries. Which is to say, BBCMA is concerned with psychological warfare, warping perceptions and driving action among target audiences.

“We recognise that different formats achieve different things when it comes to change… and consider audience needs, objectives and operational context when deciding which format to use,” BBCMA asserts in one file. In another, the organization crows, “people exposed to our programming are more likely to: have higher levels of knowledge on governance issues; to discuss politics more; to have higher internal efficacy (the feeling that they are able to do something); and participate frequently in politics.”

BBCMA’s internal research indicates audiences exposed to the organization’s “output” are widely encouraged into “taking action,” and concluded: “At scale this is powerful.” A cited example was BBCMA’s production of a “long-running” radio drama in the former British colony of Nigeria, Story Story, which reached an estimated 26.5 million people across West Africa. Surveys indicated 32% of listeners “did something differently as a result of listening” to the program – of those, 40% were persuaded to vote differently in the country’s elections.

BBCMA has operated at once secretly and in plain sight since its 1999 founding. The leaked files’ contents raise obvious, grave questions not only about the organization’s activities globally, but whether BBC staffers who conduct overseas missions for Media Action truly cease being intelligence-connected state propagandists and information warriors when they return to their day jobs in London, producing ‘factual’ and entertainment content for the British state broadcaster.

Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine in BBCMA’s crosshairs

In February 2021, The Grayzone exposed how BBCMA managed covert programs training journalists and cultivating influencers in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, while helping produce news and entertainment programming for local media outlets pushing pro-NATO messaging. These activities were funded by the British Foreign Office, forming part of a wider clandestine effort by London to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” at home and in neighboring states.

Another previously unreported component of this malign initiative saw BBCMA channel £9 million ($12.8 million) in government funds from 2018 to 2021 into “innovative… media interventions” which targeted citizens of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine via “radio, independent social media channels, and traditional outlets.” The project was managed and coordinated directly by BBCMA from BBC Broadcasting House, in London. Thomson Reuters Foundation, the global newswire’s “non-profit” wing, supported the effort via Reuters offices in Kiev and Tbilisi.

BBCMA and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) operatives met in private every four months to discuss the operation’s progress with representatives of the Foreign Office, and British embassies in the three target countries. In advance of the project, the pair leveraged their “strong profile” in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine to conduct “broad consultations” with neighborhood news outlets, media organizations and journalists.

The National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA:PBC) was offered “essential support,” aimed at “improving its existing programs” and “developing new and innovative formats for factual and non-news programs.” The broadcaster was reportedly “very interested” in BBCMA developing a “new debate show” and “discussion programming” on its behalf. Additionally, BBCMA was “already working on building the capacity” of nationalist Ukrainian outlet Hromadske, which was also receiving funding from the US government via USAID.

Meanwhile, BBCMA visited the offices of Georgia’s Adjara TV “to discuss training priorities and possible co-productions.” The station was especially keen to develop “youth programming” – “a gap in the market” locally. BBCMA and TRF furthermore proposed to tutor and support ostensibly “independent” online Georgian news portals like Batumelebi, iFact, Liberali, Monitor, Netgazeti, and Reginfo. “Local” and “hyperlocal” media platforms, as well as “freelancer journalists,” bloggers and “vloggers” were also considered important targets. “Mentors” were “embedded” in target outlets, providing “bespoke support across editorial, production and wider management systems and processes as well as on the co-production of content.” Those “mentors” included current and former BBC reporters.

“Our ability to recruit talented and experienced BBC staff is a great asset which will be harnessed for this initiative,” BBCMA bragged. The British state broadcaster was glowingly described as “well-known and highly regarded” in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and thus well-placed to begin “encouraging” journalists to meet with “local stakeholders,” including politicians, in order to “cement the media as a key governance actor” in the region. This would hopefully ensure “a more enabling operating environment” for secretly British-sponsored “independent” media platforms.

The “long track record” of BBCMA and TRF in conducting comparable efforts elsewhere had purportedly “shifted government policy.” This included states “experiencing Arab uprisings.” Elsewhere, BBCMA cited TRF establishing “the award-winning Aswat Masriya” in Egypt as a major success. As The Grayzone revealed, this secretly British-funded, Reuters-run outlet worked overtime to undermine Cairo’s first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, and helped lay the foundation for his removal by a violent military coup in July 2013.

Seemingly emboldened by this experience, BBCMA proposed the Thomson Reuters Foundation create a comparable “news platform” in Ukraine which was “timed for the run up to the 2019 elections,” which ultimately put Volodymyr Zelensky on the world stage.

The pair planned to “replicate” the exercise for Georgia’s elections the following year. “This platform” – “staffed entirely by local editors and journalists,” the BBCMA wrote, “would publish independent and vetted news content, freely syndicated to local and national media,” and “provide a vital service.”

London exploits BBCMA to ‘hold governments to account’

The unified nature of BBCMA and the British state broadcasting body of the BBC is undeniable in leaked documents related to the former’s activities in the former Yugoslavia. Submissions to the Foreign Office boast, “BBC Media Action was created to harness the reputation; resources and expertise of the BBC…[its] trainers and consultants are working journalists, editors and producers with substantial newsgathering, programme-making and editorial experience in the BBC.” A specific selling point was BBCMA’s “access to the wider BBC’s wealth of experience and talent.”

This global army of BBC apparatchiks “have a wide range of format and production experience with partners and beneficiaries including factual programming, dramas and the development of social media.” Media outlets in which BBCMA’s operatives are embedded are also granted access “to a broad range of innovative digital tools” created by the British state broadcaster, and “BBC connected studios.”

A BBCMA pitch for a Foreign Office project set to run from 2016 to 2019, ostensibly concerned with “promoting freedom of expression and public dialogue” in Serbia and Macedonia, proposed a team comprised almost exclusively of BBC veterans, some of whom had occupied senior positions with the British state broadcaster for decades. One had worked for BBC World Service’s Bulgarian division since the 1980s, eventually leading the entire operation from 1996 to 2005.

Their CV states they managed “all aspects of BBC broadcasting to Bulgaria, including strategy, editorial supervision; budget and staff management and training,” while “negotiating and achieving partnerships with Bulgarian radio stations and other media and representing the BBC in the target area.” Another had likewise headed numerous divisions of the British state broadcaster at home and abroad over their lengthy career, and was credited with “masterminding election and other big-story coverage”.

This experience may be relevant to a prior BBCMA project, cited in the leaked pitch. From November 2015 to March 2016, the organization “worked on helping the Macedonian media to effectively cover elections.” As The Grayzone has revealed, Macedonia’s 2016 election was triggered by an MI6-sponsored “colorful revolution”, which dislodged a popular nationalist administration from power. In its place, a doggedly pro-Western government scraped into office. We can only speculate whether BBCMA’s clandestine sway over how local news outlets reported the vote influenced its outcome.

That the Foreign Office uses BBCMA – and the BBC by extension – for nakedly political interference overseas is spelled out in leaked documents detailing yet another covert British safari in the Balkans. While ostensibly concerned with “supporting greater media independence” in the region, BBCMA acknowledged that its news reporting was “a means to an end.” The ultimate objective, according to the internal documents, was holding “governments and powerful entities to account” should they fail to act as required by London.

BBCMA Balkanizes the Balkans

According to BBCMA documents, Britain sought to “contest the information space” throughout the Balkans through a series of campaigns to “diversify the information, sources and perspectives available” to local populations. In this case, diversity was a clear subtext for amplifying pro-NATO, UK-centric viewpoints.

BBCMA goals included “supporting current and future media outlets, actors and journalists to provide high-quality output and content, and to operate safely, sustainably and more viably.” For instance, the  supposed charity proposed a “training and mentoring” initiative, which would “prioritise female defence and diplomacy journalists.”

“As well as developing current journalists, in order to create a pipeline of future women, the programme will include an outreach element with activities undertaken in universities to encourage women to consider journalism as a career,” BBCMA pledged. This would not only bring “female journalists to the forefront of the industry’s consciousness” in the region, but “improve the perception of the UK with these participants, who are influencers in the Western Balkans.”

The funding proposal sent by BBCMA to the FCO reveals the extent of their contempt for women and the working class, who were meant to be targeted with fictionalized content rather than hard news. “Drama can be a useful tool for engaging poorer and female audiences,”  BBCMA explained.

BBCMA further pledged to “support the creation of new media” across the region, assisting “entrepreneurs to establish new media titles” that would amplify “independent, local voices.” Britain was described as “expert at providing the space and opportunity” for news “start-ups.” London’s overt backing of such projects explicitly aimed to exploit the dearth of job opportunities on the local scene to “increase positive perception of the UK with younger target audiences.” Among the outlets to be bankrolled would be a regional “news wire” producing “quality content (written, images, and video).”

Also among the proposals were so-called “Citizen Content Factories,” consisting of “two-week long, highly-publicised, content creation camps” in the Western Balkans. These British-backed summer camps would “bring young people from across the region together for a YouTube training and partnership camp that will teach young people to become content producers” as well as “provide a very public programme of activity that will improve the perception of the UK.”

Elsewhere, popular local vloggers would be employed to produce videos “in which they share highly inflammatory disinformation, some of which will include conspiracy theories about NATO, before revealing that it is fake and calling out their follower community for possibly believing them.” The rationale was, “audiences dislike being accused of succumbing to disinformation,” which would in turn make them dismissive of facts and perspectives unwelcome to the British Foreign Office. In practice, the campaign seemed designed to taint all criticism of NATO as potential disinformation.

BBCMA also sought to recruit and cultivate a legion of “opinion formers” across diverse fields, particularly in London’s “priority areas of defence, security and diplomacy… who will be advocates for the UK” in the West Balkans. Media training programs would enable BBCMA assets “to become more effective public speakers,” and the organization would “then work with media partners in-country to provide opportunities for them.”

No area of the West Balkans was considered off-limits to BBCMA. A “media literacy roadshow” would tour “rural areas and towns” throughout the region. “Areas outside major cities” were “identified as priorities due to the smaller information environment of which they are likely to be part.” Even schools were proposed for infiltration, with BBCMA stating local curriculums should be reviewed to “ensure explicitly recognising disinformation is included.” If not, “an education package could be created” with “pre-created lesson plans and materials” for teachers.

One document boasted that BBCMA had dedicated offices in 17 countries on every continent, employing hundreds of people. At the time it was written, BBCMA was managing 68 “live projects, with most offices running several simultaneous programmes.” The organization’s intimate connections to BBC World Service, active in “more than 100 cities globally,” meant BBCMA’s information warfare could reach audiences totaling hundreds of millions worldwide.

Original article:  thegrayzone.com

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Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting.

Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour.

Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess. His comments, filmed by someone at the meeting, can be watched below.

Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) confronts Richard Burgess, the BBC’s Executive News Editor, about their coverage of the Gaza genocide and the data revealed by @cfmmuk at the Houses of Parliament.

Burgess’s response: “I’m not an expert on the Middle East”. pic.twitter.com/WpwjrW4T0q

— NewsCord (@newscord_org) June 18, 2025

Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:

1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.

Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.

Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.

2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.

Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.

The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.

3. The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.

Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.

The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.

4. By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.

5. Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined.

New research shows Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Yugoslav Wars, the Afghanistan War and the Ukraine War COMBINED.

More: https://t.co/YJi8bdIm9Y pic.twitter.com/p8XJSZpj3a

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 1, 2025

The BBC has reported just 6 per cent of the more than 225 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, compared to 62 per cent of the far smaller number of journalists killed in Ukraine. This is once again vital context for understanding that Israel’s goals are genocidal. It hopes to exterminate the main witnesses to its crimes.

6. Oborne adds a point of his own. He notes that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.

And yet extraordinarily, Shlaim has never been invited on by the BBC. He is only too ready to do interviews. He has done them for Al Jazeera, for example. But he isn’t invited on because, it seems, he is “the wrong sort of Jew”. His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.

Watch the video above to see how Burgess responds. His answer is a long-winded shrugging of the shoulders, a BBC executive’s way of acting clueless – an equivalent of Manuel, the dim-witted Spanish waiter in the classic comedy show Fawlty Towers, saying: “I know nothing.”

Other lowlights from Burgess include his responding to a pointed question from Declassified journalist Hamza Yusuf on why the BBC has not given attention to British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. “I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel,” Burgess answers.

So the British state broadcaster has decided that its duty is not to investigate the nature of British state assistance to Israel in Gaza, even though most experts agree what Israel is doing there amounts to genocide. Burgess thinks scrutiny of British state complicity would be “overplaying” British collusion, even though the BBC has not actually investigated the extent or nature of that collusion to have reached a conclusion. This is the very antithesis of what journalism is there to do: monitor the centres of power, not exonerate such power-centres before they have even been scrutinised.

Labour MP Andy McDonald responded to Burgess: “To underplay the role of the UK is an error.”

It is more than that. It is journalistic complicity in British and Israeli state war crimes.

Here are a few key statistical findings from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on BBC coverage of Gaza over the year following 7 October 2023:

• The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.
• The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.
• The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.
• Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage.
• The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”. During one major hostage exchange in which 90 Palestinians were swapped for three Israelis, 70% of BBC articles focused on those three Israelis.
• The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russia ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
• In coverage, Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered” – and the author of the violence was named, even though, as we have seen, the Hannibal directive clouded the picture in at least some of those cases.

As is only too evident watching Burgess respond, he is not there to learn from the state broadcaster’s glaring mistakes – because systematic BBC pro-Israel bias isn’t a mistake. It’s precisely what the BBC is there to do.

Original article: jonathan-cook.net