[Reader-list] BBC and Gaza

[A. Mani]

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As Gaza Is Savaged Again, Understanding
The BBC’s Role Requires More Than Sentiment

By John Pilger

23 November, 2012
JohnPilger.com

In Peter Watkins' remarkable BBC film, The War Game,which foresaw the
aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the
narrator says: "On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons,
there is now practically total silence in the press, official
publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?"

The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November,
1965, the BBC banned The War Game as "too horrifying for the medium of
broadcasting". This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the
chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret
letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.

"[The War Game] is not designed as propaganda," he wrote, "it is
intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful
research into official material... But the showing of the film on
television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards
the policy of the nuclear deterrent." Following a screening attended
by senior Whitehall officials, the film was banned because it told an
intolerable truth. Sixteen years later, the then BBC director-general,
Sir Ian Trethowan, renewed the ban, saying that he feared for the
film's effect on people of "limited mental intelligence". Watkins'
brilliant work was eventually shown in 1985 to a late-night minority
audience. It was introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who repeated the
official lie.

What happened to The War Game is the function of the state broadcaster
as a cornerstone of Britain's ruling elite. With its outstanding
production values, often fine popular drama, natural history and
sporting coverage, the BBC enjoys wide appeal and, according to its
managers and beneficiaries, "trust". This "trust" may well apply to
Springwatch and Sir David Attenborough, but there is no demonstrable
basis for it in much of the news and so-called current affairs that
claim to make sense of the world, especially the machinations of
rampant power. There are honourable individual exceptions, but watch
how these are tamed the longer they remain in the institution: a
"defenestration", as one senior BBC journalist describes it.

This is notably true in the Middle East where the Israeli state has
successfully intimidated the BBC into presenting the theft of
Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and killing of its people
as an intractable "conflict" between equals. Standing in the rubble
from an Israeli attack, one BBC journalist went further and referred
to "Gaza's strong culture of martyrdom". So great is this distortion
that young viewers of BBC News have told Glasgow University
researchers they are left with the impression that Palestinians are
the illegal colonisers of their own country. The current BBC
"coverage" of Gaza's genocidal misery reinforces this.

The BBC's "Reithian values" of impartiality and independence are
almost scriptural in their mythology. Soon after the corporation was
founded in the 1920s by Lord John Reith, Britain was consumed by the
General Strike. "Reith emerged as a kind of hero," wrote the historian
Patrick Renshaw, "who had acted responsibly and yet preserved the
precious independence of the BBC. But though this myth persisted it
has little basis in reality... the price of that independence was in
fact doing what the government wanted done. [Prime Minister Stanley]
Baldwin... saw that if they preserved the BBC's independence, it would
be much easier for them to get their way on important questions and
use it to broadcast Government propaganda."

Unknown to the public, Reith had been the prime minister's speech
writer. Ambitious to become Viceroy of India, he ensured the BBC
became an evangelist of imperial power, with "impartiality" duly
suspended whenever that power was threatened. This "principle" has
applied to the BBC's coverage of every colonial war of the modern era:
from the covered-up genocide in Indonesia and suppression of
eyewitness film of the American bombing of North Vietnam to support
for the illegal Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the now
familiar echo of Israeli propaganda whenever that lawless state abuses
its captive, Palestine. This reached a nadir in 2009 when, terrified
of Israeli reaction, the BBC refused to broadcast a combined charities
appeal for the people of Gaza, half of whom are children, most of them
malnourished and traumatised by Israeli attacks. The United Nations
Rapporteur, Richard Falk, has likened Israel's blockade of Gaza to the
Warsaw Ghetto under siege by the Nazis. Yet, to the BBC, Gaza - like
the 2010 humanitarian relief flotilla murderously attacked by Israeli
commandos - largely presents a public relations problem for Israel and
its US sponsor.

Mark Regev, Israel's chief propagandist, seemingly has a place
reserved for him near the top of BBC news bulletins. In 2010, when I
pointed this out to Fran Unsworth, now elevated to director of news,
she strongly objected to the description of Regev as a propagandist,
adding, "It's not our job to go out and appoint the Palestinean
spokesperson".

With similar logic, Unsworth's predecessor, Helen Boaden, described
the BBC's reporting of the criminal carnage in Iraq as based on the
"fact that Bush has tried to export democracy and human rights to
Iraq". To prove her point, Boaden supplied six A4 pages of verifiable
lies from Bush and Tony Blair. That ventriloquism is not journalism
seemed not to occur to either woman.

What has changed at the BBC is the arrival of the cult of the
corporate manager. George Entwistle, the briefly-appointed director
general who said he knew nothing about Newsnight's false accusations
of child abuse against a Tory grandee, is to receive £450,000 of
public money for agreeing to resign before he was sacked: the
corporate way. This and the preceding Jimmy Savile scandal might have
been scripted for the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press whose
self-serving hatred of the BBC has long provided the corporation with
its "embattled" façade as the guardian of "public service
broadcasting". Understanding the BBC as a pre-eminent state
propagandist and censor by omission - more often than not in tune with
its right-wing enemies - is on no public agenda and it ought to be.

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A. Mani




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