Good news on the BBC report

Here are two letters in today's Guardian from Greg Philo and my friend Ala Khazendar.

The BBC's Middle East coverage has had important effects on public understanding (BBC's coverage of Israeli-Palestinian conflict 'misleading', May 3). In our study - Bad News from Israel - three years ago we found that there was a strong emphasis on Israeli casualties in TV reports, even though deaths on the Palestinian side were much higher. In a large audience sample from 2002, just 35% knew that the Palestinians had significantly more casualties than the Israelis, while 43% believed either that there were more Israeli casualties or that the figures were the same for each side.

We showed how such reporting could strongly influence attitudes, leading, for example, to the belief that Palestinians were instigating violence while the Israelis "responded". Now the new report from the BBC and the research it commissioned from Loughborough University has found the same pattern for news about casualties, this time concluding that national news programmes reported six times as many Israeli as Palestinian fatalities (a more extreme ratio than we found). The question is: why has this situation been allowed to continue and what will the BBC now do to offer a better informed coverage.
Professor Greg Philo
Glasgow University Media Group

As a Palestinian, the BBC does indeed look unsympathetic most of the time. I look forward to the BBC no longer being afraid to call Palestinian terrorism terrorism, as well as being bold enough to describe targeted assassinations as Israeli executions without trial that inevitably kill civilian bystanders; the Israeli army as occupation forces; settlements as illegal Israeli colonies; and the security barrier as Israeli land theft condemned as illegal by the international court of justice. And if the BBC is really plucky, perhaps it will start describing those Palestinian acts of terrorism as retaliations to Israeli persecution.
Ala Khazendar
Pasadena, California, USA

A point that has been missed in articles and these letters on the report on the BBC's coverage of Israel/Palestine is that it was the zionists who called loudest for it. I wonder what the Jewish Chronicle will say about it tomorrow.