Right-wing critics attack the ABC and BBC, but the real media bias is in ignoring Palestinian voices and defending power.

Controversy surrounding BBC Panorama’s editing of Trump speeches and the consequent resignations of Director General Tim Davie and Deborah Turness head of BBC news, have provided easy targets for right wing critics who appear delighted to find such wounded victims among their media competitors.

The BBC demise is having a ripple effect. It has been easy to savage public, non-private institutions and in particular tax funded broadcasters, notably the ABC.

In The Australian newspaper on 12 November Tom Switzer, and on 14 November Chris Kenny, described an institutional bias in the ABC which they saw as not much different from poor journalistic standards in the besieged BBC.

Controversy in the UK had presented these columnists with an open goal, so they wanted to score as much as possible, but these experienced scribes did not need to use the usual pejorative adjectives ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’. Instead, any individuals still willing to defend the value of a common good, a public broadcaster could be dismissed as ‘progressives’.

Switzer depicted the horror of ABC, BBC journalists instinctively embracing a progressive world view, and worse still he identified  “smug self entitlement of the tax funded progressive.” Such individuals were likely to support illegal migrants, multi-culturalism, transgender rights, net zero, taxes/spending, America First and the War in Gaza, though not with any condemnation of massive numbers of Palestinian deaths.

Kenny boasted that in the pages of The Australian and on Sky News he had detailed the ABC’s rampant misreporting and demonisation of Trump. He took particular aim at a Four Corners programme ‘Chasing Trump’s billions’ and called the coverage of the Trump Presidency “obsessive, relentless, jaundiced, jejune.”

These critics and others who follow their lead are rejoicing at the resignations from the BBC . They accept that a Trump speech was edited. They were disappointed the BBC had not been promoting the judgemental conservatism so treasured by right wing populism, a trend derisive of public services and a public good, a view aided and abetted by Zionist-based support for Israel and antagonistic towards journalists reporting a Palestinian perspective.

Support for Israel and reluctance to be professional, courageous and forthright about the colonisation of Palestine, has marred the BBC’s and the ABC’s reporting of the Gaza war and has seen a frenzy of false claims about anti-Semitism.

Contrary to what conservative critics think, a one sided bias in reporting about Israel/Palestine would have been grounds for high ranking resignations from the BBC, but  those chief executives resigned for the wrong reasons. Columnists in The Australian missed the point. They could have acted progressively by acknowledging a years long, blatant bias in favour of Israeli views.

Columnists in The Australian may find the following evidence unpalatable, but difficult to deny.

The ABC is being tarred almost with the same brush as the BBC.

On November 13 in Media Lens, the Centre for Media Monitoring judged the BBC to have been completely unbalanced and biased in its coverage of the so called war in Gaza.

Palestinian deaths were treated as less newsworthy despite suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel.

The BBC exhibited a systematic language bias favouring Israelis. Their reporters applied ‘massacre’ 18 times more to Israelis than to Palestinians. They used ‘murder’ 220 times in reference to the death of Israelis and only once to describe the killing of Palestinians.

The BBC (and the ABC?) suppressed allegations about genocide. Genocide claims were shut down in over 100 documented instances, but there had been zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements. The BBC never broadcasted Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of Palestinians to Amalek people whom Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth.

Palestinian voices were muffled. Over two years, Israeli perspectives could be heard 11 times more frequently.

It looks as though BBC journalists had been unduly influenced by Zionists’ ‘protect Israel at all costs’ agenda. Bolstered by accusations from President Trump’s press secretary – quickly taken up by the conservative UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph – the BBC is dubbed a ‘leftist propaganda machine.’ Mud sticks so the BBC Director General must resign, even though he had been to Cambridge University, was a Tory candidate and deputy chair of a local Conservative Party Association. Clearly a man of the left.

On November 13 in Subdeck, journalist Jonathan Cook records other events which show Britain’s national broadcaster beholden to the Israeli lobby.

In 2010, Israeli marines boarded the ship the Mavi Marmora carrying provisions to Gaza. In execution style they murdered nine peace activists but in a Panorama programme, the killings were reported as examples of ‘self defence’ or at worst use of ‘excessive force’. Cook concluded that the BBC via Panorama was ‘effectively helping Israel to justify an act of piracy on the high seas.’

In 2019, Panorama staged a program intent on proving that the UK Labour Party was anti-Semitic. Their main target was socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn who happened to be the only western leader openly supportive of the Palestinian people.

Jeremy Cook records that Panorama based its accusations agonist Corbyn on interviews with members of an aggressively pro Israel lobby group inside Labour called the Jewish Labour Movement. Jewish Labour members who disputed the claims against Corbyn were not interviewed.

This accumulation of evidence about one-sided media judgements to satisfy a powerful lobby and associated establishment interests, should have been grounds for resignations. This did not happen.

The evidence about complicity with Israel was ignored. Nothing should hinder a right wing campaign to bring down the BBC even though it had been complicit with powerful private interests, or in Cook’s words, “craven to billionaires’ self-interest agendas.”

The Australian columnists’ gleeful  attacks on the ABC suggest a similar development in Australia, a taste for denying resources to public institutions, for suppressing information supportive of vulnerable groups and the people of Palestine. It looks as though the UK’s Daily Telegraph-engendered excitement about resignations from the BBC, is being imitated in Australia by staff at Sky News and from The Australian.

If such staff behaved like ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’, high standard, totally professional, even non-leftist journalists, they would ponder the findings of the Centre for Media Monitoring, and then think differently about their reasons for attacking the BBC and the ABC.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.