Last Straw

Robert Fisk, writ­ing for The Independent:

… why is it that Haaretz’s¹ top cor­res­pond­ents — Amira Hass and Gideon Levy — write so much more cour­ageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I’m asked by lec­ture audi­ences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broad­cast­ing station.

I can cer­tainly advise view­ers to turn to Sky TV’s infin­itely tougher cov­er­age of the Middle East and … I can recom­mend the cour­age with which Al-Jazeera Eng­lish cov­ers Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian-Israeli war.

My exper­i­ence is that you can’t trust the BBC on the Middle East either. While I was in Iraq on the human shield action, the BBC — some­what to my sur­prise — turned out to be one of the most fac­tu­ally incor­rect and least object­ive news source report­ing on the action. In fact I remem­ber at one point read­ing more object­ive stor­ies on the Fox News web­site, a pro­pa­ganda chan­nel for the Repub­lican Party of the U.S.

I doubt any­thing will change there until the place is cleansed of people like the mor­ally cor­rupt Mark Thompson, the BBC’s dir­ector general.

1. Haaretz is Israel’s old­est daily news­pa­per. [↩]