More than two decades on, The Electronic Intifada has obtained a report the BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep under wraps.
In 2003, under pressure from Israel, its lobby groups in the United Kingdom and its many influential British friends, the BBC commissioned a senior news executive, Malcolm Balen, to analyse the corporation’s news and current affairs broadcasts on the Israel-Palestine conflict and judge whether they showed anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian bias.
Balen studied BBC TV and radio broadcasts in the last six months of 2003, as well as online coverage into the first months of 2004, at the height of the second intifada.
The BBC did not publish the resulting 21,000-word report, and fought a long campaign not to do so. Supporters of Israel applied for its release under the Freedom of Information Act, but in 2010 the Court of Appeal ruled that the document should remain unpublished. In 2012, the Supreme Court rejected a further appeal under the Act.
I have now read the document, the first journalist outside the BBC to have done so. ….more
