Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.
Entitled “A Walk in the Park” — a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem — the programme was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.
Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.
So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”

This Monday, Britain’s Channel 4 TV aired a landmark documentary alleging that Jewish lobby groups have sunk their claws so deep into the British establishment that politicians have no choice but to toe their line, and that the media has been cowed into submission. It is easy to laugh, but we should not. The documentary has provoked a new wave of virulent anti-Semitism and threatens to silence Israel’s few supporters in Britain once and for all. I have an op-ed on the subject in tomorrow’s edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe which is now published on the paper’s website.
For readers who have not yet purchased my recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel please see this extremely generous review. Obviously, I would be grateful if readers would pass this on to anyone they think might be interested and/or post up the link on any relevant websites. To read the review, click here: