Auntie's Agonies

The BBC's convulsions over its sacred impartiality continue. An Observer editorial declares that "Israeli and Palestinian groups both regularly accuse the corporation of institutional bias, which is probably a crude indication that, in its journalism, the BBC gets the balance about right". By the same brilliant logic, if a report that 200,000 died in the Holocaust provokes complaints from both mainstream historians and Holocaust deniers, such complaints would constitute a crude indication that about 200,000 died in the Holocaust. Martin Bell, a former correspondent, claimed that, even after years of being run by Thatcherite apparatchiks of the John Birt variety, a "culture of timidity" is rife in the corporation. Now that the Israelis have decided they've had enough fun for the time being, even a few ministers in the British government have objected to the BBC's decision not to broadcast the DEC's appeal on behalf of Gaza. Only Greg Dyke, the predecessor of the present incumbent, said he could understand why the BBC had decided not to broadcast the appeal, because "on a subject as sensitive as the Middle East it is absolutely essential that the audience" or, better still, Greg Dyke, "cannot see any evidence at all of a bias". Self-evidently, one displays bias only if one disagrees with Tzipi Livni's statement that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.