British Journalist Group Admits Pro-Palestinian Sympathies
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Those familiar with the often grossly partisan reporting in the British media won’t be too surprised that someone has alleged British journalists are sympathetic to one side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Speaking about Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which this week narrowly passed a motion to boycott Israel, the commentator said: “Members’ sympathies lie with the people in Palestinian areas.”
No big shock there. But what might come as a surprise is who it was that described, or rather admitted, this bias: None other than Tim Gopsill, the public relations director for union.
The pro-Palestinian bias in much of the UK media is apparently so entrenched and so widely accepted that the NUJ spokesman didn’t think twice about admitting partisan sympathies on behalf of the union’s 35,000 members.
So much for the NUJ’s code of ethics, which states that “A journalist has a duty to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards.”
Fortunately, the British media isn’t entirely monolithic in its antagonism toward Israel. Writing about the language of the NUJ motion, Toby Harnden, a member of the union and an editor for the UK’s Telegraph, asserted:
It is tendentious and politically-loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.
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