New BBC Watch Launches
CAMERA congratulates CiF Watch, an independent CAMERA project, on the launch of their new Web site, BBC Watch. CiF Watch reports:
BBC Watch – a sister project of CiF Watch with the independent support of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) – will provide comprehensive monitoring of the BBC’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to ensure adherence to the BBC’s own editorial guidelines.
A few of the more egregious problems at the BBC will be familiar to many CiF Watch readers:
•The BBC demonstrates a disproportionate focus on Israel in relation to other countries in the Middle East – a trend which continued even through the ‘Arab Spring.
•The BBC’s Middle East editor frequently displays an egregious lack of objectivity, portraying Israel in an overwhelmingly negative light and the Palestinians in a positive light.
•The BBC is self-regulating, and has been less than transparent and open to change in response to substantive criticism.
Hadar Sela, managing editor of BBC Watch, notes:
Two organisations which formerly monitored BBC output – ‘Just Journalism’ and Trevor Asserson’s ‘BBC Watch’ website – have ceased operations in recent years, exacerbating the need for close and regular monitoring of the world’s most influential broadcaster”. BBC Watch will seek to build upon and develop the work already done by those organisations in order to continue the monitoring of BBC output on the subject of Israel and to examine the broadcaster’s adherence to its legal obligation to produce accurate and impartial reporting as a service to its funding public.
Updates can be received via Twitter @bbcwatch and Facebook at www.facebook.com/bbcwatch.
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