The BBC IS Balanced

An odd debate to have considering the annihilation of Jewish communities across the Middle East, but required for balance

I hope I didn’t make the wholly unfortunate impression in my last post that our beloved Beeb is not balanced. In fact in their reporting they are just about as perfectly balanced as they could be between Israel and ISIS. Can you imagine how difficult it must be to balance each ISIS atrocity with an Israeli outrage? Sometimes there just isn’t a story of evil Jews to be had for love or money! It’s a real challenge at times, but one which the BBC nobly rises to every day, including Sundays.

These guys never sleep. The requirements of balance are truly a Labour of Hercules. But what you must appreciate is that it is all done in a good cause. If they just reported the stories as they came in willy-nilly, people’s nasty Islamophobic prejudices would only be confirmed and strengthened. They might for example come to the conclusion that Islamic State were a bunch of perverted, sadistic monsters and how would that reflect on Islam?

So when all the barbarity seems to be coming from one side of the Israeli-Islam divide one of the following approaches is usually employed to redress the balance.

1)    Omission: simply not reporting stories this is the most effective way to avoid giving ISIS a bad name. A couple of days ago the UN released a report about the torture and murder of 12 Syrian Christians. I guess the BBC had filled their weekly quota of ISIS atrocities (one?) because search as I might I could find no trace of this one on any BBC platform. Perhaps it is there somewhere but that brings me to the next weapon in the Beeb’s armoury in the fight for balance.

2)    Downgrading: so as I say the story of the slicing off of the fingers of a boy to make him convert to Islam, his subsequent murder along with 11 other Syrian Christians may well be somewhere on the BBC’s millions of web pages. But 99.99% of their readers will never find it.

3)    Dispassionate: when talking of the latest ISIS evil abomination the BBC will go ultra matter-of-fact, passive language, so many dead, location, context, dah de dah, blah, blah, blah, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

4)    Passion: at the same time that a sickening evil perversion is retailed like the talking clock, the extent of (self-inflicted) Palestinian sufferings will magnified by emotive language and images like a mother clutching her blood-splattered infant to her breast. What sort of monsters could have done this to her?

5)    Perspective: but sometimes all these approaches prove inadequate so it’s necessary to actually tread the line between truth and falsehood like a mountain goat. That’s what the BBC tried when they headlined a story a few days ago about a Palestinian terror attack which masterfully portrayed the terrorist as the victim with:

Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two

So let’s hear no more about lack of balance in BBC coverage of the Middle East. The balance that the BBC maintains between Israel and its terrorist enemies is nothing short of masterly. You try applying moral equivalence when comparing the actions of a civilised people who are daily provoked by terror attacks to those of blood-soaked savages. It's often said about TV news that, "If it bleeds, it leads". With that in mind a little recognition of what it takes for a "world-renowned" news organisation to conceal the ghastly and daily atrocities going on in the Islamic State wouldn't go amiss either.

The BBC is so balanced, it’s quite plainly as unbalanced as you can get without restraints and liberally applied medication.


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