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As Gaza is savaged again, understanding the BBC's historical role is vital - John Pilger - 22 November 2012 - johnpilger.com
[...] On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.
"[The War Game] is not designed as propaganda," he wrote, "it is intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful research into official material... But the showing of the film on television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent." Following a screening attended by senior Whitehall officials, the film was banned because it told an intolerable truth [...]
What happened to The War Game is the function of the state broadcaster as a cornerstone of Britain's ruling elite [...] the BBC enjoys wide appeal and, according to its managers and beneficiaries, "trust". This "trust" may well apply to Springwatch and Sir David Attenborough, but there is no demonstrable basis for it in much of the news and so-called current affairs that claim to make sense of the world, especially the machinations of rampant power [...]
This is notably true in the Middle East where the Israeli state has successfully intimidated the BBC into presenting the theft of Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and killing of its people as an intractable "conflict" between equals. Standing in the rubble from an Israeli attack, one BBC journalist went further and referred to "Gaza's strong culture of martyrdom". So great is this distortion that young viewers of BBC News have told Glasgow University researchers they are left with the impression that Palestinians are the illegal colonisers of their own country. The current BBC "coverage" of Gaza's genocidal misery reinforces this.
The BBC's "Reithian values" of impartiality and independence are almost scriptural in their mythology. Soon after the corporation was founded in the 1920s by Lord John Reith, Britain was consumed by the General Strike. "Reith emerged as a kind of hero," wrote the historian Patrick Renshaw, "who had acted responsibly and yet preserved the precious independence of the BBC. But though this myth persisted it has little basis in reality... the price of that independence was in fact doing what the government wanted done. [Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin... saw that if they preserved the BBC's independence, it would be much easier for them to get their way on important questions and use it to broadcast Government propaganda."
Unknown to the public, Reith had been the prime minister's speech writer. Ambitious to become Viceroy of India, he ensured the BBC became an evangelist of imperial power, with "impartiality" duly suspended whenever that power was threatened. This "principle" has applied to the BBC's coverage of every colonial war of the modern era: from the covered-up genocide in Indonesia and suppression of eyewitness film of the American bombing of North Vietnam to support for the illegal Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the now familiar echo of Israeli propaganda whenever that lawless state abuses its captive, Palestine. [...]
Mark Regev, Israel's chief propagandist, seemingly has a place reserved for him near the top of BBC news bulletins. In 2010, when I pointed this out to Fran Unsworth, now elevated to director of news, she strongly objected to the description of Regev as a propagandist, adding, "It's not our job to go out and appoint the Palestinean spokesperson".
[...]
Understanding the BBC as a pre-eminent state propagandist and censor by omission - more often than not in tune with its right-wing enemies - is on no public agenda and it ought to be.
LINK:https://johnpilger.com/articles/as-gaza-is-savaged-again-understanding-the-bbc-s-historical-role-is-vital
