Former BBC chairman rips coverage

The former chairman of the BBC, Lord Michael Ian Grade, criticized the British news network for its coverage of recent wave of terror attacks in Israel.

In a letter to the corporation’s director of news and current affairs, James Hardin, Grade specifically criticized journalist Orla Guerin, whose report from Israel did not include the “wider context” of the attacks and equated “Israeli victims of terrorism and Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli security forces in the act of carrying out terror attacks.”

“An emotional interview is conducted with the father of a dead Palestinian youth who had been killed committing a fatal terror attack. However, the report failed to show the emotional distress caused to Israelis by any of these recent attacks. This is inexcusable,” Grade wrote in the letter.

“Additionally, it was improper of the correspondent to claim that ‘there’s no sign of involvement by militant groups,’ before immediately showing footage of Palestinian Islamic Jihad banners at the home of a 19-year-old terrorist who carried out a deadly knife attack at Lions’ Gate in Jerusalem on Oct. 3. PIJ is a well-known Palestinian terror organization and it has since claimed responsibility for the attack and been praised by Hamas, another internationally proscribed terror organization. This directly misleads viewers,” he added.

The fact that Guerin did not show Palestinian rock-throwers in her report limited viewers’ “awareness and understanding of what is an undoubtedly a complex issue.”

“Regrettably, this is not the first time the standard of reporting and impartiality has been unsatisfactory in recent weeks” at the BBC, Grade wrote.