Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?

Never one to allow any sort of freedom of expression which might show or explain the facts - let alone anything which might reflect poorly on Israel - the Israel Lobby has pursued a complaint of alleged bias against the Middle East editor of the BBC.

The findings of the BBC Trust has, rightly, drawn the ire of Robert Fisk in his latest piece in The Independent:

"The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.

But I am mincing my words.

The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth."

And:

"And this, remember, is the same institution which said that to broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza might upset its "neutrality". Legless Palestinian children clearly don't count as much as the BBC's pompous executives."

Read the Fisk piece, in full, here.

Meanwhile, The Independent editorialises on the BBC Trust's finding in "Bad judgement" and concludes:

"The BBC Trust needs to learn that accountability does not mean swallowing every complaint uncritically. When a good journalist needs to be robustly defended, it must not be afraid to do so."

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