Through The Looking Glass

Via normblog again, a report to make one choke on one's British afternoon tea. The world in a distorting mirror, courtesy of Glasgow University:

Israeli bias: it's official

One of the most difficult tasks facing any journalist is reporting from, or writing about, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whenever I touch on Middle Eastern issues I receive scores, sometimes hundreds, of emails.

So my in-tray will surely be overflowing today because of a research study by the Glasgow University media group entitled Bad News From Israel, which is being published in book form this week.

Its findings confirm what so many impartial observers already know. The main overall conclusion is that there is a clear bias in television news bulletins in favour of the Israelis. The researchers discovered that there is a "preponderance of official Israeli perspectives", particularly on BBC1, where Israelis were interviewed or reported more than twice as often as Palestinians.

American politicians who support Israel appeared more often than politicians from any other country, and twice as often as those from Britain. There are also major differences in the language used to describe the two sides, with Israel benefiting from its official statist position and the Palestinians suffering as stateless rebels.

Read Norman Geras's comments on this at the link above, and read the piece itself (scroll down) at Media Guardian (free registration required).