An Islamist pressure group has been caught out attempting to present the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as being biased in favour of Israel. When the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) published an overview of BBC coverage of the Gaza war that followed the October 7th pogrom, it assumed it had the Corporation bang to rights. Instead, authentic investigative journalist David Collier was able to lay bare the CfMM’s child-like amateurism and inability to manage even simple data.
One basic problem in its methodology includes the claim that overall, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage than Palestinian ones. However, this figure was partly reached by counting the standard ‘boilerplate’ ending to most BBC web coverage of Gaza with a paragraph noting the events of October 7th.
Other daft ‘metrics’ include treating reports of Israel exercising its right to reply as proof of bias and criticising the British Broadcasting Corporation for covering the release of British hostage Emily Damari “disproportionately.” While the CfMM demands BBC journalists act unprofessionally in reporting Israel, it treats the killing of Hamas operatives posing as journalists as an Israeli attack on press freedom.
The outfit presents itself as a scholarly organisation concerned with the unfair treatment of Muslims in the UK media, attracting establishment support. Yet according to Collier
The CfMM functions openly as a political enforcer for the Muslim Council of Britain [MCB] …. If the goal is genuine media accountability, we need watchdogs committed to truth—not sinister political actors dressing up propaganda as analysis. The CfMM’s true critique is not that the BBC is inaccurate, but that it refuses to adopt the CfMM’s political narrative.
In practice, it has built outwards from its MCB origins and attempted to control the narrative on reporting Islam, Islamism, and terrorism—and even Pakistani-heritage paedophile rape gangs. Collier’s exposé echoes last week’s publication of a damning report into CfMM activity by the think tank Policy Exchange.
Tragically, the argument that the BBC is biased against Israel has far more grounding in reality—as shown by its suspect handling of the recent Glastonbury music festival.
