Summary
Former BBC Middle East correspondent and author of Chapter 15 of For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, “The Crafting of the News: The British Media and the Israel-Palestine Question”, extracted from a talk given online on 13 August 2020. Llewellyn argues that the BBC in particular has not covered Israel/Palestine properly over the past twenty years: it listens to government and pressure groups instead of public opinion, shifts with government thinking, maintains a spurious equivalence between the two sides, and avoids the issue for fear of the Israeli lobby and of allegations of antisemitism (For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, PDF p.251-266).
Details
- Llewellyn joined the BBC in the Middle East in 1974, at the point when, in his account, its reporting began to change with government thinking; one of his first stories, on the Syrian town of Kuneitra blown up by the Israelis as they left the Golan Heights in spring 1974, was used without fear or favour, as the UN confirmed it (PDF p.258).
- He covered the Sabra-Shatila massacre in 1982 and was, in his account, the first to get the news out about it for the BBC: “The Israelis did not carry out that massacre, but they allowed it to happen. It could not have happened without them.” (PDF p.260-261).
- He pairs two BBC responses thirty years apart: the Head of Secretariat’s 1968 reply to Christopher Mayhew, that an accurate reflection of publicly expressed attitudes “may well inevitably reveal at times a preponderance of sympathy for the Israeli side”, and a senior BBC news executive’s rejoinder to Llewellyn in about 2003 or 2004, that digging out Palestinian spokesmen would be “doing the Palestinians’ job for them” (PDF p.256-257).
- His Contributors entry records that he was BBC Middle East Correspondent based in Beirut 1976-1980 and again 1987-1992 based in Nicosia, a BBC freelance until 2004, and thereafter a vocal critic of BBC coverage of Israel and Palestine, and author of Spirit of the Phoenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon (IB Tauris, 2010) (PDF p.15-20, Contributors).
Related pages
For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, Sabra and Shatila massacre, Antisemitism, Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group