Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

since key players realized decades ago how much sway news outlets hold over public opinion, a vast amount of them have been co-opted to spread propaganda [0]. at least a dozen countries and probably more (including Israel) are tapped directly into the five/fourteen eyes [1][2] intelligence network, countries which share "raw sigint" [3] with each other and strategically disseminate international propaganda to the alliance's benefit.

watching or reading publications from any of these nation's news outlets is intended and virtually guaranteed to paint them all as the "good guys", and any other countries as "bad guys". just like BBC is doing here. this is not a conspiracy, it's all fairly well documented.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...

I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.

There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.

The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.

The BBC having 21,000 employees (5500 journalists). Only 100 signed.

From my perspective the BBC is extremely anti-Israeli but for some people this is obviously not good enough. They want the BBC to champion their cause. Naturally people supporting the anti-Israeli cause who only get anti-Israeli content will feel that the BBC is "pro" Israel. Nothing could be farther from the truth and Pro-Israeli media looks nothing like the BBC.

This is from 2006:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/governors_archive/im...

"We were appointed by the Governors to assess whether the BBC's coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict meets the required standards of impartiality."

...

"apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias; on the contrary there was evidence, in the programming and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial;"

...

"these shortcomings include:"

...

"Equally in the months preceding the Palestinian elections there was little hard questioning of their leaders"

...

This has been a big criticism of the BBC which is still not addressed:

"The term "terrorism" should accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies."

Apologies for the oversight. However I feel the author's phrasing "hysterical pro-Israel campaign" to downplay their concerns is telling.

It's math. You can model what happens in n-player repeated games of incomplete information, and you'll realize we're far from any stable point. And it's not even that hard to understand that the narrative of "end of history" benefits the people who get to say that and uphold that narrative.