Counter-critique of ICJS re BtN

This critique refers to material on Propaganda for young minds

I have carefully examined both the original ABC program and the suggested re-write by ICJS. As an independent observer with no connections to either side of the conflict, except that I have a number of Jewish friends and no Arab acquaintances even, I did not find the ABC program to be biased.

The evidence for the accusation of bias was not specified. As the ICJS is a pro-Zionist organisation with a focus on, according to their web site, the "Australian Broadcasting Corporation's recurring patterns of imbalance", it may be that it was assumed that this bias would be self-evident to its readers. However, an independent observer must try to deduce the nature of the complaint from the suggested amendments to the report. It seems that few of the actual facts mentioned in the report were substantially disputed. What the amendments mainly do is add extra facts that the ICJS thinks are equally important, mainly
about Israel. This overlooks the fact that the program was about Lebanon and the impact of the current hostilities on the Lebanese.

These short ABC briefings can't deal with everything, and the suggested ICJS amendments made the piece 51% longer, so to include this new material within the same time frame, a half of the Lebanese material  would have had to have been dropped, and this would have made it a different piece. There are perhaps one or two things in the ABC report that I would have said differently, but in general it is not at all biased. Perhaps another piece is needed on the effects in Israel, even though they are significantly less.

The ABC is by far the least and perhaps the only unbiassed media outlet in Australia, and it goes out of the way to stay that way. It is terrified of being biassed as it is very sensitive to the various lobby  groups from both sides of any question, such as the ICJS, that are
trying to privilege their interpretation of a situation over other ones. I deplore such attacks on the ABC as it only serves to undermine it and endanger it, and if we lose it, we lose one of the great bastions of democracy in this country.

With respect to the suggested ICJS amendments, I did find them biassed in not a few places themselves, for example:

(1) They amend "over 300 people killed" in Lebanon to "over 350 killed on both sides" without mentioning that only 10% of those deaths were in Israel.

(2) They misleadingly insert a sentence about 15% of the population being Arab between two sentences about what happened in 1948, which implies that this figure refers to the 1948 situation, when in fact it is a current figure. in 1948 there was a much greater percentage of Arabs in the lands that became Israel.

(3) They want to insert a sentence about the UN 'creating' Israel in 1948, but omit to mention that the same UN Commission that recommended a Jewish state also recommended formation of a Palestinian state.

There are many more examples.

We are right to be vigilant about bias on the ABC, but I think we can dismiss this as just another lobby group trying to pressure the ABC to accept it's particular slant.