BBC spent £350,000 on legal battle to keep its ‘biased’ Middle East coverage secret

Report examined corporation’s coverage of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Liz Thomas and Nicholas Mcdermott
Mail Online
February 16, 2012

The BBC has been accused of a cover-up after spending almost £350,000 on a legal battle to suppress an internal report about bias in its Middle East coverage.

 

A seven-year campaign to gain access to the 2004 document, which examined the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ended in defeat  yesterday after the Supreme Court ruled it could remain secret.

Lawyer Steven Sugar, who passed away last year, made a Freedom of Information request in 2005 for disclosure of the 20,000-word Balen Report.

But the corporation argued it was exempt from revealing information it held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature’.

Read full report here

This article was posted: Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 12:22 pm

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