I am in good company in complaining that the BBC does not inform or educate to the extent that Reith anticipated. One must except World Service Radio and the News channel's Context, but the main TV news bulletins tend to have a tabloid agenda, reporting only the most dramatic items of foreign news. To be fair, once the current Hamas-Israel war started, BBC News has been even-handed and stuck to its policy of not stating as fact any report which has not been independently verified. Thus it did not fall for the discredited story of the bodies of decapitated babies being found in the wake of the kibbutz attacks, though sadly it briefly took in the US president.
But the lower-level of violence in the region and the breaches of UN resolutions which have been going on day by day remained unreported. As Patrick Cockburn wrote around Christmas last year:
If a prize was to be awarded for the most important yet least reported story in the media in 2022, it might well go to the news outlets that failed to report on the escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which is now combining with the likely impact of the incoming far-right government in Israel.
As a result, the al-Qassam brigades attack last week came as a surprise to most casual consumers of broadcast news.
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