Whatever happened on the Mavi Marmara on the morning of May 31st, 2010, the BBC’s Panorama team failed to give a balanced view of it in its so-called documentary, Death in the Med. Even the title sounds more like that of a paperback mystery, rather than a serious analysis of Israel’s worst atrocity since Operation Cast Lead.
Documentaries should be truthful and informative and expand our understanding of situations and events; their content should be rigorously checked for errors in statements which are presented as facts and conjecture, and the personal opinions of their writers and presenters should be explicitly identified as such. But Death in the Med failed any test based on those parameters.
The BBC’s television and radio services reach an audience measured in hundreds of millions, world-wide, but are primarily funded by taxes and license fees paid by the British public; not by Israel or its influential friends. Panorama’s biased and often untruthful treatment of Israel’s worst atrocity since Operation Cast Lead should trigger a public enquiry about who is really in charge of one of the most influential broadcasters on the planet.