The BBC Pro-Israeli?

-The official report for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict listed a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favor of Israel.

-This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC's greatest hits remain fresh in the memory. There was the send-off for Yasser Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which concluded that the corrupt old brute was "the stuff of legends."

-There was Orla Guerin's story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes."

-There was the case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."

-These examples are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians.