BBC

Any aeroplane crash is newsworthy. Media organisations, bloggers and opportunists race to publish anything, just so long as it gets picked up by major search engines within minutes. Even venerable reporting organisations fall into the trap of just getting something, anything onto their website so they don't seem to be behind. Grabbing eyeballs is the primary objective. But as the BBC found out yesterday, sometimes that rush to publish leads to questionable content....

For much of the past two weeks, BBC News has heavily featured criticism of British Labour Party and Prime Ministerial hopeful Jeremy Corbyn. The criticism has been orchestrated by some British Jews who claim that he, and some of his party, are, in their words, "anti-Semitic." The primary concern is not the treatment of Jews in the UK, but Corbyn's long and loud protests against Israel's behaviour in Palestine. Right-wing, one might argue radical, Jews in the UK are incensed. The BBC willingly provides a megaphone for them. So why has the BBC been almost silent on the subject in the past three days?

Yesterday, Hamas, which now has effective political control over those parts of Palestine that Israel does not occupy, issued a landmark statement which announced its new Charter. It was an amazing document, with almost everything that Israel could reasonably expect from a peace treaty, except the inevitable refusal to acknowledge an Israeli state as a legal entity, while acknowledging it as a fact. It was such a departure from the previous position, that only the most radical and racist Israeli could possibly dismiss it out of hand. So Israeli president Netanyahu did just that. The BBC simply gave this extraordinary news such a low priority that it does not appear on any of its early mobile screens.

The BBC needs revenue and that revenue has to come from advertising and sponsorship. Indeed, although in the UK its services are commercial free, its external broadcasts have long been advertisement-supported. Today it crossed into dangerous territory.