Gaza, the BBC, and Impartiality

This post has been running around my head for some time -- I apologise that the story is getting out of date now! It's still relevant, at least.

As I'm sure you know, both the BBC and Sky refused to air an appeal on behalf of the DEC concerning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The BBC refused on the basis that the ad would threaten their impartiality, whilst Sky said that showing the ad would be "incompatible with their objective role". 

I think they're both wrong about this: broadcasting the appeal is perfectly compatible with remaining an objective and impartial news broadcaster. A quick search for a definition of 'partiality' yields this: "biased or prejudiced in favor of a person, group, side, etc., over another, as in a controversy", whereas 'objective' gets "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased." (courtesy of Dictionary.com). I take it that Sky and the BBC are basically articulating the same worry, so I'll treat them as one.

As far as I can see, broadcasting an appeal on behalf of the DEC involves endorsing no more than the following claims:

1. There is a humanitarian crisis.
2. The crisis is severe enough to warrant an alliance of aid charities (i.e. the DEC) in attempt to allay it.
3. There is at least good reason to believe that this alliance is in a position to assist in allaying the crisis, to whatever degree. 

None of these claims involves bias, prejudice, distortion of the facts, reliance on feelings, or a preference for one group over another; and so it seems to me that showing the ad would not compromise the objectivity or impartiality of a news broadcaster.

Perhaps the BBC would be concerned about its perceived impartiality -- perhaps it's worried that showing the appeal would make Israel think that the BBC was demonstrating bias or prejudice against it. But this would be a bad reason to refuse to show the ad. I daresay that China, Russia, Iran, Somalia, etc, consider many of the stories that the BBC runs about them to be biased or prejudiced. (I know for certain that this is the case about China, and it's plausible in the other cases.) But the fact that some state has a distorted view of what counts as biased reporting doesn't mean that we should kowtow to their sentiments in order to live up to the odd idea of 'perceived impartiality'. If I'm right, above, in saying that showing the ad wouldn't involve as bias or prejudice, then the fact that Israel (or anyone else) might think that it involves bias or prejudice is neither here nor there. Why should we care, if we have good reasons to think otherwise?

Of course, just how outraged we should be about this depends on how common it is for the BBC to show appeals from warzones. According to the story I linked above, the corporation also refused to air an appeal in 2006's Israel-Lebanon skirmish because of impartiality worries -- but that's a bad precedent to draw on, since the issue of appeasing Israel is what's at stake in the present day too. In the East Africa 2006 and Burma 2008 cases, the appeals were contingent on ease of access on the one hand and the effectiveness of the aid on the other -- impartiality, it seems, wasn't a concern. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from this...