Still on the same tack, here’s the BBC’s populist historian Dominic Sandbrook opining on the Balfour declaration in the Daily Mail.
Here’s one occasion when the Rice-Davies Formulation comes into its own (as applied to the OMG Daily Mail) and I can justifiably cite it myself.
Honest Reporting (shut up, Mandy) has exposed this appalling article by Sandbrook and shows how and why it is littered with falsehoods and revisionist, BBC-type history.
I suspect that many of our readers are bored with this topic so I’ll reproduce Honest Reporting’s deconstruction in full over the page. If you’re one of them, DON’T click on the ‘read more”.
It’s very cheeky that I haven’t asked permission, but I’m flouting blogging etiquette on this occasion because I hope exposing Dominic Sandbrook’s sublime ignorance and ‘putting him right’ goes some way towards explaining the BBC’s bias, or rather explaining why the BBC doesn’t think its bias is bias.
Honest Reporting finishes with the following:
Remarkably the conclusion of Sandbrook’s article is dedicated to supporting Israel and denigrating those, particularly on the far-left, who deny its right to exist and wish to see its destruction as well as the anti-Semites who use the Middle East conflict as justification for their bigotry.
At one point Sandbrook writes: “In Britain, the tragedy of the conflict is often reduced to simplistic statements.”
How sad that he has himself fallen into this trap by making sweeping and inaccurate generalizations, historical statements lacking in context, and even falling for the very propaganda he claims to oppose.
This kind of echoes Rob Burley’s tweeted defence of Andrew Marr’s challenge. By citing egregiously biased sources to bolster his case for the BBC’s impartiality, he kind of reveals more than he intended (and effectively does the opposite.)
Sandbrook purports to be defending Israel’s right to exist, and then cites a string of historical inaccuracies and distortions, which, if believed, effectively demolish the case for the defence.
