ADRIAN MORGAN

High up on a hill in Wood Green, north London, is a Victorian brick building called Alexandra Palace. Surrounded by 196 acres of parkland, the edifice was constructed in 1873. In 1936, it was from Alexandra Palace that the BBC made its first television broadcasts. When I was growing up in 1960s Britain, the BBC was highly regarded. There was a time when people would validate a statement by claiming that they had heard it "on the BBC." Those days have long passed, and a once-revered institution is now being used to disseminate disinformation and political correctness.

Damien Thompson, a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph has noted that the BBC's "reporting of the Middle East has been so relentlessly pro-Palestinian for so long, and that coverage is so influential, that it finds itself an actual player in the conflict, as opposed to an impartial observer."

The Balen Report was an internal BBC document which was commissioned in 2004 to investigate complaints of anti-Israeli bias in the BBC's coverage of the Middle East conflicts. Even though the BBC is funded by the taxpayer, the organization allegedly spent $400,000 of tax-payers' money to prevent the report from being made available to the public. The Telegraph quoted lawyer Steven Sugar, who was using the Freedom of Information Act to have the Balen Report released. The report was widely believed to have found the BBC guilty of anti-Israeli bias.

Sugar said: "This is a serious report about a serious issue and has been compiled with public money. I lodged the request because I was concerned that the BBC's reporting of the second intifada was seriously unbalanced against Israel, but I think there are other issues at stake now in the light of the BBC's reaction." On April 27, 2007 the BBC won its battle to suppress the report's publication. The decision to suppress the Balen Report was condemned by Tory MP Philip Davies, who said: "This seems to be outrageous. If the BBC are embarrassed about what they are doing they should not be doing it. If they are not embarrassed they should release the information."

The BBC runs a "rolling news" channel, called News 24. One of its frequent guests and commentators on Middle East events is Palestinian-born Abdel Bari-Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In June 2007, Bari-Atwan told a Lebanese TV station: "If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight... Allah willing, [Iran] will attack Israel." Defending its decision to keep Bari-Atwan as a pundit, the BBC said that it was obliged to present "a range of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented."

In 2002 the then-head of BBC News, RIchard Sambrook, warned his journalists that they needed to be more concerned about "impartiality" on contentious issues such as the Middle East, the European Union and the gap between those living in the countryside and those in towns. Sambrook would later commission the Balen Report. His warnings were not heeded. In January 2005 an independent review commissioned by BBC governors found that reporting on the European Union was riddled with ignorance. Presenters were described as "ill-briefed" and there was lack of knowledge about the EU "at every stage" of the news gathering and presenting process. The report claimed that BBC reporting of this subject needed to be "more demonstrably impartial," but stopped short of stating that the BBC was "pro-EU."

In 2005, the BBC advised journalists to be cautious in the use of the word "terrorist," as the term was deemed to be "judgmental." In October 2006, a senior executive at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted at a conference that the corporation was "ignoring" mainstream opinion and was out of touch with the British public. A month earlier the BBC held an "impartiality" summit. Alan Yentob, head of BBC Drama, admitted that he would not air a Koran being thrown in a garbage can, lest the act offended Muslims, but he would allow a Bible to be shown being thrown in a bin. The impartiality summit found that there was an anti-Christian bias within the corporation, as well as an anti-American bias. At the same conference Jeff Randall, a former business editor at the BBC, gave damning testimony. He said that he had complained about the "multicultural stance" of the BBC to a top news executive and was told: "The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it." When Randall wore cufflinks into work, which bore the Union Jack (the national flag) he was told: "You can't do that, that's like the National Front!" The National Front is a racist political group. To Americans, the notion of being accused of racism for wearing an item carrying the Stars and Stripes would be unthinkable, but not so in the Britain of the BBC.

The issue of the BBC's left-wing bias was brought to a head earlier this year. In June a BBC-commissioned report authored by John Bridcut From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel was published, which stated that the corporation was existing in a "left-leaning comfort zone." and that it had an "innate liberal bias."

In July 2005, after the 7/7 Muslim bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent people, the BBC had a discussion show entitled "Questions of Security: A BBC News Special." The corporation admitted that it had deliberately stacked the audience with Muslims. As a proportion of the audience, there were five times as many Muslims as the proportion of Muslims in the national demographic.

The PC and leftist bias has extended to the BBC Drama Department. The popular drama "Spooks" is known in the U.S. as "MI-5" and is entertaining hokum. In November 2006, the BBC was facing complaints of anti-Christian bias, after an episode of this show featured religious terrorists murdering people from another faith. The terrorists were evangelical Christians, and the victims were Muslims. Another episode involved Al Qaeda terrorists taking control of the Saudi Embassy and murdering people inside. Except the Al Qaeda terrorists were not Muslim terrorists—they were dastardly Israeli agents, posing as Muslims.

"Casualty" is a long-running hospital drama, where patients get injured, brought into an Emergency Room, and then all their emotional problems are solved by the improbably intrusive staff. Recently, the show was to have featured the aftermath of a suicide-bomber blowing himself up in a bus station, with all the consequent mayhem and social hand-wringing amongst the caring, sensitive hospital staff. The suicide bomber was originally written as an Islamist. By the time BBC executives had got their hands on the script, the bomber had changed his allegiance to become an animal rights activist.

Lord Tebbitt, who served in Thatcher's government and whose wife was paralyzed in an IRA bomb attack in 1984, condemned the decision to change the Casualty storyline to avoid offending Muslims. He said: "People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here? The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness."

The BBC produces international radio shows on its "World Service," in the manner of "Voice of America." These are produced at Bush House near Piccadilly. The reports from the BBC World Service used to be influential—so much so that in 1978 Bulgarian dissident and World Service broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a Bulgarian communist in the street outside Bush House. Now, the BBC World Service has succumbed to the leftist climate. Professor Frank Stewart has claimed that the BBC's Arabic language service, which began in 1938, was "anti-Western and anti-democratic." Stewart claimed that the Arabic BBC service spoke of Saddam's 2002 election victory as if it was "straight" news, and said that Assad of Syria also received favorable coverage. When a member of the U.S. State Department referred to Assad's Ba'athist regime as a dictatorship, the interviewer "immediately interrupted and reprimanded him." Stewart wrote that "authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world" had received "sympathetic treatment."

The bias which exists on the BBC has been so frequent that blog sites have been created to document its transgressions, such as Busting BBC Bias and Biased BBC.

What was once a great British institution is now a club for the commissars of political correctness. Alexandra Palace, where BBC TV began, is no longer used by the BBC. In a symptom of the times we live in, Alexandra Palace still has a purpose. In 2006, while London marked the first anniversary of 7/7, Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood held an "Islam Expo" at the site. Last month, the terror supporting Hizb ut-Tahrir held its annual conference at Alexandra Palace.

Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist. This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared on Sept 25 in familysecuritymatters.org