Head-lines: a mental health news show run by puppets.
I’m currently doing a lot of head-line reading. I am, as some of you may know, a writer, and it’s always a pleasure to get my hands on a bit of good news to work with.
The recent death of George Galloway is one example of the kind of stuff my brain can actually do under the best of circumstances.
The BBC News Magazine is another, because they occasionally pick up something that might be pretty interesting.
A few days ago, they had an article about how Galloway’s new book was going to be “The Case for Israel”. Apparently, the Jewish lobby is very worried about it.
I’m not a fan of the Jewish lobby. I’ve been anti-Zionist since I picked up the New York Times crossword in the 1970s. But I can understand why Galloway’s book, which sounds an awful lot like “Bony Moron”, has caused a concern in the Jewish establishment. It has a tendency to come from the left and is full of anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish and anti-Arab rhetoric.
My own view was that it was a clever way to get people’s attention since the book was going to be a serious discussion on the issue of Zionism, and there already was a lot of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian, anti-Arab feeling in the US. I’m not exactly sure how or why they made the book come out, but it did, and the reaction to it has been a lot of people with very different points of view from Galloway. Some have even said the book was brilliant.
Of course I’d be much more interested in what has caused this particular controversy if the BBC report had mentioned what is really going on and the real reason Galloway is being attacked.
Some may see this as another example of the BBC’s general problem with covering too much political discussion.
I do wonder, however, whether they ever should have done the report on Galloway. I have long wondered whether what the BBC does is a matter of bad judgement and bad publicity, or bad judgement and bad reporting.
It is the former, because it’s the kind of discussion that should be discussed in the open, and