The Jewish Chronicle informs us that the BBC has issued a statement following the receipt of complaints concerning remarks made during a BBC News Channel papers review on November 8th (and also promoted on the BBC News website) which, as we noted here, included references to “the Jewish lobby”.
“The BBC has received 33 complaints after a commentator referred to a “Jewish lobby” during a newspaper review. […]
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the BBC said: “The comments were made about the Independent on Sunday story which claimed that unnamed Jewish donors were withdrawing financial support from Ed Miliband over Israel.
“Tim named Maureen Lipman in this context, and as part of a wider discussion, asked if Labour’s ‘mansion tax’ policy was one of the factors that might put off some of the Jewish donors cited by the paper from contributing to Labour’s election coffers.
“It was clear that he was not suggesting that Jewish people in particular are against the mansion tax.” “
As the JC points out:
“The newspaper article had made no reference to the mansion tax.”
According to the information in the JC report, the BBC statement does not appear to have addressed the equally problematic issue of the programme’s promotion of the ‘Jewish lobby’ trope.
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