Study on Iraq coverage shows BBC was most pro-war of British * Over the three weeks of conflict, 11 percent of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin. This was the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. The BBC used government sources twice as much as ITN and Channel 4 News.
* The BBC was the least likely to quote official Iraqi sources, and less likely than Sky, ITV or Channel 4 News to use independent sources of news such as the Red Cross. Channel 4 used these sources three times more often than the BBC, and Sky twice as often.
* The BBC placed least emphasis on Iraqi casualties, which were mentioned in 22 percent of its stories about the Iraqi people. Numbers of casualties received most prominence on Channel 4 News, figuring in 40 percent of its reports about Iraqis, compared with Sky at 30 percent and ITN at 24 percent.
* The BBC was least likely to report on the opposition of the Iraqi population to the invasion.
* Across all four broadcasters, the bulletins were three times more likely to present the Iraqi population as pro-invasion than anti-invasion. The exception to the ratio was Channel 4, where it was just less than two to one.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/bbc-j10.shtmlThe BBC And Iraq: Myth and RealityMedia Tenor, the non-partisan, Bonn-based media research organisation, has examined the Iraq war reporting of some of the world’s leading broadcasters, including the US networks and the BBC. It concentrated on the coverage of opposition to the war.
The second-worst case of denying access to anti-war voices was ABC in the United States, which allowed them a mere 7 per cent of its overall coverage.
The worst case was the BBC, which gave just 2 per cent of its coverage to opposition views – views that represented those of the majority of the British people. A separate study by Cardiff University came to the same conclusion.
The BBC, it said, had "displayed the most pro-war agenda of any (British) broadcaster."http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/pilger1.htmlStudy deals a blow to claims of anti-war bias in BBC news Downing Street's complaints about anti-war bias within the BBC appear to be disproved by an academic analysis that shows the corporation
displayed the most "pro-war" agenda of any broadcaster.
A detailed study of peak-time television news bulletins during the course of the Iraq war shows that the BBC was more reliant than any of its rivals on government and military sources.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,991343,00.html