News

The Arab spring has had a remarkable effect on the media's appetite for Middle East news which doesn't revolve around Israel. Over the first three months of this year, correspondents usually engaged full time in counting Israeli bricks going down in the West Bank were dispatched to Tahrir Square and Tripoli, because something even bigger was happening.

A recent report by Just Journalism documents how in 2010, when the stirrings of mass discontent were surely detectable across the region, Middle East coverage by the British broadsheets and the BBC News website was disproportionately focused on Israel. Across all outlets and in news, comment and editorial categories, Israel was by far the most discussed country. In the case of the BBC, coverage of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia combined and doubled still amounted to less than was produced about Israel.

Recently, Greg Philo of Glasgow University Media Unit complained on these pages that having pored over 4,000 lines of text from main UK broadcast bulletin... >>>