Arab Media Watch director Judith Brown, who is undertaking a PhD in "Imagery of Arabs in the British Media", describes her July-September 2004 analysis of BBC Radio 4's flagship programme as "damning".

By Bob Fenton
10 October 2007
Financial Times

The BBC World Service will receive above-inflation funding from the Foreign Office over three years to expand television services beamed to the Arabic-speaking world and begin new broadcasts to Iran and Afghanistan.

By Mary Dejevsky
31 October 2007
The Independent

Whenever the BBC comes under financial pressure, the Director-General reaches for the hoary old threat of back-to-back repeats. In so doing, however, he does the Corporation a disservice. There are programmes that warrant an almost instant re-showing and regular outings thereafter. One such is John Ware's two-part documentary about the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, No Plan, No Peace, which went out this Sunday and Monday.

Invariably, the very programmes that deserve to be repeated seem to be the ones allowed to languish in the bowels of Television Centre until such time as they are pronounced "classics". To judge by the BBC's response when I tried to find more about Ware's documentary yesterday, this is the fate in store for No Plan, No Peace.

By Owen Gibson, media correspondent
25 January 2008
The Guardian

The BBC is planning a controversial dramatisation of the run-up to the war in Iraq, to be broadcast over 10 days in March, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the start of the conflict.

Starring Kenneth Branagh as Colonel Tim Collins, as well as Art Malik and Harriet Walter, the high profile series will focus on the events that happened on the corresponding days five years earlier, the BBC said yesterday.

The series, overseen by Colin Barr, who made an acclaimed drama-documentary about Robert Maxwell, will tell the story of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, the debates in the UN, the plans for reconstruction and the countdown to the war, which began on the night of March 20 2003.

Your role will include:

- Receive calls in the call centre during leading phone-in programmes for radio and TV
- Archiving
- Perform ad-hoc jobs such as welcoming and receiving guests in reception and guiding them to studios

Requirements:

- Arabic as a mother tongue or equivalent
- Good verbal communication skills in Arabic and English
- Ability to speak and understand major Arabic dialects
- Comfortable using computers
- Valid UK work permit

Duration:

- 3 hours a day, 3 days a week for an ongoing basis

By Adam Sherwin
6 March 2008
The Times

The last time that the BBC tried to launch an Arabic television channel, in 1996, it collapsed. Its partners in Saudi Arabia pulled out of the commercially funded channel over a Panorama report on human rights abuses in the Kingdom. In the wake of the debacle, several employees went on to found al-Jazeera.

More than a decade on and al-Jazeera is an established voice in the region, yet the BBC believes that there is room for its "authoritative and impartial" Arabic-language service to be launched into a crowded media marketplace on Monday.

By John Pilger
11 September 2008

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help in the country's rebuilding program." Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC's principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style open democracy." Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defense correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush's speeches for "evidence" of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilization. Says he: "The 'D' word is not there, but the phrase 'united, stable and free' [is] clearly an allusion to it." After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq "was launched as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'." Moreover,20says the BBC man, "in Bush's 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy ... These examples show that these were on Bush's mind before, during and after the invasion."

Try to laugh, please.

Agence France Presse
17 May 2007

LONDON - The British government said Thursday it is asking a Palestinian cleric detained here whether he would be willing to appeal for the release of BBC journalist Alan Johnston from the Gaza Strip.

BBC News
15 June 2007

The Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, says it is taking "practical steps" to secure the release of kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston.

Hamas said it had sent a warning to Mr Johnston's kidnappers, hours after the movement claimed victory in a bloody power struggle in Gaza.

A spokesman said Mr Johnston, a hostage for three months, was the Palestinians' guest and should be made welcome.

8 June 2007

The BBC has issued a written apology in response to a joint complaint by Arab Media Watch, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, after a presenter on BBC 1's Football Focus incorrectly described Jerusalem as Israel's "capital," a well as "its historic soul."