10. In January, Palestinian presidential candidate Dr. Mustafa Barghouti (not to be confused with his better-known distant relative, Marwan) tried to use Israel and the Western media to get some free publicity for his campaign by getting himself arrested at the Temple Mount. The Independent's Donald Macintyre saw straight through Barghouti's ploy, but the BBC's Martin Asser proved more gullible:

9. Every morning, listeners can tune into BBC for an uplifting "Thought of the Day." One February morning, Rev. Dr. John Bell used the feature to describe an Arab-Israeli acquaintance only identified as "Adam." According to Rev. Dr. Bell, this acquaintance was "conscripted" into the Israeli army, where "he was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren." See the full transcript here.

8. In March, the BBC apologized to Israel for reporter Simon Wilson's handling of an interview with Mordechai Vanunu. A former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant, Vanunu is prohibited from talking to foreign reporters, but Wilson, in 2004, was caught trying to smuggle tapes of his interview out of the country. Although the apology - which paved the way for Wilson to return to Israel - was supposed to remain confidential, it was inexplicably posted on the BBC's own web site for several hours. The BBC once intended to rent out a luxury apartment for Vanunu paid for by British television viewers.

7. He retired from the BBC, but former Mideast correspondent Tim Llewellyn (now an executive member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding) makes this list for an interview he gave to Electronic Intifada. We are concerned Llewellyn's views are shared by colleagues within the BBC:

[BBC] are adopting what they see as an even handed attitude. To me this is a cowardly attitude, it is an attitude which confuses occupier with occupied...

6. In May, BBC correspondent Orla Guerin reported that construction linking Maale Adumim to Jerusalem would split the West Bank in two, destroying any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. HonestReporting noted that construction in the area known as E-1 doesn't take away territorial contiguity. A map produced by our colleagues at CAMERA highlights how the Palestinians would have continuous territory, which, at its narrowest, would be nine miles (or 15 km) wide - which also happens to be the width of Israel's "waistline" between the Green Line and the Mediterranean.

5. When members of the British Association of University Teachers considered a boycott of Israel's Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities, BBC radio tried to influence the vote with a report by correspondent John Reynolds from the College of Judea and Samaria. As Melanie Phillips wrote in May:

4. When terrorists linked to Al-Qaida struck the London transportation system in July, many thought the BBC would finally use the word "terror" to describe the wanton attacks on civilians. To their credit, a small handful of initial reports did. But appearances of the "t-word" in initial coverage were soon removed from the BBC's web site (but not before Tom Gross documented the inconsistencies). Yet Roger Mosey, the head of BBC's television news, contradicted BBC policy when he wrote in The Guardian that there was no ban in the first place!

Then there has been a controversy about our use of language - particularly the question of whether the BBC banned the word "terrorist". There is no ban. It's true the word is contentious in some contexts on our international services, hence the recommendation that it be employed with care. But we have used and will continue to use the words terror, terrorism and terrorist - as we did in all our flagship bulletins from Thursday.

3. Following the London terror attacks, the BBC admitted loading the studio audience with a disproportionate number of Muslims for Questions of Security: A BBC News Special. (See Biased BBC for links to video of the show.) Among the complaints, one viewer wrote angrily:

2. Within hours after Israel completed its pull-out from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians wasted no time desecrating synagogues and looting greenhouses. BBC's Orla Guerin was one of several journalists who actually justified the sad, senseless destruction:

1. Whatever happened to Malcolm Balen, who was appointed to help improve the BBC's Mideast reporting? Back in November, 2003, the BBC hired him as a "senior editorial advisor," or, as some put it, "a Middle East policeman." Some HonestReporting readers were hopeful when Haaretz reported that Balen was supposed to present a "conclusive and comprehensive report" to BBC executives. Balen even told Haaretz:

What I do is a long-term editorial review, and by definition, the review is retrospective, rather than a look at day-to-day output. The truth is, in any editorial job, you are so tied up with your program and deadline, that you simply do not have the time to stand back and look at the coverage as a whole," says Balen.

"Nobody has the time in a journalistic job to trace the course of a single story in an organization as large as the BBC, which is what I was appointed to do. I can concentrate on a single story and look at all sorts of angles and aspects. I can join the dots together, [determine] what the coverage feels like, what the tone is like - crucially, what the content is like, what the balance is like."

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