Israeli cable drops BBC World
Israeli cable television operators abruptly dropped the BBC World news channel from their roster of stations today after the two sides failed to reach a financial agreement.
Cable company spokeswoman Aliza Khoury said the decision was taken after talks between both sides, and was based on the BBC’s low viewer ratings and not on the BBC’s reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been widely criticised in Israel as biased in favour of the Palestinians.
She said Israeli cable viewers still had a choice of three international news broadcasters: CNN, Sky News and Fox News.
The BBC said the Israeli operators wanted a lower price for the BBC news service.
“As a commercially funded channel we were unable to accept the cable operators’ proposal, which wasn’t commercially viable,” they said.
