The American broadcasters don't hold a candle to the BBC. The reporting of the BBC is far superior to that of the American mainstream media, despite it's flaws.

We are seeing virtually no coverage of the Palestinian civilians on the ground, either in Israel proper, or in the occupied territories, on American media. That is partly due to restrictions being put on all journalists by the Israeli's (see the UN High Commissioner for Refugee's statement on this yesterday), and because they are too chicken to go into the war zones with or without their armored cars.

But OMO, the poor standard of reporting by American media has much, much more to do with the fact that the US media doesn't report critically on the US government and it's so-called "national interests", and this of course includes Israel.

The BBC is often not that reasonable of an alternative either, as their reporting on the anti-globalization movement, for instance, has shown. But I do believe the BBC has much higher journalistic standards than most American journalists.

I think it is no coincidence the Al Jazeera network has many former BBC journalists on their payroll, and CNN is so desperate to get a long term deal w/Al Jazeera for their exclusive broadcast rights in the English speaking world. Al Jazeera isn't trying to recruit American broadcast journalists, because they just plain aren't as good as their BBC counterparts.