Ruth King at a rightwing site says that the London Review of Books had received a government subsidy for ten years and has now been cut off. She surmises that it is because of the publication’s pieces critical of Israel. A spokesman for LRB says that the UK Arts Council never brought them up. King claims a scalp regardless:
In an interesting development at the militantly anti-Zionist London Review of Books (LRB), the magazine is no longer to receive funding from the UK Arts Council’s regular donor programme. This follows years of campaigning by a variety of individuals and organisations, most notably in the last couple of years by the media monitoring watchdog Just Journalism, who have berated the Arts Council for channeling public funds into an agenda driven media outlet….
The following facts are not in dispute: 1) From 2012 the Arts Council will cease funding a virulently anti-Israeli magazine which since 1980 has received 767,000 pounds in state subsidy via its standard donor programme. 2) The magazine makes a loss. 3) Money that LRB can still get from the Arts Council will next year go to funding a literary festival not the magazine itself. 4) Just Journalism put out a very widely read report on LRB’s anti-Zionism in November 2010 pointing out that “between 2000 and 2010, public money, to the tune of over £188,000, was drawn from to pay for 92 articles on Israel-Palestine, 91 of which put forward a staunchly pro-Palestinian narrative and many of which depicted Israel as, ‘a bloodthirsty and genocidal regime out of all proportion to reality, while sympathetic portraits abounded of groups designated as terrorist organisations by the British government such as Hamas and Hezbollah”. 5) From 2012, LRB will no longer have money from the Arts Council to pay for such articles.
