I share Owen Jones's disgust at the mainstream Western media's portrayal of Israel's recent round of attacks on Gaza, and in particular the BBC's recent online news headline 'Israel under renewed Hamas attack' (8 July 2014). Once again, Palestinians are being massacred, tortured and terrorised and their homes and hospitals destroyed. Yet with some welcome exceptions (such as Jon Snow's challenge to the ever risible apologetics of Mark Regev on Channel 4 News), the mainstream media in the UK have often reported the horror as an outbreak of 'fighting' between two more or less equally matched adversaries (although this may yet change in response to pressures from below, as popular expressions of disgust intensify, and from above, if - as seems to be happening these days - the British state begins to tilt away from the geo-strategic interests of US/Israel).

As Jones says, given the enormity of Israeli violence against Palestinians, the BBC's headline 'is as perverse as Mike Tyson punching a toddler, followed by a headline claiming that the child spat at him'. But whereas Jones sees the fundamental problem as a lack of journalistic 'balance', I would say the problem, in this instance, lies precisely in the way in which the notion of balance is invoked in order to justify biased reporting that posits a false equivalence between the paltry and (thankfully) ineffective military actions of Hamas and the devastating atrocities of the Israeli state.

Another Jones - Howard Jones - sang in 1983: 'See both sides / Throw off your mental chains'. But it isn't always so simple. While it may be appropriate to be 'balanced' in cases requiring the evaluation of two equally plausible propositions, the notion of balance is often invoked to justify misleading reporting. We can see this in the media coverage of topics such as climate change: those who deny anthropogenic global warming are sometimes given as much airtime and column inches as those warn against it, even though their views are scientifically unfounded. As Marcuse put it long ago in his essay on 'repressive tolerance', 'in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood'.

The same problem attends media discussions of social issues that claim to present 'both sides' of 'the debate'. Take 'the immigration debate', for example. The debate about whether immigrants should or should not be allowed to reside in 'our' country tends to be based on at least two questionable assumptions: that immigration is a problem and that it is the prerogative of the state to control it. Political positions that reject these assumptions go unacknowledged. For as long as it relies on such crass binarism, 'balance' is a dubious journalistic objective. In fact, it could be argued that we don't need to have balance in news reporting at all. What we need is accuracy and truthfulness. The world is not balanced - so why should our news reporting be?

Comparisons are being made, not entirely unfairly, between Citizen Khan and the racist late-1970s language college comedy Mind Your Language. In the earlier comedy, minority characters behave like childish morons, reproducing a very narrow set of stereotypical mannerisms, while the college's long-suffering white teacher, played by Barry Evans, wearily tries to bring order to a classroom that threatens to be overwhelmed by ethnic idiocies. Citizen Khan is nowhere near as insulting to its ethnic minority characters and its references to religious and ethnic particularisms are balanced by 'safer', 'universal' themes of marital and inter-generational strife familiar from 'white' sitcoms like My Family. Yet even here the pre-eminence of white liberal decency is continually asserted through the well-meaning interventions of the ginger-haired mosque manager Dave, who tries, disastrously, to help Mr Khan's mother-in-law buy a cardigan in Marks and Spencer and dispenses relationship advice to the simple-minded young man Amjad Malik (there is perhaps a suggestion of ethnic/immigrant community in-breeding here).

One could go on. But suffice to say that BBC executives must be concerned by the show's dwindling audience and the number of complaints received by the BBC about the programme suggests that not everybody is finding it very bloody funny.

And while we're talking about TV stereotypes, I kind of wish that the writers of the Scottish sketch show Burnistoun would not bring so many of their sketches to a close with explosions of verbal violence or physical battery. I love the show, if only because it reminds me of my Caledonian homeland; and it's true that Scottish comedy has always embraced madness, mayhem, knockabout and the carnivalesque. But in 2012 the stereotype of the working-class Glaswegian psychopath seems a bit, well, played out. To paraphrase a character from Burnistoun's predecessor Chewing the Fat, they've taken that too far.

Like masturbation and listening to Keane, watching television programmes presented by Dominic Littlewood should probably be done sparingly, if at all. These days, though, it is harder than ever to avoid the gnome-like Essexian: turn on daytime or primetime television on any weekday and up pops the cheeky bald geezer, perkily - yet obscurely menacingly - advising on car purchases, home auctions or consumer affairs. Indeed, over recent years, Littlewood has become a 'type', in the Lukascian sense, a concretisation of the Little Englander prejudices of every market-town Mussolini.

Anyway, last week's episode of the BBC's Fake Britain (series 2, episode 14) was one of the most mean-spirited and mendacious 'factual' programmes I have ever watched. The episode focused on so-called 'fake' immigrants, following UK Border Agency raids on restaurants employing 'illegal' workers. Throughout the programme, Littlewood mocked the immigrants with sarcastic comments and told us nothing about their life stories or sufferings.

Such anti-immigrant fare is not unusual on British television (Sky's UK Border Force, for instance, follows a very similar format). But what was particularly hard to stomach about the Fake Britain 'exposé' was its implicit comparison of immigrants to criminal scammers in the programme's central section, which focused on a Suffolk pensioner who had fallen for a well-organised fake inheritance scam. So: people who have travelled thousands of miles in the back of lorries, risking life and limb in order to have a measure of security in their lives, are equivalent to professional fraudsters? The cynicism of this comparison would have made Goebbels blush.

BBC television is still capable of great things; but it's not all Jonathan Meades and Sherlock - and those who argue that 'public service' broadcasting is superior to its commercial competitors should be encouraged to take a brief dip in this televisual effluent. Anybody disposed to doing so should heed the warning issued by Littlewood at the start of each episode: 'welcome to a world where nothing is quite as it seems'. For what presents itself as an innocuously diverting consumer affairs programme is in fact a scurrilous exercise in immigrant-bashing.