Australia/Israel Review

“The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world.” 

BBC Charter

Chopping and cutting a video of President Trump was the straw that broke this camel’s back. 

As former Director of BBC Television Danny Cohen put it, “If this kind of misleading editing had originated in a Russian bot farm, the BBC would probably have described it as an attempt at election interference.”

The Director of the BBC and the head of news fell on their swords. The damage to Auntie (as the BBC is affectionately known in the UK) has seen an increasing number of the public, who pay for the public broadcaster through TV licensing, call for this funding to cease. 

Amongst them are a majority of British Jews, who have felt the full brunt of the kind of selective chopping and editing of news that forced the BBC into a fawning apology to the American President (a threatened US$1 billion lawsuit will do that). They, however, do not expect anything similar. 

The BBC’s coverage of Israel was never great to begin with, with accusations of a deep bias against the Jewish state exposed time and time again by groups like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), and Campaign Against Antisemitism. Auntie was able to weather these occasional storms – like the periodic skirmishes in Gaza or the West Bank, they were short-lived and people moved on to the next news cycle.

October 7 changed everything where the BBC was concerned. The two-year war meant that its institutional bias was exposed to daylight much longer and was much harder to deny. 

After the worst pogrom against Jews since the Second World War, the Nova music festival and Kibbutz massacres, gang rapes and the kidnapping of 250 people into Gaza, Auntie just could not bring itself to call it terrorism, or label Hamas terrorists. In fact, it contorted itself into shapes befitting a Twister champion to avoid using any such language. 

BBC journalists defended the corporation’s stance by pointing to its founding charter and claiming that terrorism is a “loaded word which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally.” A strange defence which begs the question, does the BBC not disapprove of Hamas’ actions? A strange defence also compounded by hypocrisy. The BBC had used the term “terror” attacks to describe 9/11 in the US, the 2005 London bombings and the 2015 Bataclan Theatre attack in Paris, to name but three counter-examples.

This dogmatic refusal set the tone for everything that followed. 

This column could probably fill the entirety of the AIR citing examples of this inherent bias. Thankfully, a forensic analysis of 2,500 BBC News headlines on the conflict since October 7 by CAMERA saves me the trouble. It reveals a newsroom that has lost complete sight of any commitment to impartiality in its portrayal of the conflict.

The CAMERA figures are stark. BBC headlines were three times more likely to be critical of Israel than the terrorists of Hamas. Claims of “genocide”, “famine” and “starvation” appeared 45 times, while references to Hamas “war crimes” appeared exactly once.

Just a single headline covered a series of filmed public executions by Hamas of their opponents. By contrast, 33 separate headlines in just two months promoted claims – unsupported by video or photographic evidence – that Israel had killed civilians at US-funded aid sites.

Then there was the Al-Ahli Hospital blast on Oct. 17, 2023. “Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli airstrike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” screamed the alert, which failed to spell out that “Palestinian officials” in fact meant Hamas. The BBC tweet was swiftly and widely shared by, among others, England’s leading clergyman at the time, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

BBC News reporters speculated, “It is hard to see what else this could be… given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.” 

It was, as we all know, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short and hit the hospital carpark. But the damage was done. Cities throughout the Middle East and Europe exploded in anger, with attacks on synagogues in Berlin and Tunisia, and then-US President Joe Biden’s meeting with Arab leaders in Jordan cancelled.

I didn’t even mention the BBC commissioning and airing a documentary, “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” which claimed to follow the lives of four young people affected by the conflict in Gaza. It was forced to remove the documentary from its BBC iPlayer soon after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator was the son of Hamas’ Deputy Minister of Agriculture.

Recently, I found myself reading an interview with David Byrne, the writer, visual artist and former lead singer of the band Talking Heads. He was lamenting the state of American media and how its political bias is just so obvious depending on the channel watched or paper read. 

I take a different view. I actually much prefer such obvious bias. In America, you can watch MSNBC or Fox News and know exactly what you are getting. Neither seeks to hide behind “impartiality”. I cannot help but respect the honesty here. It allows me, as a consumer, to make an informed choice.

What is much more sinister is what the BBC is doing. In openly denying any lapse in impartiality, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, it is being utterly dishonest.

The BBC’s refusal to do so has consequences. It is simply impossible to ignore the link between what is on its news feeds and the climate on the streets. This is especially true in the UK, where the BBC dons the cloak of impartiality and the fig leaf of its charter to such devastating effect. 

Jews everywhere are continuing to pay the price for this disgusting charade. So too, sadly, is the British public, where too many continue to labour under the misapprehension that the BBC is a reliable arbiter of truth when it is anything but.