Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, 16 Jan 2026
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In terms of weekly audience reach and reputation, the BBC is the world’s leading international broadcasting organization. As well as serving the UK, it transmits entertainment, information, news and current events via TV, radio and the internet to audiences measured in hundreds of millions around the world. Yet it is perpetually struggling with the obligation, built into its very DNA, to operate to the highest standards of objectivity, impartiality and lack of bias.
This problem, which has haunted it
for more than half its existence, recently reached crisis point. It has resulted in the resignations of the
BBC’s director general, its head of news, and a member of the Board, and the threat
by US President Donald Trump to sue the corporation for up to $5 billion. In fact he has filed a lawsuit in a federal court for $10 billion.
Launched in November 1922, the BBC was defined from its start by the high moral tone set by its first Director General, John Reith. Reith summarized the nascent BBC's purpose as to “inform, educate and entertain”. The order of priority was deliberate. To his way of thinking, entertainment was far from broadcasting’s main purpose. Informing and educating the public was of far greater importance.
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From its earliest days Reith
successfully established and maintained the independence of the BBC from
political interference, and by 1939, when the UK went to war with Germany, the
BBC’s reputation for accuracy, objectivity and impartiality was firmly established.
Throughout World War II the BBC
broadcast in a multiplicity of languages to Nazi-occupied Europe. People all over the continent literally risked
their lives to hear the truth from London. Listening to foreign broadcasts could result
in the death penalty.
The BBC’s shortwave transmissions also
covered the world. At its peak the
corporation was broadcasting across the globe in some 80 languages. The wartime reputation that the BBC acquired
of honesty, objectivity, and lack of bias is the bedrock on which today’s BBC
stands. Regrettably, in the more recent
past the structure has wobbled badly on its foundations.
There is no doubt that, at some
point during the 1960s-1970s, something began to go very wrong within the BBC. Not a deliberate policy, perhaps, but reflecting
a general shift to the left among the opinion-forming élite, the BBC’s
editorial standards came to be dominated by what became known as “political
correctness” – an unspoken consensus of ultra left-leaning views.
In 2010 Mark Thompson, one-time
Director General of the BBC, admitted: "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago
there was, in much of current affairs…a massive bias to the left. The organization
did struggle then with impartiality."
This shift to the left permeated
the BBC’s output across many types of programming including domestic political
comment and even comedy. The philosophy
that finally dominated left-wing thinking was termed “intersectionality”. It asserted that victimhood was interrelated,
and that all victims in whatever context – ethnic, sexual, economic, political
– were to be supported. Opposition to
one form of discrimination, the doctrine ran, demanded opposition to all. Palestinians were perceived to be victims of Israeli
oppression, so it became de rigueur for left-wing activists to carry the
Palestinian flag and chant pro-Palestinian slogans in mass demonstrations on a
whole variety of topics, many having no connection with the Middle East.
Reflecting this, the BBC’s editorial stance began to shift significantly into the politically correct pro-Palestinian mode. Eventually it became obvious that the corporation was no longer adhering to its much vaunted high standards of impartiality.
That protest followed numerous
examples of anti-Israel bias broadcast by the BBC. Three years before, a British lawyer, Trevor
Asserson, had become increasingly incensed with what appeared to be the BBC’s
obvious departure from its declared principles.
Asserting that “the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by an
apparent widespread antipathy toward Israel,” Asserson commissioned a series of
in-depth studies. For a seven-week
period in 2001, his team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output
on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a
variety of other sources. Their conclusion:
the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations to be unbiased and impartial.
Trevor Asserson's report, matched
by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the
corporation to commission an investigation and report from one of its senior
journalists, Malcolm Balen.
Balen examined hundreds of hours
of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute
detail. This exhaustive study resulted
in a 20,000-word report. At the end of
2004 it was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the
BBC, but thereafter it was treated as Top Secret and locked away. Although no details of its findings were
released to the media, Keith Dovkants, a journalist working for the London Evening
Standard, later claimed that elements of the report had been leaked, “including
Balen's conclusion that the BBC's Middle East coverage had been biased against
Israel”.
After repeated legal applications
for its release under the UK Freedom of Information Act – actions defended by
the corporation at a cost of over £330,000 – in 2012 the House of Lords, then the
UK’s supreme court, ruled that as “a document held for journalistic purposes”,
the report was explicitly excluded from the requirements of the Act. So the Balen report remains under lock and
key, but calls to the BBC to release it continue to this day.
Then came Hamas’s bloodlust
assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the Israel-Gaza war. It was
feared that the mindset within the BBC and its left-orientated, London-centric,
news staff was too unshakably established to result in even-handed, unbiased
reporting of the conflict.
And so it proved. The BBC’s consistent anti-Israel bias in its news reports and comment became too outrageously partisan to be allowed to continue without protest.
Their report, published on
September 6, 2024, presented
a detailed analysis of the BBC’s news coverage during a
four-month period beginning October 7, 2023.
The BBC’s editorial guidelines
demand impartiality, accuracy and adherence to editorial values and the
public interest. The Asserson report identified no less than 1,553 breaches.
“The findings,” said the report, “reveal
a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own
editorial guidelines.”
It also found that the BBC
repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism, while presenting Israel as aggressive and
militaristic. It also revealed that some
journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict had
previously expressed sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.
A week into the war came the
explosion in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. In reporting it, the BBC’s correspondent,
speaking live from Gaza, said "it is hard to see what else this could be,
really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or
several airstrikes." The BBC’s Arabic
service repeated this assessment, and anti-Israel protests immediate broke out in
both the Arab world and the West.
It did not take long for the truth
to emerge, but by then the damage had been done. The explosion was the result of a misfired
rocket by Islamic Jihad. In its mealy-mouthed
apology days later, the BBC still failed to make clear that the evidence showed
conclusively that the explosion had not been an Israeli attack.
The hasty and unverified assertion
that Israel must be responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital was
followed by a further example a few weeks later. On that occasion the BBC reported that IDF
troops had entered Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, "targeting medical teams and
Arab speakers." This was either a
willful or an unprofessional mis-reading of an IDF release, which stated that
the troops had entered the hospital "accompanied by Arabic speakers and
medical teams" to assist patients. The BBC did broadcast an adequate apology,
but the report demonstrated the ingrained tendency for the BBC to rush to
judgement against Israel.
As Hamas’s vast network of tunnels
criss-crossing the Gaza Strip was slowly revealed, the BBC appeared to be doing
its best to undermine the IDF’s discovery of a Hamas military command post
directly underneath a hospital.
In his report Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, seemed to suggest that Kalashnikov assault rifles found beneath the hospital might have nothing to do with Hamas, but be part of its own security.
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Examples of anti-Israel bias or inaccuracy by Bowen in reporting the Gaza conflict took up no less than 16 pages of the new Asserson Report. It also singled out the BBC’s Arabic service as one of the most biased of all global media outlets, identifying eleven news and comment programmes that featured reporters who, it showed, had previously made public statements in support of Hamas – something viewers were never informed of.
The BBC promised to respond to
Asserson. After a few weeks it issued a
short dismissive statement, questioning the methodology used in compiling and
analyzing the data.
The current furore surrounding the BBC arises from the publication by the UK’s Daily Telegraph of a 19-page whistle-blowing memo written by a respected journalist named Michael Prescott, who served as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee for three years.
His report accuses the BBC of
persistent and serious breaches of impartiality, alleging a chronic failure by
senior management to uphold editorial standards or to correct errors.
The most high-profile case cited
involves the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama, which
aired just ahead of the US 2024 presidential election. Prescott reported that the programme doctored
Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech, making it appear Trump had incited the
Capitol Hill riot.
Prescott also pointed to issues
with BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, demonstrating that it used
known Hamas supporters in its programmes, minimized Israeli suffering, used
unverified casualty figures, and ran a fundamentally biased narrative consistently
portraying Israel as the aggressor.
In September the parliamentary Culture, Media and Sports Committee summoned the BBC chairman, Samir Shah and the BBC director general, Tim Davie, to answer allegations of bias, editorial failures, and recent scandals, including how the BBC had come to transmit a TV programme about the Gaza war that turned out to have been narrated by the son of a Hamas official.
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Shortly afterwards, the
broadcasting regulator Ofcom found that the film was "materially
misleading". It ordered the BBC to inform
its audience of its finding and remove it from the BBC’s streaming service.
To get a handle on the current turmoil, the Committee subjected both Shah and Prescott to intense questioning on November 24. Although the corporation has doughty champions among political figures and opinion formers who appreciate much of its output, there is a widespread and growing conviction that its news and political comment departments are, as Prescott seemed to tell the Committee, systemically warped. Speculation is already rife about who might be appointed as the next BBC director general.
Most hope that a new broom will indeed sweep clean.
Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, 16 January 2026:https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-883445
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