Deborah Turness, Hamas and the BBC

This has been a catastrophic few weeks for BBC News. It started with the decision not to use the words “terrorist” or “terrorist organisation” to describe Hamas, just after they had slaughtered more than 1400 Israeli civilians and abducted more than 200 Israeli and other hostages, many of them women, children and the elderly.

I am not aware of a single BBC presenter or reporter who has publicly criticised this decision, even when it received a torrent of criticism from many leading British politicians and journalists. Worse still, a few became very defensive about it on air and online, including John Simpson, the world affairs editor of BBC News, Mishal Husain, normally one of the best presenters of Radio 4’s Today programme (in an astonishingly ill-judged interview with the Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, on 13 October) and Kirsty Wark, a presenter on Newsnight for thirty years, in her interview with Rachel Riley. All three were responding to criticisms of the BBC’s decision about the BBC’s refusal to call Hamas “terrorists”.

It wasn’t just that these senior presenters were wrong to defend the BBC’s indefensible decision. It was the arrogant and complacent tone that was so striking. This is perhaps best captured in Simpson’s response to the outrage which greeted his first attempt to defend the BBC line: “with so much unreason flying about, it’s good to know that plenty of people are thinking and listening and staying rational”. Perhaps when the BBC is under attack it’s not the best policy to call your critics unreasonable, unlike the “rational” people who agree with you.

Then came the disastrous evening of the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza city. The Context (BBC News Channel) immediately attributed the attack to Israel, both in the words of a BBC reporter, Jon Donnison (“it is hard to see what else this could be … other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes”) and in on-screen straplines. BBC reporters and presenters also accepted  estimates of the numbers killed from the Gaza Health Ministry, without mentioning then that it is controlled by Hamas. At the beginning of The Ten O’Clock News Clive Myrie announced solemnly, “Hundreds are killed.” He did not say, “According to Hamas hundreds are killed but these figures have yet to be verified.”

Most recently, there has been the UN debacle, when the Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres said the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians “did not happen in a vacuum”. Then, when Israelis responded angrily and called for his resignation, Guterres claimed he had been misrepresented. As Jacob Rees-Mogg pointed out on GB News on Thursday, diplomats should speak clearly and take care not to be misunderstood, especially on such a divisive subject.

The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, however, sided with Guterres. On The Six O’Clock News Bowen said, “he [Guterres] made remarks at the UN which I’d say that many analysts of the Middle East would agree with.” How many is “many”? Who are these “analysts” who would “agree”?  When he came to Israel’s angry response, Bowen also failed to mention years of UN hostility to Israel, going back at least fifty years to the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (1975) which “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.

This is a problem which Kofi Annan addressed in 2004 (“The fight against anti-Semitism must be our fight, and Jews everywhere must feel that the United Nations is their home, too”) and which UN Watch condemned in 2018 in a report where they said UN agencies, officials and experts tasked with combating racism were failing to act against hatred, incitement and violence against Jews.

Since BBC reporters frequently treat the UN agency UNRWA as an authoritative source, it is worth bearing this history in mind. When it comes to Israel, the UN and especially the UNRWA under Kenneth Roth, were not and are not neutral players.

Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News, clearly felt she had to respond to the waves of criticism the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Hamas were receiving. On 25 October (updated on 26 October) she issued a defence of “How the BBC is covering Israel-Gaza”.

Turness clearly felt there was nothing to apologise for. Far from it. Her statement began, “I could not be prouder of the BBC’s journalists and our journalism.” She praised the BBC’s “truly powerful coverage”. But she then changed tack and said that it was important to listen to critics of the BBC (without naming or quoting any) and to respond. “We , of course, sometimes get it wrong,” she writes, but doesn’t give a single example. She goes on, “it’s important to acknowledge where we could have done better, and to learn from any mistakes”. She gives only two examples: “We posted a correction after we wrongly speculated about the likely cause of the Al-Ahli hospital explosion, as we also did when we misleadingly described pro-Palestinian demonstrations as ‘demonstrations…during which people voiced their backing for Hamas’.” This seems like a degree of humility but it isn’t. Two examples is not enough, especially when she quickly goes back on the main error: “The BBC did not claim that the Israelis were responsible for the attack.” Actually, they did.

But let’s see how she explains the mistake about the Al-Ahli hospital explosion. “We, along with many other reputable media organisations,” she writes,  “reported initial claims by Palestinian officials and eye-witnesses at the hospital that this was an Israeli air strike, with hundreds feared dead.” This is problematic. First, she has just said, “The BBC did not claim that the Israelis were responsible for the attack.” Now, a few sentences later, she states the opposite: “We … reported initial claims … that this was an Israeli air-strike.” Which is it? And when she writes, “We… reported initial claims by Palestinian officials and eye-witnesses”, surely she is aware that these are not merely “Palestinian officials” but effectively Hamas officials. There is no independent civil society in Gaza. Everything is controlled by Hamas. After nearly three weeks, BBC reports now acknowledge that it is the “Hamas-controlled Health Ministry”. So we’re now down to just one error that she is prepared to acknowledge.

In the final section of her statement, Turness finally gets round to the question of the BBC’s use of language. “The BBC,” she writes, “uses the word ‘terrorist’ with attribution. When we mention Hamas, we make it clear, where possible, that they are a proscribed terrorist organisation by the UK government and others.” Yes, eventually. The whole controversy started because the BBC wouldn’t call Hamas a terrorist organisation when that is clearly what they are. They’re not “militants”, in the way someone might be called a militant feminist or trade unionist. They are terrorists, just like Hezbollah, Isis and Islamic Jihad.

This statement was deeply disappointing. She doesn’t mention the tone of some of the BBC’s best-known presenters and reporters. She doesn’t mention the omissions and errors in various reports or various examples of bias.

When a Palestinian reporter working for BBC News says “there is total chaos”, how are the viewers supposed to reconcile this with live footage of Palestinian men standing around casually outside a hospital in the very town he is reporting from? Where is the analysis of fake footage, some of which was actually used by the BBC on the night of the Al-Ahli Hospital (see my recent piece for TheArticle on “The Gaza hospital attack and the BBC” (18 October)? If this footage was not shot by BBC camera crews, and I assume it wasn’t because of the danger of filming in Gaza, who shot it? When a newsreader says, “Fergal Keane has been working with teams on the ground,” what does this mean? Who exactly are they? Why has BBC News consistently treated the UN and its organisations as neutral players in this conflict when they are not and haven’t been in recent years? Why has the BBC consistently accepted numbers of deaths and casualties from what they know to be a Hamas source, the Palestinian Health Ministry and why did it take the BBC so long to make it clear to viewers and listeners that this is a Hamas source? Why has the BBC relied so extensively on interviews with spokesmen and women from international aid agencies, and not asked them what has happened to the huge sums of aid which has poured into Gaza for years? Where has it ended up? How did the leaders of Hamas become so extraordinarily wealthy (not once mentioned by BBC reporters to my knowledge)? Hamas planned its attacks on Israeli civilians for at least a year according to several sources. Why have BBC reporters not asked why Hamas did not stockpile medical, fuel and food supplies for civilians to help them when the inevitable Israeli response came? Instead, the BBC has consistently condemned Israel for not allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. This is why Israelis interviewed on the BBC become so angry and speak of “a lack of moral clarity”, in the words of former Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, in an interview with Katya Adler. (It wasn’t a good few days for Adler, who couldn’t cope with a brilliant Jewish barrister based in London who blew away Adler’s flimsy conceptions of international law and war crimes.)

These are just a few of the points that Deborah Turness never addressed in her statement. It wasn’t just one error. There have been numerous ways in which BBC News has misled viewers and listeners in its choice of interviewees, its decisions about who should have more time in studio discussions, its sometimes aggressive and self-righteous interviewing of Israeli spokesmen and women, its misleading uses of data and reliance on aid organizations without asking crucial questions.

There should be an independent inquiry into the coverage of this war by BBC News. This flimsy statement by its CEO is no substitute.

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