I heard the news today, oh boy… 

On Wednesday I listened to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. The good news was that it was hosted by two of my favourite presenters, Emma Barnett and Amol Rajan. The bad news was that the programme, as so often, was riddled with bias. About Israel, of course. But also about much more, from Southport to Kamala Harris.

First, BBC reporter Yolande Knell said of the Hamas leader and multi-billionaire, Ismail Haniyeh, who had just been assassinated in Tehran: “He was generally seen by analysts as moderate and pragmatic.” That word “generally” seems suitably vague and unhelpful. And who are these anonymous “analysts” who saw one of the leading figures in Hamas as “moderate and pragmatic”? Was he really? Or was he the most senior of the people in charge of the massacres on 7 October, who refused to release most of the Israeli hostages, including small children and elderly people? How “moderate and pragmatic” is that? Or this quote from Haniyeh about the necessary sacrifice of Palestinian civilians: “The blood of the women, children, and elderly…we are the ones who need this blood so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit…”

Jeremy Bowen also praised Ismail Haniyeh: he was apparently “involved in the ceasefire and hostage release talks.” How did this go? Any prolonged ceasefire yet? How many hostages are still held by Hamas? And what about his reported $4 billion dollars, presumably embezzled from Western aid to Gaza? What happens to that money now? Bowen also described Haniyeh as “essentially a guest of the Iranians” when he was killed. Another way of putting this is to say that he was “essentially” the political leader of a terrorist organisation responsible for the massacres on 7 October and the suffering of the hostages, not to mention the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed and still suffering because of Hamas’s human shield policy. No reference to any of this by the BBC’s World Affairs editor. 

Later there were interviews with Lord (Peter) Ricketts, formerly National Security Advisor and Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, and Tom Fletcher, former British Ambassador to Lebanon, about the killing of Fuad Shakr, a senior Hezbollah military leader responsible for the deadly attack on the Golan Heights last week that killed 12 people, mostly children. Neither mentioned how many Israeli civilians had been forced to flee their homes in northern Israel because of missile attacks by Hezbollah. According to Reuters 60,000 civilians have had to abandon their homes and 33 people have been killed, including 10 civilians, because of attacks by Hezbollah. According to The Times of Israel the evacuation figure is between 100,000 and 200,000. But the point is these major attacks on civilians by Hezbollah have been under-reported by the British news media and were not mentioned at all by these former diplomats .  They were concerned that the killing of a single senior figure from Hezbollah might escalate tensions in the region, not that thousands of missile attacks on Israel over many months might have escalated such tensions.

Amol Rajan, the presenter, did not raise these kinds of questions either. He was too busy speaking (twice) of “the unconscionable human situation in Gaza”, but not the unconscionable situation in northern Israel where tens of thousands of civilians have had to flee from their homes for many months. Wasn’t it important for the BBC to explain that this was the context for the targeting by Israel of the Hezbollah commander responsible for the attacks from Lebanon?

Then the Today programme went on to discuss Southport. One curious omission. On the Ten O’Clock News on BBC1 the night before, viewers could hear local people in Southport hurling abuse at the Prime Minister. Oddly, this did not feature in the three hours of the Today programme, even though it made a great deal of the distinction between decent local people in Southport and “thugs” who came from outside Southport to attack the police. The people who hurled abuse at Sir Keir Starmer didn’t seem to fit either category. Brendan Cox, the widower of the late MP Jo Cox, who was brutally murdered by a neo-Nazi extremist, was keen to criticise people like Nigel Farage, who was one of “some people who preferred to whip up these [racial] tensions” in Southport and elsewhere. 

Did Mr Cox also mean people like his sister-in-law Kim Leadbeater, now the Labour MP for Spen Valley? When she stood for Batley and Spen in the 2021 by-election, Ms Leadbetter sent out a leaflet about Kashmir, showing the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson shaking hands with his Indian counterpart Natenda Modi. She too was accused of “whipping up” tensions between Muslims and Hindus in her constituency. To my knowledge, the BBC’s reporter Martine Croxall was the only person to ask Kim Leadbeater about this at the time. Certainly, Emma Barnett and her producer didn’t seem aware of any incongruity here. 

Then there was a report on a speech by Kamala Harris. There were interviews with three ordinary American voters, but only one interview with an expert, what Yolande Knell would call an “analyst”. She turned out to be a Democrat strategist and a former Obama adviser. Not exactly a neutral analyst, nor indeed balanced by an interview with a Republican strategist. Yet the US polls show Trump and Harris running neck and neck. Isn’t it important to have balanced reporting, given that either candidate might win?

The following day, Thursday, Today led with the Huw Edwards story. Emma Barnett said they had tried to get an interview with the BBC’s Director-General about the Corporation’s handling of the Edwards story, but the D-G had turned down their request. Lord Vaizey, the former Conservative arts minister, pointed out how unfortunate the timing of this story was for the BBC, with the licence fee up for negotiation next year. Some might think there were more pressing issues which should dominate the licence fee negotiations next year, such as the problems with bias at BBC News, especially in their consistently hostile coverage of Israel since last October. Perhaps Emma Barnett and Amol Rajan could ask the editors of Today to defend their decision-making?    

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