Mishal Husain leaves the BBC.  Who's next?

We should have known something was going on when Nick Robinson announced that his colleague on the Today programme, Mishal Husain, was to receive the 2024 Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism. I haven’t heard her on the Today programme since and then on 27 November the BBC announced that she was leaving in the New Year to join Bloomberg.

I first became a fan of Mishal Husain when she was the morning anchor of the London Olympics in 2012. She was terrific. Calm, clear, unflappable. Presenting all those hours of live TV on one on the biggest sporting occasions in British history was no small feat and she handled it superbly. 

Soon after she joined the Today programme and was one of the regular presenters for 11 years. Another huge challenge: 3 hours of live early morning radio, several times a week.  

But then came the war between Israel and Hamas and controversy quickly followed. None of the fulsome tributes you will read or hear from BBC executives or her colleagues will mention any of this controversy, which is itself a sign of the times at BBC News. 

The problems started with her interview with Grant Shapps, at the time Defence Secretary in the Sunak government. Shapps eloquently criticised the BBC for refusing to call Hamas “a terrorist organisation”. He claimed the BBC did not seem very interested in condemning Hamas’s attacks on  Israel  and asked why it failed to call the group “terrorist”, despite Hamas being a banned terror group in the UK. Asked by Husain in a heated interview if the UK supported a reported Israeli order to evacuate the north of Gaza, Shapps said: “It is good that they provided information in advance… Hamas certainly didn’t do that before they went and slaughtered people.”

I had never heard Husain so self-righteous. She was backed by John Simpson, once the doyen of BBC foreign reporters, who also defended the BBC’s policy of refusing to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. This was only days after Hamas terrorists had brutally raped and murdered more than a thousand Israeli and foreign civilians. If you want any details about the scale of the atrocities, I recommend Alon Penzel’s searing account, Testimonies without Boundaries. Israel: October 7 th 2023 . It will leave you in no doubt whatsoever that this was a terrorist attack. 

The interview with Grant Shapps was just the beginning of 13 months of anti-Israel bias on BBC News programmes. Interviews with Israeli ministers or spokesmen (and women) have been notably more aggressive and hostile than interviews with spokesmen (and women) from NGOs, UN agencies, Palestinian and foreign doctors and Palestinian representatives. Palestinian mortality statistics have been deeply misleading, usually taken from NGOs, the so-called “Gaza health agency” (better known as Hamas), inflating the number of women and children killed, underestimating the number of Palestinians killed by Hamas missiles misfiring, exaggerating the number who have starved to death and failing to reconcile these figures with images elsewhere of food markets in Gaza and the lack of images available of starving children and adults comparable with images from the recent war in Syria or the current conflicts in Sudan and Eritrea.

It is curious that among the presenters on the Today programme, Mishal Husain seemed to get into more controversial spats than her colleagues. David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman, accused her of bias and said Husain warranted the “pro-Palestinian reporter of the year award”. BBC News and the National Union of Journalists both defended her robustly. The BBC has generally failed to criticise its reporters or presenters for bias during the Israel conflict. As for the NUJ, it has repeatedly criticised Israel and on 27 November this year, it called on its members – including those who work for the BBC – to wear keffiyehs and the colours of the Palestinian flag. Of course, this demand has not been mentioned on BBC news programmes, but you can see references to it on X.  

A few days after her run-in with Grant Shapps, Husain got into another spat, this time with his Cabinet colleague, Andrew Mitchell. According to The Independent,  “ She interrupted Foreign Office Minister  Andrew Mitchell  after he  supported Israel , saying it had suffered the biggest loss of Jewish lives since WW2 . He hit back again after Ms Husain questioned why Israel had cut off water supplies to Gaza. Mr Mitchell said Hamas was to blame for making weapons out of water pipes.”

In December 2023 Tom Gross wrote, “ Sneering at Starmer for arguing he didn’t want a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to stay in long-term control of the Gaza Strip, she told him that large parts of Gaza have been flattened, as can be seen from photos. ” 

Earlier this autumn the BBC admitted that Husain had failed to sufficiently challenge an Iranian guest who accused Israel of being an “ethno-supremacist” state that is committing a “holocaust” in Gaza.

@Camera-UK.org, the best monitor of media bias about Israel, has regularly criticized Husain. They attacked this interview on October 1 2024: 

“ On the morning of October 1 st , listeners to BBC radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme heard  Mishal Husain  conduct a softball interview with  regular BBC contributor  and Iranian regime propagandist Mohammad Marandi.”   

They were criticising her even before the current conflict. They attacked her for an interview on April 11 2023:

Husain: “Israeli forces have been searching for those responsible for the attack on a British-Israeli family in the occupied West Bank. The mother of the two girls killed died of her injuries yesterday. A fifteen-year-old Palestinian also died yesterday, killed while Israeli forces were in a Palestinian refugee camp near Jericho.”

Providing no further details, Husain then brought in the BBC’s international and Middle East editor  Jeremy Bowen  while promoting redundant linkage between the security situation and the ongoing  protests by members of the Israeli public  opposed to government proposals.

Husain: “Jeremy, these deaths, this violence, comes after a period when there have been significant political protests in Israel. How is all of that affected by these developments?”

Rather than clarifying that there is no connection between the two topics – as might be expected from the person whose  job description includes  “providing analysis that might make a complex story more comprehensive or comprehensible for the audience” – Bowen actually encouraged that redundant linkage.

Bowen: “[…] Sometimes people look at what goes on in Israel and what goes on in the West Bank – in the occupied territories – and think that it’s two different things but it’s not. It’s all related really in so many ways and it’s quite complicated but if you start from the…first of all one important thing to know is of course there’s this very long, unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and a very long occupation of Palestinians that, because it’s a military occupation and it denies them all kinds of rights, starting with independence which is something that they’ve wanted for a very long time.”

Bowen of course refrained from mentioning that over the past three-quarters of a century, Palestinians have  repeatedly rejected  initiatives that would have given them independence. He continued, promoting second hand claims supposedly made by “some analysts” whom he did not name, thereby denying listeners the ability to judge the relevance of their claims.

Bowen: “Now inside Israel itself there’ve been these protests at this very hard Right government led by Mr Netanyahu and analysts are now saying…some analysts are saying that there’s a blowback from Israel’s repressive policies in the occupied territories which over the years has empowered the hard Right inside Israel and that has led to this atomisation and this radicalisation on the Right. But in terms of, you know, the personal tragedies that happen, the attack on that family…ah…another young Palestinian teenager killed, I mean that doesn’t make it any better or more understandable for them. I mean the thing is that these awful conflicts and wars going on for generations are made up of hundreds of thousands…well actually thousands of acts of individual terrible cruelty.”

Husain went on to again promote false linkage between the security situation and the protests:

Husain: “But the…but those Israelis who were protesting against the Netanyahu government – and I know that there was that compromise when he put some of his plans on hold but then also there was to be a new national guard formed – do these protests go on in the face of…of the latest that has happened in East Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank?”

Bowen: “Yes, I think the likelihood is that they will be. One thing will be next Saturday when we’ll see just how many protests go on. Netanyahu’s a canny political operator and he was really threatened by the opposition to his plans to change the way…various judicial reforms which caused a  great  deal of controversy and these big demonstrations. And the way that he’s actually put those plans on hold for a while, having made this agreement with the hard Right parties that sustain him in office, that make up his coalition, you know, you could say that he’s…it’s a gambit by him. He might be hoping to try and split the opposition against him, to take the momentum out of it. So it will be interesting to see whether they’re able to sustain the levels of commitment to these demonstrations that they have…that they’ve had now for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.”

Husain: “And it does seem as if the period since the beginning of the year, since this government came into power, has been especially tense but – I don’t mean the protests, I mean as far as Israeli-Palestinian violence is concerned – but then again, there was also an uptick  last  year.”

Husain’s mention of “last year” apparently refers to the Hamas incited violent rioting that took place on Temple Mount during Ramadan in April 2022. However, both she and Bowen carefully avoided the highly relevant topic of Hamas’ role in encouraging and facilitating the rise in terrorism that actually  began in 2021 .”

Bowen, along with other critics of Israel like Jon Snow and Christiane Amanpour, was also awarded the Charles Wheeler Award. I met Wheeler several times and he struck me as professional and impartial, as he was throughout his distinguished career. 

Husain is not the first presenter or reporter to leave BBC News in recent times. Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, Lewis Goodall, Mark Urban, Laura Trevelyan, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr and Nick Bryant have all left, among others. Now Mishal Husain. More will certainly follow. Will the last one to leave BBC News please turn out the lights?  

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