The BBC and Israel: an update
(Image created in Shutterstock)
The BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie, has been touring TV and radio studios, expressing his concern about the financial future of the BBC if the licence fee is not substantially increased. He has also defended the corporation’s record on impartiality when giving evidence to Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee. In particular, when questioned about the BBC’s coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Davie said that overall its reporting had been balanced and fair. “I am proud of our output under huge pressure,” he said, “and I think that [if] we look at the data as well… overall we’re doing a good job in terms of delivering impartial coverage amidst enormous pressure.”
The two issues, the licence fee and accusations of bias against BBC News, are, of course, related. For the first time in my life I have wondered why I should pay a licence fee, when its news coverage is more biased than at any time I can ever remember. In particular, I am struck by its bias against Israel, even in its flagship programmes.
It’s no good throwing accusations around without evidence. So this is my 8th article about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias. Each time I have tried to give examples of bias from recent programmes.
First, I appreciate that these are difficult times for a national broadcaster. As Davie has said, there have been cuts in the BBC’s budget; the BBC has to contend with what he calls “the storms of social media”, so that no sooner has a presenter or reporter made a slip than it is all over X; finally, and most important of all, the “polarisation in society is profound”, perhaps nowhere more than in the debate over Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.
These are real issues, they are unprecedented and Davie is right to spell them out. But they are no excuse for repeated instances of bias, which have alienated Jewish viewers and listeners and anyone who believes that important international issues should be explored with care and impartiality.
On 21 March the BBC News website published an article by Yolande Knell and Rushdi Abualouf, a Palestinian reporter currently based in Istanbul. The article, “New Gaza hospital raid shows Hamas is not a spent force”, argued that Israel’s raid on al-Shifa hospital was “a strong reminder that Hamas is far from a spent force”.
What is curious is the images chosen to illustrate the article. They do not show Hamas gunmen but, as so often in BBC News coverage of Gaza, they show desperate women and children, with no adult males at all. Victims, not perpetrators. The BBC might have shown pictures of the enormous amounts of cash and weapons found by the Israel Defence Force in the hospital, but chose not to.
Compare this report with one in The Jerusalem Post on the same day, which included this: “The IDF announced on Thursday that in its four-day operation in Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, it has now killed around 140 terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as arrested around 650 additional terrorists.” Not only are these terrorists, nearly a thousand of them, not even mentioned in the BBC News article: they are, of course, not shown in the pictures illustrating, or rather not illustrating, the article. The BBC article set out to show that “Hamas is not a spent force”, but according to The Jerusalem Post Hamas had lost nearly 1000 men, dead or captured, and according to other sources had lost huge amounts of weaponry and currency, which confirms that Hamas are guilty of the war crime of using hospitals as a shield (also not mentioned in the BBC report).
According to Open Source Intel, the IDF seized $3 million in cash from the hospital. On the same day, Arsen Ostrovsky tweeted that “#AlShifa had more Hamas terrorists swarming than most hospitals have doctors and nursing staff!”
In a different BBC report on the al-Shifa hospital, Joel Gunter and David Gritten wrote: “Hamas and health officials have repeatedly denied the accusation that Hamas fighters have operated inside or underneath al-Shifa and other hospitals […] The Hamas-run health ministry said in a statement that Israeli forces had ‘invaded’ al-Shifa Hospital for the fourth time since the start of the war and was using ‘fabricated narratives’ to justify its actions.
It accused the troops of ‘directly shooting the specialised surgeries building with bullets and targeting it with missiles’, and said a number of people had been killed and wounded.
‘The presence of Israeli vehicles in the courtyards of the complex in a real tragedy and an attack on health institutions against all international laws and norms,’ it added.
Hamas also denounced what it called a ‘new crime’ by Israeli forces.”
In her analysis of this report, Hadar Sela wrote for Camera UK.org: “None of the BBC’s reporting informs audiences that three days before the operation, the head of the Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) for Gaza had spoken with the Director of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health about the Hamas terrorist organisation’s activities within Shifa hospital.
The BBC’s reports promote unverified accounts from medical staff and ‘eyewitnesses’. While the main article by Gunter and Gritten makes no mention of the weapons and cash found in a room in the hospital used by terrorists, on the live page, readers saw one unnecessarily qualified account of those finds (which appeared in filmed footage made public on the same day), together with a disclaimer of the kind apparently not necessary even when quoting anonymous ‘eyewitnesses’.”
She goes on,
“Readers are not informed that before joining Al Jazeera post October 7th, Sinwar fan Ismail al-Ghoul [an interviewee in the BBC report] worked for Hamas media outlets.
Readers of the report by Gunter and Gritten find one paragraph which purports to inform them on the topic of the status of hospitals during wartime:
‘The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said he was ‘terribly worried about the situation’ at al-Shifa hospital, which he warned was ‘endangering health workers, patients and civilians’.
‘The hospital has only recently restored minimal health services. Any hostilities or militarization of the facility jeopardize health services, access for ambulances, and delivery of life-saving supplies,’ he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. ‘Hospitals must be protected. Ceasefire!’
Hospitals have protected status during times of war under international humanitarian law – but they can lose that protection in limited circumstances if they are being used to commit an ‘act harmful to the enemy’.”
Gunter and Gritten do not bother to explain what an ‘act harmful to the enemy’ actually means.”
On 22 March, Orla Guerin, a highly experienced BBC reporter, interviewed a West Bank settler about his wish to ethnically cleanse Gaza and build a home there. This is incendiary stuff. Guerin also said, “For some in the Israeli cabinet, the Palestinian territory – now drenched in blood – is ripe for resettlement. That includes Israel’s hard-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir – a settler himself.”
I am no fan of the settlers or of Ben Gvir, but look at the tone in these two sentences. When she says, “some in the Israeli cabinet”, how many does she mean? We’re not told. Is “drenched in blood” appropriate language for a news report, or is it perhaps a little emotive? What about the larger context? How representative of Israeli public opinion is the settler, or indeed the notorious Ben Gvir? Shouldn’t we be told?
On 27 March, The Daily Mail (no fan of the BBC) ran a story, “MPs demand bias inquiry as Mail reveals Gaza doctors at centre of harrowing BBC report are long-time supporters of Hamas…” This was a story run by the BBC on 12 March “in which hospital medics described being tortured and abused by Israeli forces.” “International condemnation was swift,” the Mail went on, “with Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron among those demanding an explanation from Israel.” “But a Mail on Sunday investigation has uncovered some disturbing truths about six of the eight medics interviewed – evidence that should, at the very least, have given BBC news executives pause for thought as they rolled out their scoop with dramatic fanfare.
Astonishingly, all six have repeatedly spouted anti-Semitic slurs on social media, with posts ranging from the provocative and inflammatory to the downright obscene.” The Mail gave the details of incendiary remarks by six of the interviewees. The BBC dropped the story like a hot potato, but the damage to Israel was done.
Finally, on 26 March, Jeremy Bowen wrote a piece for the BBC News website: “Biden has decided strong words with Israel are not enough.” “For weeks,” Bowen writes, “President Joe Biden and his senior officials have been losing patience with the way that Israel is fighting the war in Gaza.”
Again, what is interesting is what Bowen does not say. He could have said, Biden is doing badly in the polls and is panicking about how to win back core parts of his vote who are anti-Israel (the young, ethnic minorities, Muslims) in time for November’s election.
Bowen goes on to say, “more than 30,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed with weapons mostly provided by the US.” There are two problems with this. First, Bowen provides no evidence that “more than 30,000 Palestinians” have in fact been killed and certainly doesn’t provide any evidence to show that they are “mostly civilians”. Through March, a growing number of reports have subjected the statistics provided by Hamas to devastating scrutiny. But, again, the damage has already been done. These figures from Hamas have been credulously recycled by numerous NGOs, UN organisations, politicians like President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lord Cameron, and even experienced journalists and reporters like Jeremy Bowen. They have become the conventional wisdom in the propaganda war between Israel and Hamas.
What Jeremy Bowen is doing is simply recycling the conventional wisdom within BBC News, Sky News and Channel 4 News, rather than question it. Similarly, we know that Netanyahu is difficult and unpopular in the White House, but Bowen doesn’t even consider that Biden might have other motives, such as electoral self-interest.
These are just a few examples of biased coverage by BBC News, some of it by very experienced reporters like Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen, taken from one recent week. The same would be true of coverage by Channel 4 News and Sky News. Viewers of once-respectable TV news programmes are fed a constant drip-feed of misinformation. You have to constantly be vigilant, reading between the lines, wondering why these photos have been chosen rather than others, how representative one settler is, whether Jeremy Bowen is right or wrong about what motivates Boden’s recent turn against Israel. In each case, the coverage is indeed biased and not impartial and this might have repercussions for Tim Davie’s attempt to increase the licence fee. The “Defund the BBC” movement is growing and for the very first time I can begin to see why.
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