Time the BBC sorted out its Middle East coverage
This is a crucial moment in the history of the Middle East. Israel and The United States have joined together to try and overthrow the regime in Iran. This regime, which calls itself revolutionary but in fact has practiced terror since its inception in 1979, has been responsible for the slaughter in the past few weeks of tens of thousands of its own citizens, which has oppressed Iranian women and gays and which has supported terrorist organisations throughout the region from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen.
There was a time when the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East was reliable and impartial. Since October 7th that has ceased to be the case. The problem the BBC has with impartiality did not start this year. On January 17, 2022 Alastair Stewart, himself a distinguished newsreader for many years, quoted a new poll. It asked nearly 8,000 people, “What do you think is the BBC’s key problem?” The answer by a mile, according to 67% of respondents, was “Impartiality”. Way behind came “The licence fee” (21.3%), “Staffing levels” (6.5%) and “It tries to do too much” (5.3%).
But the problem really took off with the massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7th. Within days John Simpson and Mishal Husain said they would not be calling Hamas “a terrorist organisation”. “Terrorism,” wrote Simpson on the BBC News website, “is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
Mishal Husain had a heated exchange with a government minister, Grant Shapps, over the same issue on the Today programme. She left the BBC two years later. Neither she nor the BBC explained whether this had anything to do with her refusal to call Hamas “a terrorist organisation”. According to Shapps, “The BBC seems to refuse to call them terrorists even though the British Parliament has legislated that they are terrorists.”
Oddly, part of the problem is to do with age, a curious mix of young producers and programme editors at BBC News and old reporters like John Simpson and Jeremy Bowen, who seem anti-Israel and accept the dubious mortality figures of the Palestinian Health Authority (a front for Hamas), The Lancet and fill their programmes and reports with the views of spokesmen and women for NGOs.
Within the BBC there is inordinate respect for veterans like Simpson (81), Bowen (66) and Lyse Doucet (67). None of them seem to know any of the relevant languages in the Middle East and are stretched very thin. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, pops up in Ukraine, the Middle East, even India and Pakistan. This is ridiculous. No one can have the relevant knowledge to seriously inform viewers and listeners about such different conflicts. The same is true of John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, and Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief Correspondent. At times, it’s not even clear how much time they spend in any of these war zones. BBC News presenters are often very vague about where Lyse Doucet or Jeremy Bowen are actually reporting from. Are they in Iran, Israel or at home in Britain? Shouldn’t we be told?
This leads to another problem. The world of international news is changing fast. It turns increasingly to informed specialists from universities and think tanks around the world who actually know something about the history of these countries and conflicts. By comparison some of these veteran reporters are dinosaurs from a very different news culture. Compare Bowen’s analysis of the recent conflict between India and Pakistan with that of Shashank Joshi, Defence Editor of The Economist. Before joining The Economist in 2018, Joshi served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme. He has published books on Iran’s nuclear programme and India’s armed forces, written for a wide range of newspapers and journals, and appeared regularly on radio and television. He holds degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, where he served as a Kennedy Scholar from Britain to the United States.
But most important, these academics and specialists are not just more informed, they are also unbiased. Supporters of the BBC speak of “mistakes”, but the many examples of falsification are not random errors. There are too many of them and they take too many forms. I am not talking about extraordinary cases like the BBC TV documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, about a Palestinian child who turned how to be the son of a leading figure from Hamas. But look at the number of times pro-Israel speakers are interrupted, in a way that UN representatives and NGOs never are. Studio discussions are set up so that pro-Israel speakers are outnumbered and not allowed the same amount of time as pro-Hamas speakers. Too often we are told about suffering Palestinians, not about Hamas. Words like “Genocide” and “Famine” are thrown around without proper statistical analysis or legal definitions. Compare the discussion of statistics on TV and radio news with social media, where you get people who understand mortality statistics.
And why did Gaza receive disproportionately more coverage than other conflicts? For months, the mass murder of Christians in Nigeria and Sudan was marginalised and Gaza took precedence even though according to Open Doors, “More than 16.2 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, including high numbers from Nigeria, have been driven from their homes by violence and conflict. Millions now live in displacement camps.” Palestinians, it seems, were the right kinds of victims. African Christians were not. Why is that? Have you ever heard a BBC News executive or reporter explain this policy?
Or have you heard senor figures from the BBC, whether reporters or executives quote dissenting voices? In 2024, I wrote a piece about the Asserson Report into bias in the BBC’s coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas (“1553 examples of bias”, The Article, 9 September 2024). As I wrote, “the report led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, a leading British litigation lawyer, whose clients include major banks including HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and CSFB; multi-national corporations including some of the world’s largest telecoms companies; and sovereign states including the UK government and Ministry of Defence. The research was compiled by a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists who used AI analyse nine million words of BBC output. Camera UK was a contributor to the report. It is one of the most thorough critics of media bias towards Israel.
The research finds that Israel was associated with genocide fourteen times (my emphasis) more than Hamas in the BBC’s coverage of the conflict. In BBC coverage Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas (127 examples versus thirty) and with breaching international law six times more (167 versus 27) According to the report, the BBC has downplayed Hamas terrorism and has notoriously failed to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Perhaps worst of all, it claims that some journalists used by the BBC have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and have even celebrated acts of terror committed by Hamas. They identified 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, including impartiality, accuracy and public interest. Well-known reporters like Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet come in for serious criticism. The BBC’s Arabic channel’s coverage of the war is one of the worst offenders and eleven cases are mentioned where its coverage has featured reporters who have previously made public statements in defence of terrorist and specifically Hamas without making this history clear to the BBC’s audience.
The report concludes, ‘The findings reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth.’ The BBC said it would ‘carefully consider’ the report.” Eighteen months later, I have yet to see a proper response from anyone at BBC News to this damning report.
It is time for a shake up in international news coverage at the BBC. Viewers and listeners deserve more specialist reporters not generalists. We deserve more accuracy and impartiality and less bias and proper accountability from BBC executives. Why is the coverage of Israel guilty of systemic bias when the coverage of Ukraine is not? Why is the coverage of Iran so ill-informed?
To find proper coverage of these issues you need to turn to individual commentators, such as the journalist Jake Wallis Simons, the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff, the legal director of the advocacy group, UK Lawyers for Israel or organisations like Camera UK.
In a recent article about Jeremy Bowen for Camera UK, Hadar Sela quotes a piece by Bowen: “Israel and the United States have calculated that the Islamic regime in Iran is vulnerable – dealing with a severe economic crisis, the fallout from the brutal crackdown on protesters at the start of the year and with defences still badly damaged by last summer’s war. Their conclusion seems to have been that this was an opportunity that should not be squandered. It is also another blow to the tottering system of international law.” “Exactly what part of ‘international law’ Bowen thinks has received ‘another blow’ is not clarified,” Sela writes. “He fails to acknowledge that Israel is involved in ongoing armed conflict with Iran – and has been for years – or that Iran openly seeks the annihilation of the State of Israel, as is repeatedly stated by its leaders and officials.” Elsewhere, Sela writes, “Without making any mention of either Hamas’ October 7th 2023 invasion of Israel, massacres and hostage taking or Hizballah’s unprovoked attacks on Israel that commenced the next day, Bowen tells BBC audiences that: ‘It is now clear that the US and Israel wanted to kill the supreme leader. Israel believes in the power of assassination as a strategy. In the last two years it killed the leaders of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and many of their lieutenants.’”
Had Bowen really wished to augment BBC audience understanding of the imminent threat posed to Israel by Iran, he would of course have mentioned the Iranian regime’s financing and arming of proxies that have attacked Israel – including Hizballah, Hamas and the Houthis – as well as its recently accelerated ballistic missiles programme and the attacks on Israel in 2024.
This is by no means the first time that Jeremy Bowen has tried to persuade BBC audiences that Israeli actions are the main factor behind the escalation of conflicts in the Middle East. However, as has been evident for many years, Bowen’s analyses often do anything but make a story more comprehensible to the corporation’s funding public. This is due to his preference for advancing politically motivated and misleading talking points, such as the ones in this article concerning “international law” and “the legal justification of self-defence”.
Of course, these kinds of criticisms of Bowen will never be aired on the BBC. But why are these issues never debated on the BBC?
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