I have spent decades defending the BBC. I always believed it to be the best broadcaster in the world, with the best journalists and the most rigorous standards.
Its public funding means it has a special duty to uphold impartiality and accuracy. But there are 200 territorial conflicts in the world and none of the others are covered in remotely the same way as Israel and Palestine.
About 180,000 people have died in Myanmar where 18.6 million need humanitarian aid, but we don’t hear about that very much on the BBC. Even the war in Ukraine no longer attracts the same scrutiny as Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Yemen is suffering the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe, but that hardly gets a look-in either.
Concerns about the BBC’s approach go beyond the war in Gaza. A particular low point was the appalling report which blamed schoolchildren celebrating Chanukah in Oxford Street for a racist attack in which they were the victims. Last July, after a wave of terror attacks in Israel, a breathless Jeremy Bowen dashed dramatically to Israel overnight – not to report on the civilian victims but to cover the IDF’s attempt to arrest the terrorists responsible.
When a violent, racist mob stormed an airport in Russia’s Dagestan and surrounded plane landing from Israel chanting “We are here for the Jews … We came to kill them”, the BBC described them simply as “anti-Israel”.
The BBC has refused to refer to the rape, kidnapping and slaughter of civilians on October 7 as terrorism, but a presenter insisted that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children” in an interview with Naftali Bennett. It claimed Israel was “targeting medical teams and Arab speakers” at Gaza’s largest hospital and reported unverified allegations by Hamas that the Israeli army was carrying out “summary executions” of Palestinians in Gaza six times. We had to wait more than a fortnight before they finally admitted it had not been true.
The BBC spent months saying the ICJ had ruled that it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide, despite lawyers and media analysts such as CAMERA saying this was not true. In late April, the BBC eventually did an interview with the court’s former president who explained that the court had not made this ruling, but it took more than another fortnight for an article to appear on the BBC’s website explaining this and all sorts of other stories making the original claim still remain on its website.
The reporting of the explosions at the Al-Ahli hospital in October – for which the BBC apologised – was even worse. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said: “It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.” Bowen piled in, claiming the hospital “was flattened”. He said: “The missile hit the hospital not long after dark ... The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli hospital.”
Reports of the incident had a very serious impact. Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East was disrupted, with the cancellation of a summit in Jordan with Arab leaders and the President of the Palestinian Authority. Protests took place in more than a dozen countries. Synagogues were attacked in Tunisia and Berlin.
Independent investigations showed the cause was actually a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad at Israel that had landed in the hospital’s car park. The hospital had not been “flattened” or “destroyed”. Bowen admitted his reports had been wrong but said, “I don’t regret a thing and I don’t feel bad at all.”
Gary Lineker is the face of BBC football but retweeted a post calling for the country’s team to be banned from international competition. He said a video by Corbyn-supporting hard-left campaigner Owen Jones in which the academic Raz Segal accused Israel of “genocide” was “worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time”.
Last week he referred to the October 7 atrocities as “the Hamas thing” but described Israel’s campaign to deal with the terrorists and free the hostages as “the worst thing I’ve seen in my lifetime”.
The BBC guidelines are clear: “Everyone who works for the BBC,” they say, “should ensure their activity on social media platforms does not compromise the perception of or undermine the impartiality and reputation of the BBC.”
The failure to uphold the guidelines when it comes to Lineker makes the board and senior managers look weak and foolish.
We would all accept that a huge broadcaster will occasionally get things wrong, but the scale and frequency of mistakes now looks like an institutional problem.
I’m sure the BBC’s new chairman Samir Shah understands the scale of the problem, but will the board and senior managers stop him sorting it out?
Lord Austin is a former Labour MP and a life peer
