Israel’s PR problem is much bigger than biased BBC coverage - The Jewish Chronicle

Last week the president of the Board of Deputies met the BBC’s director general. The timing could hardly have been more exquisite. On the very day of the meeting, the BBC apologised for a “serious mistake” that “clearly falls well below our standards” after the Israeli Embassy released a text message from a producer asking the embassy to provide an anti-Netanyahu speaker for the BBC’s Newshour programme: “We want someone who is going to be critical of Netanyahu and the ground offense [sic] (concern about remaining hostages, stretching the IDF capacity, destruction of Gaza or any other reason) . Do you think you could help with this?”

The BBC was quite wrong to have apologised in this way. Or rather – let me rephrase this – the BBC was quite wrong to have stated in its apology that the behaviour of the producer fell below its standards. It didn’t. It precisely met its standards – which is why the president of the Board, Phil Rosenberg, was meeting the BBC’s DG, Tim Davie. It wasn’t for a general chinwag. It was because, as Mr Rosenberg put it after the meeting, “the British Jewish community has long been sounding the alarm regarding BBC misreporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; not just for years, but for decades.”

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing the Board should be doing. And Mr Rosenberg was entirely right to say that the BBC should “grip the issue with a seriousness and urgency we have not yet seen” and to make a series of specific demands, such as a “thematic review into the Corporation’s reporting on Israel-Gaza since October 7 2023”, introducing a “one-strike” policy for BBC staff found to have “egregiously breached its rules of impartiality and or antisemitism”, stopping its editorial practice of translating the Arabic word Yahud, meaning Jew, as “Israeli” when used by Palestinians, all measures which the BBC should indeed implement immediately. So I mean no criticism of Mr Rosenberg when I say that the meeting was a waste of time and completely misses the real point - for two interconnected reasons.

Most obviously, it would need far more than a series of new processes and editorial checks to change the culture that is the real cause of the BBC’s bias against Israel – and, given some of its reporting, of Jews. The problem is the mindset of those involved.

We are all familiar with the many egregious examples from the BBC’s reporting of the ongoing Gaza war. But there are recent examples of its attitude to Jews. The BBC’s coverage of an attack in 2021 by a gang of Muslim youths on a bus of Jewish children in Oxford Street in London was, for instance, so hideously flawed at every stage that I find it impossible to believe it was not based on a particular view of Jews.

The BBC reported that one of the Jewish children had said “dirty Muslims”, when they were in fact calling for help in Hebrew. Mistakes happen, yes. But at every stage of its handling of complaints around its reporting the BBC acted as if it regarded those who were angry with its reporting – Jews, that is – with contempt.

Malik Faisal Akram the man who took a rabbi and congregants hostage in a synagogue in Texas[Missing Credit]

The BBC’s attitude is sometime revealed by what it does not report, such as in its coverage of the Beth Israel synagogue siege in Texas in 2022. Not once on the 10pm news report was antisemitism mentioned, despite the hostages – a rabbi and three other Jews – being seized in a shul. The reporter began by asking, “What made Malik Faisal Akram leave Blackburn, the place he called home, to travel to Texas, arm himself with a gun, and hold people hostage inside a synagogue?” Gosh, whatever could the reason have been? At no point did the reporter suggest that antisemitism might have been involved. New editorial processes are all very well, but they would not change the mindset of reporters, producers and editors who send a journalist to cover a siege in a synagogue in which a rabbi and three Jews are taken hostage but who do not at any point think the antisemitism of the gunman needs to be mentioned, let alone explained.

Which leads to the second point: this isn’t just a BBC issue. There is an understandable and entirely correct focus on the BBC as we are all forced by law to pay for it, but the real issue is far wider. The vast majority of the journalistic pool from which the BBC, Sky, ITV, and other news media draw their teams are left-liberal in outlook – and the default left-liberal attitude to Israel now is that it is a rogue state which kills Palestinians with impunity, with mainstream Israelis complicit. The BBC could introduce industry-leading, gold standard editorial procedures but they would have no impact on this nor, obviously, on other news organisations.

It is this wider point – that Israel has, to put it crudely, lost the PR war – that is the real issue, an issue that stretches far beyond the BBC.

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