The rot runs deep at the BBC, but some training would be a start

Take, for instance, “Mr Fafo”. This is the Hamas actor who has appeared in numerous social media clips in the guise of a doctor, a patient, a corpse (later reanimated), a terrorist, a loving father and a shocked onlooker, among other roles. You’d have thought that the BBC Verify unit may prevent such a fraud from making his way into one of the broadcaster’s news reports. You’d be wrong.

Did Mr Fafo appear in the Hamas documentary? On this, the jury is out. At one point, a man looking very much like him appears in a dubious scene of a fire allegedly occasioned by an Israeli strike. Either way, the chap has definitely been spotted in other BBC news packages.

It’s a mystery how the Hamas documentary came to be aired. Apparently, before going out it was screened to a number of executives, all of which gave it a clean bill of health. How? I don’t know if you managed to watch it before the BBC withdrew it in disgrace, but some of the scenes are laughable.

One in particular showed the narrator, Abdullah, telling viewers that “trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task,” as he passed stalls selling bottled water, soft drinks, bread, vegetables, clothing and pet food (he even points out the pet food). In the very next scene, we were introduced to ten-year old Ranat, a social media influencer who had started an “online cooking show” to take her mind off the “constant pressure of this war”. We watched as she picked out pumpkins in the market and visited a well-stocked grocery shop. “I love cooking and creating food content,” she smiled.

Later in the documentary, we saw kebab shops, sweet shops and large bottles of chilled water in the hands of bodybuilders in the gym. The BBC executives, whose job it was to check that the content passed muster, would have seen all this. Their response? Fill your boots.

Which brings us back to the antisemitism training. Over the weekend, Lord Mann, the government’s antisemitism tsar, revealed that he had contacted Director-General Tim Davie to offer such education to his staff on at least three occasions. His offers had been turned down, prompting him to condemn the “arrogance at the top” of the organisation.

“Heads should roll,” over the Hamas propaganda scandal, Lord Mann said. “And the heads that roll shouldn’t just be the little heads. You know that’s always the danger with organisations the size of the BBC. Oh hey, there’s something wrong, let’s get rid of a few of the people at the bottom. No, let’s get rid of some at the top, would be my view.

“Someone at the top should carry the can. It’s not acceptable and I’ve been in there several times, I’ve offered them training, they’ve never accepted it. I think there’s often an arrogance there.”

He then called on the government to establish a broader public inquiry if a senior figure did not take responsibility for failures over the documentary (whether it featured Mr Fafo or not). Because, you guessed it, Auntie is marking her own homework.

It’s the response that is so revealing, isn’t it? All media organisations make mistakes from time to time. The proper response is to hold your hands up, apologise, remove the offending material and improve the system so that it can’t happen again.

Time and again, the BBC, however, which is uniquely funded by licence and has a duty to be impartial, takes an entirely different tack. First they ignore the problem, then they deny the problem, then they blame it on someone else, then they play it down, then they try their best to move on. It is only when the public uproar is truly deafening that they finally take it semi-seriously and do something about it.

We saw it with the Chanukah bus scandal a few years back, which ended with the indignity of the Board of Deputies being forced to fund a professional audio forensic specialist to produce evidence that the BBC was wrong. We saw it with the Hamas documentary and on many other occasions.

All of this tells us one thing. The BBC – not all of it, but enough – has a problem with Israel and quite possibly a problem with Jews. Antisemitism training would probably be too little, too late. But its refusal to accept Lord Mann’s offer only shows how deep the rot runs at our national broadcaster.