After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.
A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media – were dismissed one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.
Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.
The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, announced it too would investigate the programme.
All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.
The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.
First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.
Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.
True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.
Dangerous consequences
The BBC’s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.
Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded is a genocide.
There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover.
The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.
Signs of the BBC’s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers.
It has since been shown by Channel 4.
The BBC argued that – even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks – airing it risked contributing to a “perception of partiality”.
What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not “partiality”. It was the perception of it by vested interests – Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media – who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.
In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel – and the Starmer government – dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Caving in to pressure
Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza’s children, How to Survive a Warzone.
The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.
Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.
Instead, he stated that it was a breach of “full transparency” not to have divulged the child-narrator’s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father’s governmental work.
Paradoxically, the BBC’s coverage of Johnston’s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.
On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film’s narrator was “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas.”
He is nothing of the sort. He is the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by Hamas.
There is zero evidence that Ayman Alyazouri was ever a member of the militant wing of Hamas. He doesn’t even appear to have been a member of its political wing.
In fact, since 2018 Israel had set up a system to vet most officials in Gaza like Alyazouri to ensure they were not linked to Hamas before they were able to receive salaries funded by Qatar.
Johnston himself concedes as much, noting that the programme makers failed to inform the BBC of 13-year-old Abdullah’s background because their checks showed Alyazouri was a civilian technocrat in the government, not involved in its military or political arms.
The team’s only failing was an astounding ignorance of how the Israel lobby operates and how ready the BBC is to cave in to its pressure tactics.
In reality, Johnston’s finding against the BBC was over little more than an editorial technicality, one intentionally blown up into a major scandal.
Johnston himself gave the game away when he noted in his executive summary the need for “full transparency” when the BBC makes programmes “in such a contested setting”.
In other words, special, much stricter editorial rules apply when the corporation intends to make programmes likely to upset Israel.
From now on, that will mean that, in practice, such programmes are not made at all.
Glaring double standard
The double standard is glaring. The BBC aired a documentary last year, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, offering eyewitness testimony from Israeli survivors of 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israelis were killed during Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza.
Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festivalgoers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?
And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?
If it was not necessary to include such background details for Israeli eyewitnesses, why is it more important to do so for a 13-year-old Palestinian?
And even more to the point, if the BBC needs to give details of 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri’s background before he can be allowed to read a script written by the programme makers, why is the BBC not also required to give important background about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appears in reports: such as that he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Exactly how trustworthy a narrator of events in the devastated enclave does the BBC consider Netanyahu to be that it does not think this context needs including?
Both-sidesing genocide
The gain from this manufactured row for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – were set out in stark detail last week by the makers of the second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector.
In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings.
The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law.
She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film.
In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality.
“The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.”
Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel.
Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards.
BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”.
Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what fanatically pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza.
The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza.
This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”
If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer.
Skewed coverage
A damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring last month analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.
It found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices”.
These included the BBC running over 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians; interviewing more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians; asking 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas but asking no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools; and shutting down more than 100 interviewers who tried to refer to events in Gaza as a genocide.
Only 0.5% of BBC articles provided any context for what was happening before 7 October 2023: that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and besieging the enclave for 17 years.
Similarly, the BBC has barely reported the endless stream of genocidal statements from Israeli political and military leaders – a crucial ingredient in legally determining whether military actions constitute genocide.
Nor has it mentioned other vital context: such as Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive on 7 October 2023, licensing it to kill its own citizens to prevent them being taken captive; or its military’s long-established Dahiya doctrine, in which the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure – and with it, the likelihood of slaughtering civilians – is viewed as an effective way to deter resistance to its aggressions.
In the specified time period, the BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered”.
None of these were editorial slip-ups. They were part of a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour – a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and one that has created a permissive environment for genocide.
Journalists in revolt
Journalists at the BBC are known to be in revolt. More than 100 signed a letter – anonymously for fear of reprisals – condemning the decision to censor the documentary Doctors under Attack. They said it reflected a mix of “fear” and “anti-Palestinian racism” at the corporation.
The BBC told MEE: “Robust discussions amongst our editorial teams about our journalism are an essential part of the editorial process. We have ongoing discussions about coverage and listen to feedback from staff, and we think these conversations are best had internally.”
The journalists, it seems, would prefer that these discussions are had out in the open. They wrote: “As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”
And they added: “All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.”
They could have added, even more pertinently, that in the process the BBC has been doing PR for the British establishment too.
A former BBC press officer, Ben Murray, last week gave broader context to the meaning of the corporation’s famed editorial “impartiality”. His role, he wrote, had been a rearguard one to placate the Times, Telegraph, Sun, and most of all, the Daily Mail.
Those establishment outlets are owned by corporations and billionaires heavily invested in the very oil, “defence” and tech industries Israel is central to lubricating.
BBC executives, Murray noted, “were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries.”
None of this went against the grain. As Murray pointed out, most senior BBC staff enjoyed private educations, have Oxbridge degrees, and have been “fast-tracked up the corporate ladder”. They see their job as being “to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints”.
Editorial smokescreen
If this weren’t enough, senior BBC staff also have to look over their shoulders to the British government, which sets the corporation’s funding through the TV licence fee.
The government, no less than the BBC, needs to keep its main constituencies happy.
No, not voters. Ministers, keen for favourable coverage, similarly dare not antagonise Israel-aligned media moguls. And equally they cannot afford to alienate powerful US administrations that pledge an undying, unshakeable bond to Israel as it projects western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Which is precisely why Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, was only too keen to jump on the Daily Mail bandwagon in calling for heads to roll at the BBC over the supposed “failings” in its Gaza coverage.
“It makes me angry on behalf of the BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country,” she said, apparently oblivious to the fact that many BBC journalists’ fury is not over the confected scandals generated by the Israel lobby and billionaire-owned media.
They are appalled at the corporation’s refusal to hold Israel or Nandy’s own government accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
In such circumstances, the BBC’s professed commitment to “impartiality” serves as nothing more than a smokescreen.
In reality, the corporation acts as an echo chamber, amplifying and legitimising the interests of media tycoons, the British government and the Washington consensus, however much they flout the foundational principles of international law, human rights and basic decency.
Anybody who stands outside that circle of influence – such as the Palestinians and their supporters, anti-genocide activists, human rights advocates, and increasingly the UN and its legal organs, such as the International Criminal Court – is assumed by the BBC to be suspect.
Such voices are likely to be marginalised, silenced or vilified.
The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.
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