The BBC ‘faces a major crisis over their documentary on Gaza, but this is not an isolated incident,’ former BBC TV director Danny Cohen told NR.
The BBC removed its new documentary on the war in Gaza from its online streaming service last week, after an investigative journalist found the film unwittingly profiled the son of a Hamas member. But that’s far from the first time the outlet has been caught violating journalistic standards in its reporting on the Israel–Hamas war.
The latest controversy arose after investigative journalist David Collier found the 13-year-old subject of the BBC’s new film, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, was in fact the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
The BBC defended the concept behind the project, which was to feature “important stories we think should be told – those of the experiences of children in Gaza,” but said it would remove the film from its iPlayer while it conducts an investigation.
“There have been continuing questions raised about the program and in light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company,” a spokesperson for the outlet said.
Collier connected the dots through Facebook searches, which the BBC no doubt had the ability – but apparently not the desire – to do.
On Tuesday, the Telegraph reported that the BBC had also repeatedly mistranslated references to “the Jews” and omitted praise of “jihad” in the documentary.
Former BBC television director Danny Cohen told National Review the BBC “faces a major crisis over their documentary on Gaza, but this is not an isolated incident.”
“The journalistic failings of the documentary are symptomatic of wider issues of anti-Israel bias at the BBC. The problem they have is systemic. The BBC’s senior leadership has tried to ignore the problem, and this has led to the debacle over the recent Gaza documentary,” he said.
Cohen released a report in September that found instances of extreme bias among BBC reporters; it notes the outlet took no action against five BBC reporters who were placed under investigation for making offensive social media posts after the October 7 massacre. The BBC did, however, fire one employee who describes Jews online as “Nazi apartheid parasites” and called the Holocaust a hoax.
The BBC issued a statement in response to the report, saying, “We do not recognise the overall characterisation of our journalism in this report” and insisting that the network has “focused on reporting the conflict impartially, bringing audiences breaking news insight and analysis, and reflecting all perspectives.”
BBC Arabic invited on a guest who had previously referred to the massacre as a “heroic military miracle” and another who described Hamas atrocities against innocent Israelis as “necessary.”
The outlet’s Arabic outfit was forced to correct articles on average every 48 hours during the height of the conflict, including copy that referred to Hamas as the “resistance,” the report says.
The report assesses that while “honest mistakes can happen in any field” the BBC “is not merely careless in its reporting of the war in Gaza. The ‘mistakes’ are almost always in the anti-Israel direction. It would not be possible to compile a similar record of anti-Palestinian errors.”
The report compiles a host of offenses, beginning on the day of the October 7 massacre, when the network led its coverage with a headline about “Israeli revenge attacks” and broadcast interviews with “Hamas apologists,” who made comments that the BBC later admitted were “offensive.”
The BBC, like many other media outlets, reported without question Hamas’s claims that an “Israeli strike” on Al-Ahli hospital killed hundreds – and later failed to remove articles stating that the hospital blast may have been caused by the Israeli military, even after the network admitted it got its reporting wrong.
“The BBC incorrectly reported that Israeli soldiers had been “targeting” medical teams and Arab speakers as they hunted Hamas terrorists in a hospital, when instead they actually had brought medical teams and Arab speakers with them to help the patients during the military operation,” the report explains.
It also shared a Hamas propaganda line that Gaza had become a “polio epidemic zone” and claimed 69 “journalists” had been killed in the conflict, though evidence from their social media posts suggested 55 of those killed either supported Hamas or worked for the terror group.
“We recognize the challenges of reporting accurately in war zones, but the evidence presented in this report goes far beyond what might reasonably be attributed to errors made in the fog of war,” Cohen wrote. “These are not academic errors. They have real world consequences. Inaccurate media reporting on the conflict contributes to the delegitimization of Israel in the public sphere, which in turn fuels anti-Jewish hatred, and has made British Jews and Jews around the world less safe and secure in their communities. As a global media leader, the BBC carries extra responsibility in these regards.”
Media watchdogs were unsurprised by the BBC’s latest error in judgment, as the public broadcasting agency has cultivated a reputation for less-than-accurate reporting on the Israel–Hamas conflict.
Simon Plosker, editorial director of Honest Reporting, tells NR it has been “crystal clear that manipulating the media has been a part of [Hamas’s] strategy” since the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks: “from the Gazan photojournalists who infiltrated Israel and became part of the narrative as they recorded terrorist atrocities to those who have followed the Hamas script covering the appalling staged spectacles of the hostage releases.”
“There are virtually no Gazan media workers who are untainted by a connection to Hamas or the ability to operate independently of Hamas oversight,” he said. “Why, then, did the BBC simply choose to ignore this glaring fact when it commissioned this piece of Hamas propaganda?”
Adam Levick, co-editor of the UK branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, told NR the BBC’s “appalling failure to do due diligence on the documentary, which resulted in the film’s promotion of Hamas propaganda, is just one example of how the corporation has failed the license-fee paying British public in their coverage of Israel and the Palestinians — a pattern of ideologically-driven bias that’s been especially egregious since the October 7 massacre.”
As the watchdogs suggest, the documentary is merely another strike against the BBC, which breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in just the first four months of the conflict, according to research spearheaded by British lawyer Trevor Asserson. Researchers identified violations of BBC policies centered on impartiality, accuracy, editorial values, and public interest.
The report uncovered several instances in which BBC reporters had shown extreme hostility to Israel and were then allowed to report on the conflict nonetheless. It identified eleven cases in which the BBC Arabic’s coverage of the war featured reporters who previously made public statements in support of terrorism and Hamas.
BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek reportedly called for “death to Israel” and came to the defense of a journalist who tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.” Meanwhile, Lebanese reporter Marie-Jose Al Azzi described Israel as a “terrorist apartheid state.”
Asserson was unsurprised by the documentary’s breach of ethics, telling National Review the BBC “consistently fails to comply with its own guidelines.”
“For example it is obliged to state whenever it reports from a place of reporting restrictions; and also to state when the people being broadcast have an interest in the outcome – both obligations are generally ignored by the BBC. It’s flagrant breaches in the case of this documentary are thus no surprise,” he said.
“Only by compliance with the Guidelines can the BBC hope to achieve impartiality. It fails to come close to meeting its obligations,” he added.
The BBC has fallen short in its reporting on numerous other occasions, including earlier this month, when the BBC’s Jon Donnison claimed “propaganda efforts” by both Hamas and Israel were “pretty nauseating” when Hamas returned hostages to Israel.
BBC anchor Nicky Schiller, meanwhile, referred to three Israeli hostages being returned home as “Israeli prisoners” of Hamas during an on-air segment. The network later issued an on-air correction before making a similar mistake again the next day in an on-air chyron, when it referred to the 183 Palestinian prisoners released as “hostages.”
The outlet’s approach to reporting can be summed up with its former policy of not describing Hamas as a terrorist group, despite the group’s military wing being designated as such by the U.K. government.
“BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen is a “truthful not neutral” chap,” said Tim Graham, executive editor of Media Research Center’s Newsbusters. “In response to Trevor Asserson’s report, he claimed, ‘Searching for some kind of spurious balance is entirely wrong, the truth is the objective.’ Bowen also said Hamas is a ‘good’ source of information on Gaza casualty figures during a closed-doors ‘masterclass’ on reporting war impartially — their numbers are ‘pretty accurate’ — and objected to the word ‘terrorist’ to describe Hamas.”