Another week, another sign that our national broadcaster has unmoored itself from the realms of objectivity and drifted into an ideological fantasy.
The publication of the independent report today into the Gaza documentary debacle has constituted a moment of intense humiliation for the BBC, especially coming so shortly after another damning report into the Greg Wallace affair.
The 31-page document by Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews, found that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone contravened editorial guidelines for accuracy.
Inexplicably, it had not found a breach of impartiality, as it had seen no evidence “to support the suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way”.
This was bizarre. How about the fact that the producers consistently mistranslated “Yehud” as “Israeli”, sanitising the display of anti-Semitism in line with progressive, “anti-Zionist” mores?
One of the diminutive stars appeared with hair of different lengths and in different sets of clothing in apparently contiguous shots; he was later reportedly pictured embracing a Hamas terrorist, wearing a headband and clutching a gun. Was that not also, as it were, a smoking gun?
I watched the programme at the time and was taken aback by further scenes in which the child narrator – the scion of Hamas – claimed that “trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task” while his cart rolled past stalls openly selling bottled water, soft drinks, vegetables and pet food.
A few minutes later, we were introduced to 10-year-old Ranat, a cooking influencer with 1.4m followers on Instagram, picking out pumpkins in a bountiful market. Later on, we saw people munching on kebabs, buying pick-n-mix and drinking from huge bottles of iced water while working out in a gym.
This summed it up. When presented with footage of large quantities of food and drink, the BBC was so blinded by ideology that it happily accepted the claims that the characters were starving, and transmitted them to millions of viewers.
What’s that old journalistic adage? If one person says it’s raining and another says it isn’t, it’s not your job to quote them both. If that wasn’t evidence that Hamas had “influenced the content”, I don’t know what was. Either way, it showed standards of reporting that were nothing short of laughable. But look: the report found that the BBC had breached accuracy guidelines, and at least that’s something.
The worst thing about all this is how damaging it is to public trust. I have had numerous conversations with young people in which they confess to taking all their news from unqualified influencers on TikTok.
Obviously, this is a deleterious state of affairs. How on Earth can they trust such sources? The comeback is always the same: How on Earth can you trust the BBC? That is what they have done to us.
This is a disservice done not just by the broadcaster to itself, or even to the licence-fee payer. Given the corrosive effect of fake news, it is a disservice done to the very integrity of our culture.
What lies at the bottom of all this? Over the years, it seems the corporation has come to see its purpose as offering an interpretation of reality that will lead viewers to an enlightened worldview, rather than a transparent account of the facts.
Editors will often move the camera away from things that might lead the great unwashed to form illiberal conclusions. Or if such things are unavoidable, they will be given a sanitising spin.
Think of the al-Ahli hospital incident, in which damage from a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket was blamed on Israel. “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,” its correspondent Jon Donnison informed viewers.
This was the same reporter who had previously been forced to apologise after passing off a picture of an injured Syrian girl as a “heartbreaking” image of a Palestinian child hurt by the dastardly Israelis. What was he doing on the story?
Later, Jeremy Bowen, the international editor, admitted that his own coverage of the hospital strike had been “wrong” but insisted that he “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting. Consequences came there none. Given red flags like these, did the Gaza documentary scandal really come as a surprise?
Of course, the BBC has guardrails to protect its impartiality. But such checks and balances will never be adequate when the overwhelming cultural bias tilts in a particular direction. Like a drug addict trying to control his own impulses, there’s only so long a broadcaster can protect itself from itself.
You’ve got to feel for them. In the light of what seesm like an unspoken mission statement to educate the audience into its own worldview rather than transmitting the facts, you can see the BBC’s predicament.
The corporation seems simply desperate to produce a documentary about Gaza that is filled with residents opposed to Hamas who are suffering horribly at the hands of the Jewish state.
What the BBC keeps finding, however, is a society dominated by jihadi brainwashing, that militates its own children in the service of lies about Israel, and cares nothing for either life or truth. Indeed, that celebrates gruesome suffering in the most inhuman and macabre fashion. Hard, isn’t it? What’s a second-hand propagandist to do?
Another week, another sign that our national broadcaster has unmoored itself from the realms of objectivity and drifted into an ideological fantasy.
The publication of the independent report today into the Gaza documentary debacle has constituted a moment of intense humiliation for the BBC, especially coming so shortly after another damning report into the Greg Wallace affair.
The 31-page document by Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews, found that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone contravened editorial guidelines for accuracy.
Inexplicably, it had not found a breach of impartiality, as it had seen no evidence “to support the suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way”.
This was bizarre. How about the fact that the producers consistently mistranslated “Yehud” as “Israeli”, sanitising the display of anti-Semitism in line with progressive, “anti-Zionist” mores?
One of the diminutive stars appeared with hair of different lengths and in different sets of clothing in apparently contiguous shots; he was later reportedly pictured embracing a Hamas terrorist, wearing a headband and clutching a gun. Was that not also, as it were, a smoking gun?
I watched the programme at the time and was taken aback by further scenes in which the child narrator – the scion of Hamas – claimed that “trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task” while his cart rolled past stalls openly selling bottled water, soft drinks, vegetables and pet food.
A few minutes later, we were introduced to 10-year-old Ranat, a cooking influencer with 1.4m followers on Instagram, picking out pumpkins in a bountiful market. Later on, we saw people munching on kebabs, buying pick-n-mix and drinking from huge bottles of iced water while working out in a gym.
This summed it up. When presented with footage of large quantities of food and drink, the BBC was so blinded by ideology that it happily accepted the claims that the characters were starving, and transmitted them to millions of viewers.
What’s that old journalistic adage? If one person says it’s raining and another says it isn’t, it’s not your job to quote them both. If that wasn’t evidence that Hamas had “influenced the content”, I don’t know what was. Either way, it showed standards of reporting that were nothing short of laughable. But look: the report found that the BBC had breached accuracy guidelines, and at least that’s something.
The worst thing about all this is how damaging it is to public trust. I have had numerous conversations with young people in which they confess to taking all their news from unqualified influencers on TikTok.
Obviously, this is a deleterious state of affairs. How on Earth can they trust such sources? The comeback is always the same: How on Earth can you trust the BBC? That is what they have done to us.
This is a disservice done not just by the broadcaster to itself, or even to the licence-fee payer. Given the corrosive effect of fake news, it is a disservice done to the very integrity of our culture.
What lies at the bottom of all this? Over the years, it seems the corporation has come to see its purpose as offering an interpretation of reality that will lead viewers to an enlightened worldview, rather than a transparent account of the facts.
Editors will often move the camera away from things that might lead the great unwashed to form illiberal conclusions. Or if such things are unavoidable, they will be given a sanitising spin.
Think of the al-Ahli hospital incident, in which damage from a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket was blamed on Israel. “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,” its correspondent Jon Donnison informed viewers.
This was the same reporter who had previously been forced to apologise after passing off a picture of an injured Syrian girl as a “heartbreaking” image of a Palestinian child hurt by the dastardly Israelis. What was he doing on the story?
Later, Jeremy Bowen, the international editor, admitted that his own coverage of the hospital strike had been “wrong” but insisted that he “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting. Consequences came there none. Given red flags like these, did the Gaza documentary scandal really come as a surprise?
Of course, the BBC has guardrails to protect its impartiality. But such checks and balances will never be adequate when the overwhelming cultural bias tilts in a particular direction. Like a drug addict trying to control his own impulses, there’s only so long a broadcaster can protect itself from itself.
You’ve got to feel for them. In the light of what seesm like an unspoken mission statement to educate the audience into its own worldview rather than transmitting the facts, you can see the BBC’s predicament.
The corporation seems simply desperate to produce a documentary about Gaza that is filled with residents opposed to Hamas who are suffering horribly at the hands of the Jewish state.
What the BBC keeps finding, however, is a society dominated by jihadi brainwashing, that militates its own children in the service of lies about Israel, and cares nothing for either life or truth. Indeed, that celebrates gruesome suffering in the most inhuman and macabre fashion. Hard, isn’t it? What’s a second-hand propagandist to do?