British Tax Dollars Back BBC Bias Against Israel

Broadcaster’s charter is coming due for renewal

BBC Broadcasting House in central London. Credit: Richard Cooke.

Does the BBC have a problem with Jews? That is the question many are asking about Britain’s esteemed state broadcaster. And that feeling has become increasingly prevalent in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel.

The BBC is funded by a license fee, or tax, of £174.50 ($232) levied on households with a television. Non-payment of the fee is a criminal, rather than a merely civil, matter. The broadcaster prides itself on its self-proclaimed impartiality and authoritativeness. It sees itself as the global gold standard for fair reporting.

Its charter, which sets out the BBC’s funding structure and also its broad editorial remit, is renewed every ten years. The negotiations for the next charter, starting in 2027, are well underway.

The current funding model is clearly now well past its sell-by date, in our streaming age. Regardless of this, the current Labour government is likely to continue with it or something very like it. Putting the BBC on a properly commercial footing will be put off for another decade. But even Labour might realize that something needs to be done to maintain the BBC’s perception of impartiality if the national broadcaster is to regain the confidence of all sections of the community.

On domestic matters, BBC news broadcasting justifiably infuriates the right, but the service does uphold its standards to a certain extent. During elections, much as it may stick in the craw of many who work there, it is fastidious in its adherence to exact allocations of time between competing candidates and tailoring its news broadcasts so that the main parties get equal billing and prominence, even when all the news is being created that day by one campaign rather than another. Upstart parties like Nigel Farage’s Reform are allocated time based on their polling and past electoral performance, so due to its recent upsurge will now be represented on many more of the BBC programs than its staff might like.

Outside of elections, the BBC will feature one campaign group after another demanding more taxpayer money for this or that cause without challenge. But it will usually warn viewers or listeners that those it allows on air demanding a reduction in the size of the state or cuts in government spending are from “right wing” organizations. The experts it turns to usually represent establishment, status quo thinking. But to its own metropolitan, center-left mindset, the BBC certainly sees itself as impartial.

The BBC would contend that its coverage of Israel’s operations on Gaza has also been objective. So let us look at some of the evidence.

Danny Cohen — a former director of BBC Television and before that head of its flagship TV channel — has forensically mapped out the corporation’s failings, most notably in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas massacres, it took an age for the BBC to describe them as a terrorist attack. According to CAMERA, it still fails to mention that Hamas is a terrorist organization in 90 percent of its news reports. BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, has defended the stance, contending, “Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”

Such reluctance, in this context, has a way of adversely affecting accuracy. Once Israel’s operations began, again and again the BBC accepted Hamas’s account of what happened before later having to retract. For example, it reported as fact that the explosion at the al-Alhi hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023, was due to an Israeli strike before acknowledging the facility was hit by a rocket launched from within Gaza itself and that its reporting was mistaken.

For months, the BBC reported the death figures coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry without any, so to speak, health warning. This body is Hamas controlled and serves the terrorists’ propagandist ends. It took pressure from Danny Cohen and others for the corporation to finally change tack. The BBC’s English language broadcasts now do announce that the Health Ministry is run by Hamas when citing its figures.

This pattern has continued — initially defending its reporting and saying they have indeed been impartial, then, as the evidence mounts retracting and eventually saying they got it wrong. In February this year the BBC broadcast a documentary offering a children’s eye view of conflict: Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. It forgot to mention that one of the main characters featured was the teenage son of a Hamas minister. And when the Gazans were talking of fighting the Yahud, this was translated as Israelis rather than Jews. This is far from an isolated incident of this particular mistranslation. After initially celebrating the documentary with great fanfare, the BBC has since withdrawn it from its platform and acknowledged that mistakes were made.

The BBC is not just responsible for its UK TV channels, radio stations and news sites. It also produces the BBC World Service and its various foreign language services, including BBC Arabic. The latter broadcasts from London and Cairo and has had a litany of issues with anti-Israel bias. Many of the guests appearing on BBC Arabic have posted blatantly anti-Semitic material on social media.

The BBC’s chairman since last year, Samir Shah, has acknowledged that problems with BBC Arabic may exist and that they need investigating: “I think this whole business of how we’ve covered Israel-Gaza is a proper thing to examine thoroughly.” The corporation has repeatedly been willing to acknowledge that a problem exists and that something should be done — but then nothing really happens. It takes comfort in the fact that anti-Israel extremists also attack the BBC for what they see as bias.

The BBC’s line is that it must be impartial, but the real test for its Israel coverage is not how it covers domestic politics but how it covers other international conflicts. Compare its coverage with Gaza to its reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And there is simply no comparison. Don’t get me wrong. The BBC’s coverage of the Ukraine war has been brilliant, but it does not feel the endless need to appear evenhanded. When Russia bombards Kyiv and towns in eastern Ukraine, it does not feel-duty bound to put Kremlin representatives on our screens defending these attacks. But on Israel, whatever Hamas does, BBC feels the need to give the terrorists airtime.

Does the BBC have a problem with Jews? Well, it certainly does little to reassure that it does not have a problem with Israel. Ensuring fair reporting of the Middle East both by the BBC domestically and its Arabic language service needs addressing as part of the corporation’s charter renewal.