BBC bias: cancer spreading from the top

In 2023, CAMPAIN tried to hold the BBC accountable for misreporting about antisemitism in the Labour Party, but both the BBC and Ofcom stonewalled our efforts. Now, however, many of the BBC's own journalists are trying to hold the Corporation to account for its reporting on Gaza, at considerable risk to themselves. In this article, we review recent revelations, and find a mass of evidence pointing to systematic pro-Israeli bias. In particular, we highlight the role of two individuals who exercise extraordinary power, apparently without due accountability.

Is this where the buck now stops?

We end with a simple question: where does the buck stop and who should we ultimately hold responsible for the appalling situation described?

A bold letter

On November 1st 2024, a group of 256 journalism professionals and concerned parties (including editors, actors and media lecturers) wrote to BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC CEO Deborah Turness, complaining about:

the lack of consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in coverage of Gaza by broadcasters including the BBC, ITV and Sky News. 

Basic journalistic tenets had been lacking when it came to holding Israel to account for its actions. They went on to ask broadcasters to:

recommit to the highest editorial standards—with emphasis on fairness, accuracy, and due impartiality—and to exhibit the editorial bravery we have seen in other story areas.

The letter was first published in The Independent and can also be read here without adverts. The signatories said they wanted accuracy across the board, including but not limited to:

• reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza

• making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims

• highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable

• making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines

• providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity

• including regular historical context predating October 2023

• using consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and

• robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.

The broadcasters, and notably the BBC, had been failing to perform satisfactorily in these areas. They went on to say that every television report, article and radio interview that has failed to robustly challenge Israeli claims has systematically dehumanised Palestinians. 

Significantly, only 89 of the 256 signatories (35% of the total) dared put their names below the letter. Professors and lecturers in journalism and media studies figure prominently among this group, as do independent journalists not employed by the mainstream media.

The remaining 167, including more than 100 BBC staff, chose to remain anonymous.  They could not risk the prospect of severe reprisals from their employers, being publicly pilloried as antisemitic or otherwise penalised.  

I couldn’t help noticing a few late converts among the signatories, i.e. people who in the run-up to the 2019 General Election gave credence to the idea that Britain had a major antisemitism problem, particularly in the Labour Party, without providing ha’pence of hard evidence.  This is a period when the mainstream media – notably the relatively liberal BBC and the Guardian – rolled out a disinformation paradigm, one that journalists of conscience should have rejected outright.

Well, better late than never… and let’s hope more people rediscover their moral bearings.

Owen Jones investigates

Owen Jones recently published a landmark investigation exploring in greater depth how the BBC has been performing since October 2023. You can read the original of his report in an article called the BBC's Civil War over Gaza on the Dropsite News site.

He interviewed 13 journalists and other BBC staff, who alleged that senior figures within the BBC’s news operation had during the previous 14 months:

• skewed stories in favour of Israel’s narratives.

• repeatedly and routinely brushed aside internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza without due cause. Management had, moreover, tried to pathologise their complaints, presenting them as indicative of emotional struggles and a Muslim grievance – even though internal dissent extended far beyond Muslim staff.

• either buried or failed to report on several official statements announcing Israel’s intent to perpetrate war crimes. 

  
  

Jones presents this case as a prime example of the BBC's biased reporting, wihere Berg authorised publication. The headline was phrased in a way that avoided holding the Israeli military (IDF) responsible for Bhar's death. Following a wave of protest, the BBC changed the headline, though to wording suggesting that the police dog that attacked Bhar had acted of its own volition, rather than under IDF control.

Most of the internal complaints occurred in the nine months from October 2023. Still, they peaked again in December 2024, after the BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International’s report concluding that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. While it was discussed on BBC radio stations, the journalists noted that the report was not covered at all on the BBC’s flagship news programmes, and was not afforded proper attention by BBC online.

Jones alludes to other evidence of BBC bias in its reporting on Israel and Gaza, drawing on other sources. One of these is the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on Media Bias: Gaza 2023-24 released in March 2024. The journalists whom Jones interviewed said they presented it to Richard Burgess, BBC’s Director of News Content, but that Burgess simply replied that he did not recognise the bias.

Jones also cites statistical analysis by Najjar and Lietava that uncovered biases within the BBC’s coverage. Notably, they found that:

• the BBC referred to Palestinian deaths only slightly more often than Israeli deaths, despite the fact the Palestinian death toll was at least 28 times higher.

• the BBC was using humanizing and emotive words much less to describe the deaths of Palestinians versus those of Israelis. By way of contrast, terms such as massacre, assault, slaughter and atrocity were all applied disproportionately to Palestinian actions when compared to those committed by Israel. Israeli strikes were described as retaliatory on 210 occasions, compared to zero for the Palestinians. 

• in the first nine months after October 7, just 27% of BBC news story headlines about Palestinian deaths explicitly mentioned who killed them. In the case of Israeli deaths, 43% identified the perpetrator. By contrast, when covering the Russian war against Ukraine, the BBC identified the killer in 74% of its reports of Ukrainian deaths.

As you can see in his interview with Novara Media, Jones acknowledges that BBC journalists, and particularly those on the ground like Jeremy Bowen, sometimes produce accurate journalistic pieces. The problem is that these are exceptions in an overall narrative in which the BBC whitewashes Israeli atrocities. The coverage is drastically weighted in favour of Israel.

A partisan figure at the heart of BBC reporting on the Middle East

Jones’s interviewees break new ground by indicating who is biasing BBC coverage in favour of Israel.  They were adamant in saying that the Head of BBC online, Raffi Berg, exercises massive editorial authority over the Corporation’s presentation of the Israel-Palestine issue. This is partly because BBC online is the most visited news website on the internet, having had 1.1 billion hits in May alone.

Staff allege that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East stories appear on the BBC News front page. One journalist said: If it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before curation even OK it. Another said: anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked: Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it gone to Raffi?

Berg also exercises much influence over broadcast coverage because BBC broadcasters, often having limited knowledge about Israel and Palestine, frequently draw on web articles such as those edited by Berg to flesh out their stories. 

Raffi Berg's image on X (Twitter)

In a section entitled Raffi Berg on Netanyahu’s bookshelf, Jones shows that Berg is a deeply partisan figure who the BBC should never have accorded authority in such a contentious subject area. This is evident, inter alia, from a misleading story published in 2002 that one BBC journalist described as an IDF puff piece, his three part series on Israeli settlers whom he presented as victims seeking a better quality of life (without mentioning the illegality of the settlements many of which are built on land stolen from the Palestinians), his participation (while already a BBC staff member) in a demonstration in January 2011 in support of Operation Cast Lead, and his authorship of the book Red Sea Spies, about Israeli Spy service efforts to evacuate Jews from Ethiopia, in which he describes Mossad in glowing terms (without mentioning any of its downside). 

BBC journalists far more junior than Berg have been reprimanded or even disciplined for social media output seen as biased in favour of the Palestinian cause.

In a more recent report Alan Macloed, who writes for Mintpress, shows that, prior to joining the BBC, Berg worked for the US US State Department's Foreign Broadcast Information (FBIS), an acknowledged CIA front group for gathering intelligence. Macloed compares Berg's powerful position at the BBC to what the journalist Tareq Haddad encountered while working at Newsweek. In 2019, Haddad resigned in frustration, claiming that:

the outlet systematically stymied him from covering important Middle East news stories that did not align with Western objectives, and that Newsweek employed a senior editor whose only job was seemingly to vet and suppress “controversial” stories, in the same vein as Berg.

Paddy French’s investigation of the biased misreporting of the Amsterdam Riots of November 6 and 7 suggests that a pro-Israel figure like Berg may be playing a similar editorial role within Sky News. Such observations raise the question: how widespread is the Raffi Berg phenomenon, or is he just a one-off?

The murky role of higher-ups

But Berg is not the only BBC figure whose bias was highlighted by the complainants. Behind him are a range of powerful individuals, notably Sir Robbie Gibb who serves on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, Director-General Tim Davie, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, the Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah.

Jones describes Gibb as a veteran of the revolving door between Britain’s worlds of media and politics. Between 2017 and 2019, he served as director of communications for Theresa May, who knighted him upon her resignation.  Former senior BBC journalist Emily Maitlis described him as an active agent of the Conservative party who shaped the broadcaster’s coverage by acting as the arbiter BBC impartiality.

Robbie Gibb talking to the right-wing think tank, the TaxPayers' alliance, in March 2020

Gibbs’s involvement with the deeply partisan pro-Israeli newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle (JC), should have disqualified him from a job requiring him to ensure impartiality at the BBC.  In November 2023, he declared he was sole owner of the JC, from which four columnists resigned in September 2024, in protest after the paper published a story that included fabricated quotes from Israeli officials. 

For a tongue-in-cheek view of BBC bias, I strongly recommend you read this piece from Laura and Normal Island News.

The disappearing Professor Pappe

Professor Pappe's latest book shows how a century of aggressive lobbying changed the map of the Middle East

Professor Ilan Pappe is a highly regarded historian with a massive knowledge of the conflict in the Middle East. He is an Israeli, though highly critical of Israel which he thinks was born of a deliberate programme of ethnic cleansing.

There was much consternation when the BBC suddenly disinvited him from contributing to a BBC podcast called The Conflict, which aims to show what history can teach the public about the topic. On December 13th, a group of 16 historians and other academics wrote to express their dismay about the BBC’s decision. They described Pappe as:

an esteemed colleague, the author of more than a dozen books on the area, and a highly-regarded historian of the period which saw both the creation of the state of Israel, and also the Nakba in which half of the Palestinian population either fled or were expelled from their homes. This period, along with the Balfour Declaration and the nearly 30-year British mandate over Palestine, was to be the topic of the podcast to which he had been invited to contribute.  It is a period whose complexities he is especially well-qualified to explain.

Despite the aim of examining history, the podcast did not include a single professional historian. It is most regrettable that the BBC disinvited this academic whose views are based on thorough scholarship, though they do not suit the Government of Israel.

But where does the buck stop?

Given this background, it is not difficult to understand why the BBC stonewalled CAMPAINS's complaint about its misreporting of alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party since the middle of the last decade, and why it failed to consider any of the evidence we submitted.

BBC bias is rooted in gross politicisation that comes from Government. This was particularly visible under the Conservative Government, but it did not end with the general election of July 2024. According to Patrick Howse, writing in Byline Times (23/10/24), the most worrying aspect is that the BBC:

remains vulnerable to the continuing influence of Tory ‘true-believers’ and fellow travellers appointed to key positions within its structure who are still in place. This has already resulted in a default position of largely following the agenda set by the UK’s predominantly right-wing press.

Howse concludes by saying that: A strong, independent BBC is good for Britain, democracy, and for world journalism. Labour could do what is right or it could instead retreat to a position in which it feels that it too can benefit from a weak and subservient national broadcaster, frightened to hold power to account.

Given what we have seen of Keir Starmer’s exercise of power within the Labour Party, and particularly his treatment of left-wing rivals, I am not holding my breath. Six months after the General Election, it is Keir Starmer whom we should hold accountable for the incumbency of Robbie Gibb, Raffi Berg and others of their ilk, and the consequently biased reporting.

Notwithstanding this, the good news is that many journalistic professionals are coming out of the woodwork and starting to hold the BBC to account. May we see more of this!