How the BBC stonewalled CAMPAIN’s complaint

Delivering our Open Letter to the BBC, 9th Feb 2023. From left to right: Miranda Pinch, Jonathan Coulter, Diana Neslen, Sir Iaian Chalmers, Ken Loach and John Payne

At a time when many of the BBC's own journalists are challenging the integrity of the Corporation's reporting on Gaza, it is worth recalling how CAMPAIN tried to hold the BBC to account for biased coverage of a related topic.

On 9th February 2023, a group of us, including film director Ken Loach and the public health expert Sir Iaian Chalmers, delivered an Open Letter to Tim Davie complaining that the BBC had failed to act with due impartiality and accuracy in reporting allegations about the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party. 1,440 license-fee payers eventually signed the letter.

Our Submission of Feb 2023

In our submission, we cited both:

• specific cases of erroneous reporting, in BBC News, Newsnight and the Panorama documentary Is Labour Antisemitic? of July 2019, which was screened five months before the General election of that year, and

• the BBC’s failure to report important facts, notably to meaningfully respond to the very serious allegations in the Al Jazeera Labour Files series, and to shine an investigatory light on the interest groups and lobbyists behind the stream of accusations about antisemitism.

  
  

We adopted this two-pronged strategy because all previous complaints of which we were aware had exclusively focused on the offending Panorama documentary – and got nowhere. Despite highlighting the documentary’s obvious flaws, their complaints were not upheld.

I later learned that within 11 days of broadcast, viewers had submitted about 1,600 complaints to the BBC’s Audience Services Department - which rejected them all. Sixty of these people then escalated their complaints to the Corporation’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) which similarly rejected them. Of these, 28 soldiered on, taking their complaints to Ofcom, the Government watchdog responsible for enforcing editorial standards at the BBC, only to be dismissed once more.

Rather than focusing single-mindedly on the Panorama documentary, we sought to demonstrate a pattern of bias that had lasted for several years and included both sins of commission and omission. We backed up our assertions with detailed evidence, both in footnotes and subsequent correspondence.

The BBC's responses

However, the BBC rejected our complaint at both the Audience Services level and when we escalated it to the ECU. It would not consider our five bullet points nor the supporting evidence we submitted, on the grounds that:

• the BBC had addressed many of these in its answers to the very large number of previous complaints about the Panorama documentary. The BBC did not even consider fresh evidence that had just come to light but would not have been available to the earlier complainants, notably the allegation by Martin Forde QC that both the BBC and John Ware (the director of the Panorama documentary) had both pressured him to alter his report into leaks within the Labour Party. This is evident at 5:40 minutes into this video recording of 16 March 2023. Later in the recording, he said that Panorama had filleted an email from Seamus Milne in a way that was entirely misleading, such that the context was lost, and a more sinister interpretation could be placed on the email than was ever intended.

• The regulator (Ofcom) had considered 28 complaints about the Panorama documentary and found that it was duly impartial and did not warrant further investigation.  In June 2020, the High Court had rejected grounds for a judicial review of Ofcom’s decision not to entertain a complaint about the programme. 

• Further investigation would not be proportionate, i.e. a cost-effective use of the BBC’s resources.

• Complaints about BBC output should be lodged within 30 days of broadcast and there is no requirement on the BBC to investigate older material because someone remains unhappy.

• The BBC was under no obligation to investigate the interest groups and lobbyists behind the stream of accusations about antisemitism because such a requirement would be at odds with the broadcaster’s editorial freedom.

The next stop: Ofcom

We then escalated the complaint to Ofcom pointing out that the BBC had ignored readily available peer-reviewed evidence and statistical analyses of the incidence of antisemitism in the UK, showing among other things that it was higher among Conservative than Labour supporters. We cited a series of highly relevant publications that the BBC had never reviewed or, to the best of our knowledge, even referenced, including:

• Schlosberg, J. and Laker, L. 2018. Labour, Antisemitism and the News: a disinformation paradigm. London: Media Reform Coalition

• Philo et al. 2019. Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief. Pluto Press.

• Madison, A. 2023. How many Antisemites in the Labour Party; Facts not Factionalism. Published by Jewish Voice for Labour. (This was the last of the many articles that Madison had written on this topic)

• Winstanley, A. (2023) Anti-Semitism: how the Israel Lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn. O/R books

• Aked, H. 2023. Friends of Israel: the backlash against Palestinian solidarity. Verso Books.

We also cited Editorial Guidelines that the BBC had flouted, notably Editorial Guideline 3.3.1 asking broadcasters to check facts and statistics, identifying important caveats and limitations. There was little evidence that the BBC has done this in its reporting on allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It had just homed in on anecdotal accounts which were often seriously flawed. This was particularly the case with news reporters like Laura Keunnsberg who, as stated in our Open Letter, had reported the narrative about Labour antisemitism as a fact, without checking the veracity of the underlying allegations, and with the Panorama documentary's erroneous claim that the Corbyn leadership had interfered in disciplinary cases to protect members under investigation.

We also drew attention to what BBC Editorial Guidance item 4.3.12 says regarding contributors from other organisations, i.e.: Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context. This alone should have alerted the BBC to the need to investigate those behind the litany of media-borne allegations that there was a serious problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It was also incumbent on the makers of the Panorama documentary to reveal this information about the members of the Jewish Labour Movement on whom it rested its case against the Labour Party, but they withheld this information from viewers.

We also complained to Ofcom about the BBC's use of the term editorial freedom to defend its failure to investigate those persistently claiming Labour was antisemitic and for failing to report Aljazeera's Labour Files documentaries. We said that:

Editorial freedom is not freedom to report one side of the argument, while systematically ignoring evidence that supports the other side. Such conduct contravenes Ofcom’s guidance on “due impartiality and due accuracy, and undue prominence of views and opinions”.

We also questioned the appropriateness of the BBC's 30 day time limit in cases where We also question the appropriateness of time limits in cases where there has been a major miscarriage of justice (the Hillsborough disaster took two inquests, two enquiries and 27 years to resolve).  

Ofcom's delayed response

Ofcom took over five months to respond, eventually producing a three-page letter dated December 1st 2023. As with the BBC, it rejected our complaint without considering any of the detailed evidence submitted.

The complaints system is obviously unfit for assessing complaints about systematic institutional bias of the type we submitted. To do this, it would need to assess multiple instances of the BBC’s behaviour over a period of years, including both the sins of both commission and omission we presented. This was dismissed based on two very restrictive rules:

• that complaints should be made within 30 working days of the date on which the material was first broadcast, and 

• Ofcom’s insistence that their content standards enforcement jurisdiction does not extend to overarching complaints about the BBC’s overall editorial approach and output – it could only look at individual programmes and series.

The road not taken by the BBC and Ofcom

Despite these rules, I believe the BBC and Ofcom could, and should, have used their discretion to address our complaint rather than stonewalling it.

• Firstly, they should not have used the criterion of editorial freedom to defend the BBC’s failure to investigate the interest groups and lobbyists behind the stream of accusations about antisemitism. This preposterous rationalisation goes to the heart of the BBC’s bias. Labour’s purported antisemitism was a leading news item from 2015 up to 2019, with Philo et al. (2019) citing research showing an average of four such articles per day across eight newspapers. Under such circumstances, it was incumbent on a national broadcaster formally committed to upholding due impartiality and accuracy to investigate the source and veracity of the endless stream of claims. 

  
  

• Secondly, Ofcom could have circumvented its objection to overarching complaints by conducting its own investigation, taking account of our submission, about BBC’s misreporting of alleged antisemitism in Labour. On the last page of its letter of Dec 1st, 2023, Ofcom mentioned that it could conduct and publish additional ad hoc reviews addressing any specific issue of concern identified by Ofcom.

We, therefore, wrote back requesting it carry out such a review of the topic we had raised, but it simply responded that: We will take CAMPAIN’s complaint and the points you have raised into account when deciding subject areas for future ad hoc reviews. Ofcom has carried out no such review within the past year, from which we conclude that it lacks the will to hold the BBC to the accuracy and impartiality demanded by its Charter.