The BBC has reported the deaths of 53 terrorists in Gaza as those of “journalists,” The Telegraph reported on Sunday. The paper has exposed BBC bias before and the public broadcaster has promised to clean up its act, but critics say that has not happened.
Rebecca Paul, the shadow secretary for digital, culture, media and sport, said, “The BBC’s failures on BBC Arabic are part of a long-running problem with impartiality and accountability. If the BBC wants to regain the public’s trust, it must stop giving undue credibility to anti-Semites and terrorists and apply the same rigorous standards to everyone.”
Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television, said, “Once again, the BBC finds itself at the center of a scandal of inaccuracy and anti-Israel bias. Given the BBC’s vast journalistic resources, this is simply not good enough.”
In 2024, Cohen added his voice to the growing number condemning the network’s bias against Israel, which though long-standing, has become increasingly apparent after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
U.K. Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy told the BBC’s director-general, Matt Brittin, who took up his post in June, that she remained concerned about the BBC’s reporting, The Telegraph reported.
Most of the misreporting came from BBC Arabic. The Telegraph has previously reported widespread anti-Israel bias at the Arabic-language broadcaster.
Many of the misidentified “journalists” appeared on social media dressed in military clothing, with weapons, and, in some cases, wearing headbands of terrorist groups.
Some took part in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. Their respective terrorist groups hailed some as “martyrs.”
The BBC told The Telegraph it is reviewing the inclusion of terrorists in its coverage.
During its war with Hamas, Israel was accused of purposefully targeting journalists, an allegation first exposed as false by British investigative journalist David Collier, author of a January 2024 report revealing that a list of dead reporters put out by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based NGO, was essentially the same as one put out by Hamas’s Gaza Media Office.
At the time of Collier’s report, Israel had been accused of eliminating nearly 100 journalists, surpassing the number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam War.
The list of Palestinian “journalists” killed now numbers more than 180, a list that remains posted on BBC Arabic’s website.
The BBC‘s anti-Israel bias does not end with its Arabic service. Perhaps most egregious is its 20-year suppression of the Balen Report.
Commissioned in 2004, the 20,000-word document, written by senior broadcast journalist Malcolm Balen, looked at hundreds of hours of BBC coverage of the Israel-Arab conflict.
Elements that have leaked make it clear that Balen concluded BBC coverage was biased. But only a select few have seen the full report. The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in court to keep it from going public.
