I’m old enough to remember when the BBC was good. I remember when you could trust the BBC’s News and Current Affairs output to be, if not be completely impartial, something that is probably not possible for a State broadcaster, but at least willing to allow two different viewpoints on a story. In just my lifetime the BBC has given me information that I could accept as reasonably accurate on such stories as the Vietnam War, the horrors of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Lebanese Civil War, the Cold War along with a multitude of stories of tragedy and joy from across the world. I accept, looking back that on some more domestic stories in the past, such as the Ulster Troubles and some political stories that the BBC showed that it was speaking either with the government’s voice or its own ‘BBC voice’ and might not have been as impartial as many would have liked.
The BBC was once an organisation that you could look at and appreciate it’s undoubted good points whilst being aware of and taking account of and not having to be too worried about which was not good about it’s output and culture. I can remember when the BBC was much admired and those technical staff who were BBC trained were the ones that other broadcast organisations wanted to poach, it was a case of if you wanted someone to run a 1 megawatt AM broadcast transmitter then the guy with the BBC credentials would probably be the best candidate by a long chalk. BBC tech training was the gold standard of broadcast engineering training and something that Britain could be proud of. Their news output was trustworthy and relatively even handed even at times of high international tension when the easier path for the BBC might have been to merely follow the orders of the government of the day. I can recall coming across major news stories and checking what I heard on Radio Moscow and Voice of America with the BBC version and you could reasonably assume that the BBC’s account might be more factually correct than either Radio Moscow or Voice of America.
But not now. Now the BBC is a shadow of its former self. The organisation’s decision, for example, to cleave to passing societal fads and cults such as that of transgenderism to the extent that they seem to take every opportunity they can find to insert a man in a dress into as much of their output as possible, has become a true life meme that people now mock. BBC News and Current Affairs has lagged quite a way behind other mainstream outlets and significantly behind alt media channels on contentious domestic stories such as the problems caused or exacerbated by multiculturalism, NHS failures and the horrendous and continuing story of children abused by the Islamic Rape Gangs which have infested too many of Britain’s towns and cities.
However it is their coverage of the situation in the Middle East where the decline of the BBC from its status as a respected international news broadcaster to being a sort of ‘Temu Goebbels’ whose bias is writ as large as a container ship, is most noticeable. Now although I’m a very strong supporter of Israel and a Zionist, I’m also someone who has formerly worked in media and because of that experience I understand that just as with any other story the narrative of the Israel – Gaza conflict has two sides with each side holding to its own view of the situation.
The job of the sensible and moral journalist in a situation such as exists in the Gaza war would be to listen to both sides and try to pick out the information that is the closest to the actual truth of the subject and use that as the heart of the journalist’s copy. The problem is the BBC is not taking the view that there are two sides and that they should dig out the truth and report it as dispassionately as possible, they have instead taken the view that they should accept just about any statement from Hamas aligned or controlled sources and run with that instead. Israel, whilst being like all other nations somewhat imperfect (no nation can be completely perfect, all nations have negatives about them), is not getting its voice heard fairly by BBC journalists and this is reflected in the BBC’s output of stories about the Israel – Gaza war.
Since a long long time prior to the 7/10 Pogrom carried out by Hamas and its allies the BBC has not in my view covered stories relating to Israel at all fairly. The BBC makes a point of running stories that aid and abet the narratives set forth by Hamas and other jihadist groups opposed to Israel. This bias has not been criticised in the United Kingdom by pro-Israel activists and others concerned with media accuracy. But since the 7/10 Pogrom the output of the BBC has become more and more willing to include information fed to them by pro-Hamas or Hamas aligned sources.
The scandal about the BBC’s open taking of sides in the Israel – Gaza conflict has been suppurating for years and especially since the 7/10 Pogrom but recently it has chaotically burst open like an inexpertly lanced boil. The BBC has recently been making claims that the Israelis have carried out attacks on civilian targets when the information the BBC is working with is either quite unreliable or even completely false.
One particular story strikes me as particularly egregious. On the 3rd June 2025 the BBC said this:
At least 27 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire as they attempted to collect aid near a distribution site in Gaza, local officials say.
Civilians were fired upon by tanks, quadcopter drones, and helicopters near the al-Alam roundabout, about 1km (0.6 miles) from the aid site, a spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, Mahmoud Basal, said.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops fired shots after identifying suspects who moved towards them “deviating from the designated access routes”.
Israel previously denied shooting Palestinians in a similar incident on Sunday which the Hamas-run health ministry said killed 31 people and injured nearly 200.
The problem for the BBC is that this is a fog of war situation. It’s unclear who shot the civilians although Israel has admitted that they’ve fired warning shots then actual shots at potential or perceived threats to Israeli forces. However the truth of the matter of the story of an alleged 61 Gazans being shot by the Israelis or Hamas or even whether they were shot at all, is not at all easy to confirm. The Times of Israel in a report on these recent incidents does say that there is a lot of unclarity about the veracity of these incidents.
The Times of Israel said:
It is not definitively clear who killed the 61 Gazans Hamas alleges were shot this week at and near the Rafah aid center. It is not definitively clear that 61 Gazans were killed at all. It is not definitively clear who they were. Noncombatant men, women and children? Hamas and other gunmen killed in that area or elsewhere? Victims of Hamas gunfire? (It has been reported that Hamas has set up checkpoints and tried to stop Gazans from reaching aid centers. And the IDF on Sunday published footage it said showed gunmen opening fire at Gazans seeking to collect looted humanitarian aid in Khan Younis.)
The BBC has had a knee-jerk reaction to this story and has blamed the Israelis for the alleged deaths of Gazans trying to reach aid centres. That’s very clear from their use of the term ‘tanks’ in the story excerpt reproduced above. This is because the only one of the combatants that have tanks in this conflict are likely to be the Israelis. The BBC have stated that something is true when there’s a fair chance that it might not be.
The BBC’s conduct in the handling of this story is getting them oodles of criticism from members of the public. It is also garnering the BBC criticism from the White House. Karoline Leavitt the White House Press Secretary took to the podium with a print out of the BBC’s ‘Gaza massacre story’ and called it out as fake news. Here’s a short video of Ms Leavitt heavily laying into the BBC and it’s coverage of this story.
In all my years of being interested in politics both national and international I don’t think that I’ve seen such an excoriation of a BBC report coming from a White House Press Secretary and by extension the US Government. It is I’m afraid a significantly bad position for the BBC to be in to be criticised by the White House like this.
The BBC is not accepting the criticism that they are being justly dealt over this. They are doubling down and stating that their story was not fake news. Now in the past I might have had some sympathy for the BBC’s position as any relatively impartial news organisation is going to get crap flung from them from all sides. But, the BBC has garnered such an awful reputation for its one sided reporting of this and other conflicts in the Middle East where Israel is involved that I don’t see any way that I can even remotely side with the BBC on this. The BBC have got copious amounts of form for constructing their news stories in such a way that Israel nearly always comes out looking bad even when the actual facts of a story might not show the Israelis in anything like as bad a light as the BBC shows them in.
If the BBC was getting unjustly criticised for their handling of this story then I might be able to have some sympathy for the BBC having to face criticism from everyone from the man in the street to the man in the White House. The problem for the BBC is that I and many others can see that the BBC are being justly criticised for chucking out information that is not just accidentally inaccurate (we’ve all done that from time to time) but clearly is propaganda that is helpful to Hamas and the other jihad groups operating in Gaza. The BBC have journalistically pooed their own bed with their reporting of these recent incidents and now they are going to have lie in their own mess until they decide to clean it up. The BBC can do this by admitting to their their biases, being honest about their acceptance of Hamas propaganda as fact along with their appalling record for anti-Israel reporting that’s not only been the case since 7/10 but for many years.
Links
BBC report into recent civilian deaths in Gaza
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2lkwz0y5n0o
Times of Israel piece on ‘who shot who’?
I probably annoy my wife by the frequency with which I remark on the BBC’s TV reports from their ‘trusted’ sources inside Gaza. What I say is, “I haven’t seen a single malnourished face in that film, have you?”; and “Malnourished people cannot run around like that – malnourished people cannot manage that level of exertion”. Every BBC ‘trusted sources’ report is accompanied by words spoken by the BBC’s ‘senior’ ‘international’ ‘journalists’ that, at the very least, imply that starvation is widespread in Gaza – and Israel is to blame. If Gaza is starving why don’t Hamas show crowds of exhausted starving people in the reports the BBC trusts so naively?
The most emaciated person I have seen in recent BBC reporting was, in fact, the BBC’s interviewer. Incidentally, Fergal Keane and Jeremy Bowen could do with skipping a few lunches.
Lying is what they do best, they have it down to a art form.
Let me count the ways.
The Hadith makes it clear that Muslims are allowed to lie to unbelievers in order to defeat them or protect themselves. There are several forms:
Taqiyya – Saying something that isn’t true as it relates to Muslim identity (i.e whether one is a Muslim or what that means). This is a Shiite term: the Sunni counterpart is Muda’rat.
Kitman – Lying by omission. An example would be when Muslim apologists quote only a fragment of verse 5:32 (that if anyone kills “it shall be as if he had killed all mankind”) while neglecting to mention that the rest of the verse (and the next) mandate murder in undefined cases of “corruption” and “mischief.”
Tawriya – Intentionally creating a false impression by saying something that is technically true, when knowing that the listener will interpret it in a different way. This practice has a broader application than taqiyya.
Muruna – ‘Blending in’ by setting aside some practices of Islam or Sharia in order to advance others.
Though not called taqiyya by name, Muhammad clearly used deception when he signed a 10-year treaty with the Meccans (known as Hudaibiya) which allowed him access to their city while he secretly prepared his own forces for a takeover. The unsuspecting residents were easily conquered when he broke the treaty two years later. Some of the people in the city who had trusted him at his word were executed.