The biased BBC can’t investigate itself – and the public knows it

Months ago, our national broadcaster sank to a new low, broadcasting a documentary called ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, which was essentially propaganda for Hamas – a proscribed terrorist organisation. The film featured the son of a senior Hamas official as a narrator, and the production company paid the family with TV licence fee money.

Perhaps the BBC, which can’t even bring itself to describe Hamas as terrorists, didn’t think this was such a big deal.

We and the public disagreed. We held two protests outside Broadcasting House, bought full-page adverts in national newspapers, commissioned polling showing the strength of public outrage and tens of thousands signed our petition. The Culture Secretary intervened, and the BBC tentatively conceded that there were “serious flaws”.

From the start, we said that the BBC shouldn’t be marking its own homework with an interview review, and that we needed a thorough, independent investigation. In any ordinary organisation, that would have been the obvious approach.

But the BBC is no ordinary organisation. There is no accountability at the BBC. The Corporation insisted on conducting an internal review, and the result is today’s report, which doesn’t say much of anything beyond what we already knew: paying terrorist families is bad.

The BBC tried to bury this whitewash report under Greg Wallace’s professional corpse, publishing it on the same day as its report into the former MasterChef presenter. Apparently there just aren’t enough days in the year for each BBC scandal to merit its own.

What of the payment to the Hamas official’s family? After all, our national broadcaster is a stickler for the law. Just think of those threatening licence fee letters we all receive through our letterboxes, telling us, “You could be breaking the law.” Well, the names were run through the UK sanctions list, the report assures us, and nothing came up. This, of course, is a bait and switch – as if every member of Hamas and their family are individually named and sanctioned.

The report’s recommendations are pitiful. The usual weasel pledges to update guidelines and policies. No substantive changes. No heads rolling.

The only recommendation with any merit, which isn’t even in the final list, is to consider introducing more accurate translations of Arabic curses against Jews, which the BBC has been willfully mistranslating for decades, notwithstanding the demands of the Jewish community for accuracy.

The BBC is a place where bias is so ingrained that something like this documentary scandal could happen in the first place. Today’s report fails to grapple with that issue in any way. That is why we need an independent investigation, which, according to polling that we commissioned from YouGov, 57% of the British public supports.

Under Director General Tim Davie the BBC has gone from national treasure to national embarrassment.

He needs to go. We are in discussion with the police about taking Britain’s March Against Antisemitism to Broadcasting House on 7th September, because we cannot tackle antisemitism in Britain until we tackle the rot at the BBC.

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Gideon Falter is Chief Executive at Campaign Against Antisemitism.

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