The BBC haunted by bias - and the Israeli connection

Beginning daily transmissions from British public radio station 2LO in November 1922, the BBC was defined from its inception by the high moral tone set by its first director-general, John Reith, who summarized the nascent British Broadcasting Corporation’s purpose as to “inform, educate, and entertain.” The order of priority was deliberate. To his way of thinking, entertainment was far from broadcasting’s main purpose. Informing and educating the public was of much greater importance.

Reith’s principles live on to this day in the BBC’s mission statement, which runs: “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality, and distinctive output and services which inform, educate, and entertain.”

From its earliest days, Reith successfully established and maintained the independence of the BBC from political interference, and by 1939, when Britain went to war with Germany, the broadcaster’s reputation for accuracy, objectivity, and impartiality was firmly entrenched.

Throughout World War II, the BBC broadcast in a multiplicity of languages to Nazi-occupied Europe. People all over the continent literally risked their lives to hear the truth from London, since listening to foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty.

The BBC’s shortwave transmissions went on to cover the world. At its peak, the corporation was broadcasting across the globe in some 80 languages. The wartime reputation it had acquired of honesty and objectivity is the bedrock on which today’s BBC stands.

Regrettably, in the more recent past the structure has wobbled badly on its foundations.

There is no doubt that at some point during the 1960s and 1970s, something began to go very wrong within the BBC. Not as the result of a deliberate policy perhaps but as the reflection of a general shift to the Left among the opinion-forming élite, the BBC’s editorial standards came to be dominated by what was to become known as “political correctness” – an unspoken consensus of ultra-left-leaning views.

In 2010, Mark Thompson, the corporation’s then-director-general, admitted: “In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs… a massive bias to the Left. The organization did struggle then with impartiality.”

This shift to the Left permeated the BBC’s output across many types of programming, including domestic political comment and even comedy. The philosophy that finally dominated left-wing thinking was termed “intersectionality.” It asserted that victimhood was interrelated, and that all victims in whatever context – ethnic, sexual, economic, political – were to be supported.

Opposition to one form of discrimination, the doctrine ran, demanded opposition to all.

Reflecting this, the BBC’s editorial stance began to shift significantly into the politically correct pro-Palestinian mode. Eventually, it became obvious that it was no longer adhering to its much vaunted high standards of impartiality.

In April 2004, the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, of antisemitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” over a report on a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber. That protest followed numerous examples of anti-Israel bias broadcast by the BBC.

Three years earlier, British lawyer Trevor Asserson had become increasingly incensed with what appeared to be the BBC’s obvious departure from its declared principles. Asserting that “the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by an apparent widespread antipathy toward Israel,” Asserson commissioned a series of in-depth studies.

For a seven-week period in 2001, his team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a variety of other sources. Their conclusion was that the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations to be unbiased and impartial.

Asserson’s report, matched by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the corporation to commission an investigation by one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute detail. This exhaustive study resulted in a 20,000-word report. At the end of 2004, it was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the BBC, but thereafter it was treated as top secret and locked away.

Although no details of its findings were released to the media, Keith Dovkants, a journalist working for the London Evening Standard, later claimed that elements of the report had been leaked, “including Balen’s conclusion that the BBC’s Middle East coverage had been biased against Israel.”

After repeated legal applications for its release under the UK Freedom of Information Act – actions defended by the corporation at a cost of over £330,000 – in 2012, the House of Lords, then the UK’s supreme court, ruled that as “a document held for journalistic purposes,” the report was explicitly excluded from the requirements of the Act. So the Balen report remains under lock and key, although calls for the BBC to release it continue to this day.

Then came Hamas’s bloodlust assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israel-Hamas War that followed.

It was feared that the mindset within the BBC and its left-orientated, London-centric news staff was too unshakably established to result in even-handed, unbiased reporting of the conflict.

And so it proved.

The BBC’s consistent anti-Israel bias in its news reports and comment became too outrageously partisan to be allowed to continue without protest. Asserson, now senior partner of an international law firm centered in Tel Aviv, gathered a team of some 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, and on a pro-bono basis, undertook a meticulous research program analyzing how the BBC was reporting the Gaza conflict.

The report, published on September 6, 2024, presented a detailed analysis of the BBC’s news coverage during a four-month period beginning on Oct. 7, 2023.

While the BBC’s editorial guidelines demand impartiality, accuracy, and adherence to editorial values and the public interest, the Asserson report identified 1,553 breaches. “The findings,” said the report, “reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines.”

The investigation found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as aggressive and militaristic. The report also revealed that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas War had previously expressed sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.

A week into the war came the explosion in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. In reporting it, the BBC correspondent, speaking live from Gaza, said, “It is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.”

The BBC’s Arabic service repeated this assessment, and anti-Israel protests immediately broke out in both the Arab world and the West.

It did not take long for the truth to emerge, but by then the damage had been done. The explosion was the result of a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad.

Days later, in its mealy-mouthed apology, the BBC still failed to make clear that the evidence showed conclusively that the explosion had not been an Israeli attack.

The hasty and unverified assertion that Israel must be responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital was followed by a further example a few weeks later. On that occasion, the BBC reported that IDF troops had entered Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, “targeting medical teams and Arab speakers.”

This was either a willful or an unprofessional misreading of an IDF release, which stated that the troops had entered the hospital “accompanied by Arabic speakers and medical teams” to assist patients. The BBC did broadcast an adequate apology, but the report demonstrated the ingrained tendency for the BBC to rush to pass judgment against Israel.

As Hamas's vast network of tunnels criss-crossing Gaza was slowly revealed, the BBC appeared to be doing its best to undermine the IDF’s discovery of a Hamas military command post directly underneath a hospital.

In his report, BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen seemed to suggest that Kalashnikov assault rifles found beneath the hospital might have nothing to do with Hamas but be part of the medical center’s own security.

Examples of anti-Israel bias or inaccuracy by Bowen in reporting the Gaza conflict took up 16 pages of the new Asserson Report. It also singled out the BBC’s Arabic service as one of the most biased of all global media outlets, identifying 11 news and comment programs that featured reporters who, it showed, had previously made public statements in support of Hamas – something viewers were never informed of.

The BBC promised to respond to Asserson. After a few weeks, it issued a short dismissive statement, questioning the methodology used in compiling and analyzing the data.

His report accused the BBC of persistent and serious breaches of impartiality, alleging chronic failure by senior management to uphold editorial standards or to correct errors.

Prescott also pointed to issues with BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, demonstrating that it used known Hamas supporters in its programs, minimized Israeli suffering, used unverified casualty figures, and ran a fundamentally biased narrative consistently portraying Israel as the aggressor.

In September 2025, the parliamentary Culture, Media, and Sports Committee summoned BBC Chairman Samir Shah, along with the BBC director-general, to answer allegations of bias, editorial failures, and recent scandals, including how the BBC had come to transmit a program about Gaza that turned out to have been narrated by the son of a Hamas official.

To get a handle on the current turmoil, on November 24, 2025, the committee subjected both Shah and Prescott to intense questioning. There is a widespread and growing conviction that its news and political comment departments are, as Prescott seemed to tell the committee, systemically warped.

While the corporation has doughty champions among political figures and opinion formers who appreciate much of its output, speculation is already rife about who might be appointed as the next BBC director-general. Most hope that a new broom will indeed sweep clean.■