Normally, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Often, when work goes up in smoke, someone gets fired.
And when you get fired up about a goal being achieved, success sparks satisfaction.
None of that applies to the departures of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness, who were encouraged to relinquish their roles not because of the BBC’s smoldering antisemitism but because of an unethical report about US President Donald Trump.
The Telegraph revealed exclusively on November 3 that according to a leaked internal report, the BBC’s Panorama program edited a video from the US Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, to make it look like Trump had incited the violence.
The report charged the BBC with widespread anti-Israel bias at both BBC News and BBC Arabic, giving too much credence to Hamas propaganda, being too slow to rectify misinformation, and intentionally spreading falsehoods, such as the claim that 70% of victims in Gaza were women and children.
Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, deserves credit for compiling the 20-page report that was the sledgehammer bringing Davie and Turness down and out. He wrote the report for the 14-member BBC board of directors that included the ejected director general.
Sources in Britain revealed that when the board did not take the report seriously enough, a frustrated Prescott sent it to top government officials, one of whom apparently leaked it to The Telegraph. A source involved behind the scenes said the board members were complacent instead of being open-minded about what needed to be changed and so “they were masters of their own fate.”
Respected former director of BBC Television Danny Cohen wrote a damning opinion piece in The Telegraph that made sure the report would be taken seriously.
The parts of the report that were about Trump were ultimately the smoking gun. If a Russian media outlet had done such a thing, the BBC would have been outraged.
Israel bias should have prompted firings
All due respect to the US president, who is rightfully contemplating suing the BBC. But Trump can be compared to the tax fraud that ultimately brought down the worst mobster of all time, Al Capone, who got away with countless crimes until then.
Davie and Turness should have lost their jobs long ago due to the BBC’s horribly biased coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict since well before the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, but even more so for the British broadcaster’s reporting of the war.
Respected British lawyer Trevor Asserson had dozens of lawyers and data scientists compile a damning September 2024 report revealing 1,500 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the coverage was heavily biased.
Plenty of Jewish organizations expressed outrage. But that did not create enough of a public outcry to end the tenures of the heads of the BBC, proving the indifference or even encouragement of upper management to what were continuous breaches of journalistic standards.
In July, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting published 10 reasons why Davie should be fired. It was actually quite difficult to whittle down the reasons to a digestible 10, leaving other strong cases on the cutting room floor.
The article came in the fallout over alternative hip-hop duo Bob Vylan‘s incendiary performance at the Glastonbury Festival. Despite chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF,” the BBC continued airing the live feed and kept the recording on its VOD service for several hours.
Davie was at the festival. He could have stopped the feed with a short text message, but he irresponsibly chose to do nothing.
Top 10 reasons to fire Davie
The list included these egregious examples of Israel-related controversies:
1. The refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists,” despite the UK designation of 2021. World Affairs editor John Simpson justified the decision by saying the BBC does not tell people “who to support and who to condemn.” But HonestReporting discovered that the BBC used the term for Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other international terror groups.
2. In February 2025, the BBC was forced to apologize for a documentary it commissioned on Gazan children after investigative journalist David Collier revealed that its teen narrator was the son of a Hamas minister and that his mother was paid by producers.
3. On October 17, 2023, the British broadcaster uncritically parroted Hamas’s claim that an Israeli strike killed 500 people at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital. Before the IDF released undeniable proof that it did not strike the hospital, whose parking lot was hit by an Islamic Jihad rocket, the BBC’s Jon Donnison declared it was “hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israel airstrike or several airstrikes.”
4. In November 2023, a BBC anchor claimed that the IDF entered Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, “targeting medical professionals and Arabic speakers.” The company later apologized because the truth was that the IDF announced that it brought medical teams and Arabic speakers to help patients while pursuing wanted terrorists hiding there.
5. In a May 2025 interview on BBC Radio 4, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher made the baseless claim that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours without a flood of aid. The BBC itself later found the claim was based on a gross misrepresentation of data about possible malnutrition in the following year.
6. In a July 2023 interview with former prime minister Naftali Bennett about a counter-terror operation in Jenin, BBC presenter Anjana Gadgil questioned whether the IDF had set out to kill children because four terrorists killed were under 18. She accused the Israeli military of being “happy to kill children.”
7. In December 2021, a busload of Jewish kids celebrating Hanukkah was surrounded by men performing Nazi salutes and spitting at them. After footage from inside the bus was leaked, the BBC claimed that the phrase “dirty Muslims” could be heard from the bus. But a Hebrew speaker had actually said, “Call someone. It’s urgent.”
8. In March 2021, the BBC came under fire for hosting a panel discussion of mainly non-Jews on whether the Jewish people were an ethnic minority. The panel discussed whether Jews could be considered as such due to their successful integration within the UK.
9. The BBC coddled highly paid sportscaster Gary Lineker’s anti-Israel social media, including his sharing calls for Israel to be suspended from FIFA. His posts referred to the IDF’s fight against Hamas in Gaza as a genocide.
10. BBC chairman Richard Sharp met in 2022 with then-Palestinian envoy Husam Zomlot, who is known for defending the Palestinian Authority’s pro-terror policies and has been accused of denying the Holocaust. They took a picture in front of a map of “Palestine” that encompassed the entire State of Israel.
No ‘Zionist conspiracy’ here
The Prescott report included many other egregious examples, but the BBC heads would have been forced to resign for just Trump, even if the Middle East coverage was found to be unbiased.
While that may be frustrating, perhaps it was better for Israel that the broadcaster’s heads were not brought down by a ‘Zionist conspiracy.’ Davie and Turness needed to go, no matter what ultimately inflamed enough controversy to spark their resignations.
No matter who replaces Davie and Turness, the fight against the BBC will go on – and media watchdogs and pro-Israel viewers will have to be even more vigilant than ever in holding it accountable.
The writer is the executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.