George Orwell at the BBC
The resignations of Tim Davie, BBC director general, and Deborah Turness, BBC head of news, after an intense, right-wing campaign led by the Daily Telegraph reveals much about the state of British ‘mainstream’ media.
Before we discuss the latest scandal, consider first some relevant facts about BBC coverage of the Middle East. In June 2025, a devastating indictment of BBC ‘impartiality’ was published by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) in the form of a detailed report into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza. The stated aim of CfMM is to ‘promote fair, accurate and responsible journalism about Muslims and Islam through verifiable evidence and constructive engagement.’
The report examined BBC content from 7 October 2023 to 7 October 2024. A total of 3,873 BBC articles and 32,092 segments broadcast on BBC television and radio were analysed. CfMM’s key findings were:
- Palestinian deaths treated as less newsworthy: Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs 201 Israelis).
- Systematic language bias favouring Israelis: BBC used emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims, applied ‘massacre’ 18 times more to Israeli casualties, and used ‘murder’ 220 times for Israelis versus once for Palestinians.
- Suppression of genocide allegations: BBC presenters shut down genocide claims in over 100 documented instances whilst making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements, including Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek reference (see below).
- Muffling Palestinian voices: The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 v 2,350) on television and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217).
These findings suggest that the BBC values the lives of Israelis considerably more than the lives of Palestinians. This appalling revelation was apparently not a resigning matter for senior BBC figures.
At the parliamentary launch of the CfMM report, Richard Burgess, the BBC director of news content, was challenged by Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. The exchange was filmed by a participant at the meeting. Oborne robustly confronted Burgess with as many as six ways in which BBC News has misled its audiences:
1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, implemented by Israel on 7 October 2023, that permitted the Israeli killing of Israeli civilians to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. See our media alert from February 2025.
2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine which underlies Israel’s murderous ‘mowing the lawn’ Gaza strategy over the past two decades: repeated devastating assaults on the Palestinians to weaken their resistance to the brutal and illegal Israeli occupation, and to make it easier to ethnically cleanse them.
3. The BBC has not reported the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials. In particular, the BBC buried Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to ‘Amalek’; a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth.
4. By contrast, on more than 100 occasions when guests tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as genocide, BBC staff immediately shut them down on air.
5. The BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
6. Finally, Oborne observed that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University, has never been invited to appear by the BBC.
Burgess gave a feeble, bureaucratic response excusing himself, saying that, ‘My role is to direct the journalists and I’m not a Middle East expert’. When Hamza Yusuf of Declassified UK challenged Burgess to explain why the BBC was not reporting British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, the BBC editor gave this bizarre and misleading answer:
‘I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel.’
Why did Burgess say ‘in Israel’? Why did he erase Palestine? Was he actually unaware that Gaza is an occupied Palestinian territory? Nobody was asking the BBC to ‘overplay’ what the UK is doing; but simply to report its role, rather than bury it to the point of invisibility. Whitewashing genocide as ‘what’s happening in Israel’ is wretched BBC newspeak.
But there was no national scandal, no media outrage and denunciations. As far as we could tell, the exchanges with Richard Burgess were not reported anywhere in the UK national press. Only the National newspaper in Scotland reported it. No BBC heads rolled.
The BBC Is a ‘Leftist Propaganda Machine’?
This time it is different. The hard-right Daily Telegraph, famously antagonistic towards the supposed lefty-liberal-biased BBC, was leaked an internal BBC memo written by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. Prescott had previously been a journalist, including a decade at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, where he was the chief political correspondent and later the political editor.
Prescott’s 8,000-word report said that a BBC Panorama documentary, broadcast in October 2024, edited a Donald Trump speech so that he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021.
In his speech in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, Trump had said:
‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.’
However, in the Panorama edit he was shown saying:
‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.’
The two sections of the speech that were edited together were more than 50 minutes apart. The ‘fight like hell’ comment was taken from a section where Trump alleged how ‘corrupt’ US elections are.
More widely, Prescott accused the corporation of ‘serious and systemic’ bias in its editorial coverage, including BBC Arabic’s reporting of ‘the Israel-Gaza war’ which was supposedly anti-Israel and pro-Hamas. All of this was catnip to the right-wing media and commentators who immediately used it as a weapon to attack the BBC.
The Telegraph led with a front-page story headlined: ‘BBC’s Trump bias exposed in memo leak’
The following day, the Telegraph headlined on its front page Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s call that: ‘Heads “should roll over BBC bias”’.
The Telegraph also published a comment piece from Danny Cohen, former director of BBC television, under the headline:
‘Now we have the evidence. The BBC knowingly helped spread Hamas lies and hate’
The sub-headline was: ‘The rot has spread far beyond the infamous Arabic service’
Cohen claimed: ‘An internal report reveals that the BBC has knowingly spread Hamas propaganda and anti-Semitic hate.’
A few days after the leaked memo was reported by the Telegraph, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the BBC as ‘100% fake news’. She added that British taxpayers were being ‘forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine’. The notion that the BBC is a ‘leftist propaganda machine’ is an exotic, bizarre reversal of reality.
A report in the Guardian quoted an anonymous BBC insider saying that the BBC board member that ‘led the charge’ over Prescott’s claims was Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief who also helped to found the right-wing news channel GB News. Gibb is a controversial figure even among BBC journalists, where he has been accused of interfering in stories where he perceives the editorial line to be left-leaning or ‘woke’. Reportedly, Gibb, a friend of Prescott’s, was the driving force behind then prime minister Boris Johnson’s appointment of Prescott to the BBC’s editorial committee.
In 2020, Gibb led a consortium to buy the right-wing Jewish Chronicle, an ardent supporter of the state of Israel, whose journalism has been repeatedly discredited, even leading to several long-time columnists resigning. Alan Rusbridger, former Guardian editor, observed last year that the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, appointed by Gibb, is ‘bitterly critical of the BBC’s reporting of the war’ for supposedly being anti-Israel. Again, a reversal of reality.
As Rusbridger noted:
‘How can Gibb possibly back his own editor while sitting on the board of the BBC, which is said by the same man [Wallis Simons] to actively hate Israel?’
After Davie and Turness had resigned, Trump responded that they had left the BBC: ‘because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th.’
He added:
‘These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. What a terrible thing for Democracy!’
Trump has now threatened a $1 billion lawsuit against the BBC if they do not withdraw the offending Panorama documentary.
Political columnist Steve Richards, a regular presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, observed:
‘It’s ironic but predictable that the BBC duo – who tried so hard to please the right wing papers – are removed by the right wing papers.’
The poet, author and academic Michael Rosen noted wryly:
‘Tim Davie was privately educated, went to Cambridge and was a Tory candidate and deputy chair of a local Conservative Party Association. Clear case of left-wing bias. If the left wing rot’s gotta stop, then we need to start with private schools, Cambridge and the Tory Party.’
Pro-Israel Impunity at the BBC
Richard Sanders, an award-winning producer who has made over fifty films in history, news and current affairs, including Al-Jazeera’s ‘October 7’ and ‘The Labour Files’ documentaries, noted via X:
‘BBC Panorama’s Trump gaff was shockingly poor.
‘But the contrast between the furore it’s caused and the silence over their far more egregious 2019 doc on Corbyn reveals the reaction to these scandals is all about the interests at stake – not the scale of the crime.’
Sanders is referring here to the notorious Panorama documentary, ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?, by John Ware, who had previously made clear his antagonism towards Corbyn’s politics. As we wrote in a media alert at the time, it quickly became clear that the programme makers were not interested in a serious appraisal of the supposed evidence and that the question was merely rhetorical.
The entire thrust of the programme was that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was antisemitic. The Panorama broadcast was immediately followed by BBC News at Ten which gave it extensive coverage, pumping up the propaganda value of the bogus ‘investigation’.
At the time, Peter Oborne, mentioned above, said via Twitter:
‘I proposed to the BBC a documentary on Tory Islamophobia three years ago [in 2016]. Zero interest.’
In a carefully researched and detailed series called ‘The Labour Files’, produced by the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, Sanders exposed the multiple deceptions of the Panorama documentary. One of these concerned Ben Westerman, a Jewish member of Labour’s disputes team. He claimed to Ware in the documentary that he had personally encountered antisemitism during a face-to-face disciplinary meeting with a Labour activist. He claimed that the person had asked him where he was from and, when Westerman refused to say, had asked him if he was from Israel.
As Al Jazeera revealed, Westerman had been interviewing Helen Marks, a Jewish Labour party activist who had been accused of antisemitism. She had been accompanied to the meeting by her friend, Rica Bird, also a Jewish woman. It was Bird who had asked Westerman where he was from. But she had actually asked him which local branch of the Labour Party he was from. She had never asked him if he was from Israel. The women had a tape recording to prove their version of events. As far as we are aware, Panorama has never issued an apology for this appalling misrepresentation.
As we observed in our media alert on 5 October 2022, there was a shocking, if entirely predictable, mass media blanket of silence in response to ‘The Labour Files’.
Sanders added on the current scandal:
‘Whatever you think of the BBC today is a bleak, bleak day for British broadcasting. The Trump gaffe was poor – but it happened a year ago, and no-one in Trump’s team had noticed.
‘Equally worrying, Prescott clearly had an agenda where coverage of Gaza was concerned. His principal criticism of BBC Arabic was that it wasn’t similar enough to BBC English – which, by any objective, purely journalistic criteria is a good thing.
‘Today’s events lay bare the immense pressures operating behind the scenes and help explain why the BBC’s coverage of Gaza has been so abject over the last 2 years. It’ll now get worse.’
He continued:
‘Ironic this should happen on same day this excruciating video emerges of Mossad fan boy Raffi Berg. Yes – this really is the person who has been BBC Online’s Middle East News Editor throughout the assault on Gaza.’
Sanders then linked to a clip where Berg was interviewed about his book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort. Berg said that, in writing the book, he had been ‘accepted into a circle of trust among the people who belonged to, some of whom still work for, the Mossad’. He added: ‘as a Jewish person and an admirer of the state of Israel’, Mossad’s ‘fantastic operations’ made him ‘tremendously proud… talking about it still gives me goosebumps’. The public is to understand that Berg is an impartial BBC news editor on issues related to Israel and Palestine.
Berg has now launched legal proceedings against Owen Jones and Drop Site News. This is in response to a long and detailed article, including interviews with anonymous former and current BBC journalists, that Jones published last December titled, ‘The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza’.
When the BBC refused to show the powerful documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, it compounded its complicity in Israel’s genocide. The Corporation’s earlier withdrawal of ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, had already epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby (see our media alert here).
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack detailed how Israel has systematically targeted hospitals, health care centres, medics themselves and even their families. Doctors told the filmmakers of how they had been detained, beaten and tortured by the Israelis, confirmed by an anonymous Israeli whistleblower. The nonsensical reason given by the BBC for cancelling the film, which it had itself commissioned from Basement Films, was the risk that broadcasting it would create ‘a perception of partiality’. Reporting the truth about Israel’s crimes would be ‘partial’? Such inversion of reality has become standard for the national broadcaster.
The film was instead shown by Channel 4 on 2 July. After watching it, Gary Lineker, who had essentially been pushed out of the BBC for his honesty on Gaza and other issues, said that, ‘The BBC should hang its head in shame.’
Ben de Pear, the documentary’s executive producer for Basement Films and a former Channel 4 News editor, accused the BBC of trying to gag him and others over its decision not to show the documentary. In a statement that he posted to LinkedIn, de Pear said the film had passed through many ‘BBC compliance hoops’ and that the BBC were now attempting to stop him talking about the film’s ‘painful journey’ to the screen:
‘I rejected and refused to sign the double gagging clause the BBC bosses tried multiple times to get me to sign. Not only could we have been sued for saying the BBC refused to air the film (palpably and provably true) but also if any other company had said it, the BBC could sue us.
‘Not only could we not tell the truth that was already stated, but neither could others. Reader, I didn’t sign it.’
At a conference in Sheffield, de Pear criticised Tim Davie, then still the BBC director-general, over the BBC’s decision to drop the film:
‘All the decisions about our film were not taken by journalists, they were taken by Tim Davie. He is just a PR person. Tim Davie is taking editorial decisions which, frankly, he is not capable of making.’
How ironic that quote sounds now.
Meanwhile, BBC News daily regurgitates Israeli propaganda bullet points with impunity. Last week, BBC newsreader Clive Myrie announced on News at Ten:
‘Now, it’s almost a month since the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect. And, despite claims of violations, the truce is still holding.’
As B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has pointed out, since the ceasefire agreement took effect on 10 October 2025, Israel has killed at least 241 Palestinians in Gaza, 117 of them children. More than 600 people have been injured. If 241 Israelis had been killed over the past month, the BBC would certainly not have reported that ‘the truce is still holding’.
The latest events reveal that the BBC bends all too easily to sustained pressure from established power and the right-wing press.
