It is plain to most that the BBC is biased towards Israel, but that hasn’t stopped a tsunami of coverage claiming the reverse is the case, reports Des Freedman

You might think that the world has finally come to its senses. A comprehensive review has found that the BBC has breached its editorial guidelines on accuracy in relation to its coverage of the war on Gaza.

However, this isn’t because the corporation has disproportionately reported Israeli deaths over Palestinian ones or that it has delegitimised Palestinian casualties by still referring to the ‘Hamas-run Health Ministry’ (as a recent report from the Centre for Media Monitoring shows).

The BBC hasn’t been hauled over the coals for ignoring decades of occupation as the vital context for understanding the violence against Palestinians nor is it in trouble for refusing to talk about a genocide and harassing those who do try to mention it on air.

Instead, the Johnston Review finds that the BBC has breached a single guideline on accuracy by failing to mention that the father of the child narrator of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas administration in Gaza.

Although the review didn’t find any evidence that ‘the Narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the Programme in any way’ (p.1), this didn’t stop the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, apologising to the world for ‘a significant failing in relation to accuracy’ nor culture secretary Lisa Nandy talking about ‘catastrophic failures over recent weeks’.

Yet Davie has never apologised for the Corporation’s clearly documented failings in relation to BBC coverage of Gaza that consistently marginalises and dehumanises Palestinians.

Instead, both the BBC and government are horrified when the true scale of support for Palestine bursts through onto our screens. The BBC scrutinised in advance at least seven bands they were planning to livestream at Glastonbury who the corporation described as ‘high risk’ (ie who might show solidarity with Gaza on air), even though this clearly didn’t work that well for them in the case of Bob Vylan.

Do they do this kind of ‘due diligence’ before the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, who is regularly accused of using genocidal language, makes an appearance on the BBC?

The BBC also never apologised for refusing to screen the harrowing documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. In fact, head of news, Deborah Turness, said that it would be ‘impossible for us to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality’. Yet Channel 4 was able to transmit the programme without any sanctions. The Observer has since reported that script meetings between the documentary’s producers and BBC executives were ‘dominated’ by the corporation’s fear of upsetting pro-Israel voices, not by the corporation’s commitment to make sure that audiences were able to witness the true horror of the Israeli assault on medical staff in Gaza.

Media response

Meanwhile, the official review into the integrity of How to Survive a Warzone finds that the programme was scrupulous in every respect apart from identifying the narrator’s father (which the review states was not intentional). However, even here, the review finds no fault with the actual content of the narration which ‘is factual and carries balance where required’ (p.19).

Overall: ‘I do not find there to have been any issues with accuracy, fairness or due impartiality of the reporting in the Programme in the context of the Israel-Gaza war. The production took place in an extremely difficult context, an active warzone, and I find that this was addressed with appropriate care and sensitivity’ (p.27).

This is hardly the ‘smoking gun’ that the government was alleging and that pro-Israel voices have been promising since it first aired. In fact, in virtually every way, the programme appears to be a model of caution and responsibility.

For example, despite claims that licence-fee cash made its way straight to Hamas through payments to the narrator’s family, the review concludes that there is no evidence ‘to suggest that the Programme funds were spent other than for reasonable, production-related purposes’ (p.2) and that full sanctions checks were carried out.

The review finds additionally that while some pro-Israel voices criticised the translation of Yahud as ‘Israelis’ and not ‘Jews’, ‘I do not find there to have been any editorial breaches in respect of the Programme’s translation’ (p.24). Where critics talked of misleading sequencing in the programme, the review finds no such evidence (p.25).

In spite of all this, the media’s response has been overwhelmingly to focus not on the review’s overall praise for the documentary but on the single breach of accuracy (or, in the case of the Sun, to quote the pro-Israel activist David Collier calling the BBC ‘a once respected state broadcaster [that has turned into] a propaganda outlet for a radical Islamic terror group’).

Head of news Deborah Turness has suggested that, following the Review, the BBC ‘will now explore the possibility of re-editing some of the material in short form’.

This is outrageous. When Laura Kuenssberg was found to have breached the same guidelines on accuracy – as well as its impartiality rules – when she misrepresented then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s position on the shoot-to-kill policy, I don’t remember her being taken off air or the BBC only using her ‘in short form’.

Indeed, she remains the host of its main Sunday morning news programme, interviewing the Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes about the fantasy that the BBC is biased against, not in favour of, Israel.

The BBC needs immediately to restore Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone to the iPlayer.

Yet what’s more likely to happen is that pro-Israel critics will continue to lambast the corporation, the government will carry on expressing its disappointment at the BBC’s ‘failures’ and the BBC itself will continue to refuse to talk about Palestinians facing genocide.

The Palestine movement is more needed than ever to challenge this madness. It’s not Glastonbury performers and documentary makers who are the outliers but our political and media elite panicking about growing support for Gaza that are the odd ones out.