The BBC is in crisis - for all the wrong reasons.

The BBC whitewashed Israel's genocide. Now it has capitulated to Trump

The BBC is in crisis - for all the wrong reasons. What is going on right now is a chilling indicator about the direction Britain - as well as much as the West - is heading in.

Tim Davie, the director general, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News, have resigned after a leaked dossier written by Michael Prescott, whose title is an independent advisor to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

Michael Prescott is former chief political correspondent and political editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, before becoming a corporate lobbyist. We’ll talk more about his appointment.

The dossier was leaked to the hard right Daily Telegraph. That’s not an unfair characterisation: the Telegraph has always been a right-wing newspaper, but like the modern right across the West, it has become more extreme.

The dossier alleges “systemic problems” at the BBC. The most high profile example centres on the speech made by Donald Trump in January 2020 in advance of the attempted insurrection by his supporters, which attempted to illegally overturn the presidential election outcome, which Trump falsely claimed had been rigged. This centres on how the BBC programme Panorama edited that speech.

But the dossier also makes allegations against the BBC’s Arabic service, accusing it of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas biases, and makes further criticisms about the Corporation’s coverage of trans rights, accusing the BBC’s LGBTQ desk of not covering stories which raise what it describes as “difficult questions”.

Let’s just start with the Trump speech. What Panorama did is splice together two different parts of the speech which were 50 minutes apart. In the original speech he said “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

In the edit the speech was edited so that he appeared to say: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

While it is common practice to do edits where different parts of a speech are highlighted, there’s no question that this is a misleading edit which shouldn’t have happened.

But here’s the thing. The facts are that Donald Trump did incite an insurrection against those election results. It was completely stupid of Panorama to completely unnecessarily produce a misleading edit when there was more than enough evidence to establish this incontrovertible fact. And their misleading edit did not actually mislead audiences about that basic fact.

In the weeks leading up to the 6th January 2021, Trump did over and over again falsely claim that the election had been stolen and rigged, which was incitement on its own.

On 19th December 2020, he tweeted: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In the speech itself, he said:

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

He also said: “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

During the insurrection, his aides, Congressional allies, and even his daughter pleaded with him to tell the mob to go home. He refused to act on their demands. But during the violence he tweeted about his Vice President Mike Pence - who he disowned for accepting the election results - that he “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

This was certainly interpreted as incitement against Pence by some of Trump’s own supporters.

It wasn’t until more than 3 hours after the insurrection began that he recorded a video asking supporters to “go home”, whilst also adding “We love you; you’re very special.”

Trump was then impeached by the House for “incitement of insurrection”, but then thanks to his supporters he was acquitted in the Senate.

In the House of Representatives report into the insurrection in 2022, it was concluded that Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”

When he was re-elected President, Trump pardoned those who took part in the insurrection - and today has further pardoned dozens of allies accused of trying to overturn the result.

The basic fact is - Trump incited an insurrection which sought to overturn the presidential election. Panorama did not mislead viewers in the sense of making them believe he did something he didn’t do. Their edit was stupid - and it was pointless. And nobody noticed it - there were no complaints at the time, either from the public or from Trump’s team. That’s presumably because it didn’t detract from the basic truth of what Trump did, and was thus completely inconsequential.

But now Trump and his followers have succeeded in ousting the top brass of the BBC. A far right demagogue - the leader of a foreign nation who is currently seeking to dismantle democracy, not least with his war on critical media.

On his TruthSocial platform he has posted:

The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th. Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt “Journalists.” These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!

He has further posted a Daily Mail article by former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson, threatening to cancel his licence fee over the saga, and a Daily Telegraph article with the headline ‘Trump goes to war with ‘fake news’ BBC’

His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has boasted about Trump successfully defeating the BBC. She posted screenshots of the Telegraph’s ‘Trump goes to war with ‘fake news’ BBC’ with the BBC headline ‘Tim Dacie resigns as BBC director general over Trump documentary edit’, accompanied by the text ‘Shot’ and ‘Chaser’

She then posted “@BBCNews is dying because they are anti-Trump Fake News Everyone should watch @GBNEWS!”

Completely normal there: a foreign power openly intervening in our media environment, and boasting of ousting the leadership of our public broadcaster.

The right wing hacks at GB News should be embarrassed that they are openly lauded by an authoritarian foreign government: any media organisation tasked with reporting on world news should clearly not be in a situation where they are embraced by any government. They won’t be embarrassed - they will be delighted, because for some reason, despite our broadcasting rules, we now have an openly right-wing propaganda TV channel operating in this country.

This comes in the context of Donald Trump reshaping the US media in his image. His ally Elon Musk runs X. Mark Zuckerberg shifted his Meta algorithms in his favour after Trump threatened to jail him, and put Trump supporters at the top. Trump has launched absurd vexatious lawsuits against media organisations and they have absurdly folded. His supporters are buying up US news organisations, like CBS News. He is stripping press credentials from media outlets which displease him, while seeking to impose outrageous restrictions on reporting from the Pentagon - leading to a media boycott.

We could go on: but Trump is clearly copying the playbook of the Orban regime in Hungary, which has taken apart independent media. And now he has even managed to secure a victory over the BBC, a foreign news organisation with a global reach.

A question we need answering is - did Donald Trump and his administration intervene behind the scenes over this, contributing to the resignations of the BBC top brass? Unfortunately we are unlikely to have answers to that for a very long time.

Let’s just go through the other elements of this dossier - starting with trans rights. Britain has been in the grip of an anti-trans moral panic for many years in which newspapers have waged a ceaseless and remorseless campaign against a tiny minority whose lives are very difficult - portraying them as would be predators, threats to children, as depraved, as mentally ill - we could go on: basically all the same attacks media organisations launched at gay people in the 1980s and 1990s. The realities that trans people suffer - abuse, mental distress, languishing on years-long waiting lists - are erased. Unfortunately this time the moral panic has fused with the rise of hard right wing authoritarian populism. Those movements have made opposition to trans rights a signature issue.

The idea that the BBC has offered some sort of counterweight to that is beyond gaslighting.

For example, they published a piece in 2021 originally headlined ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’. They were later forced to conclude it violated the broadcaster’s standards on accuracy, because it relied on an unscientific survey by an anti-trans rights campaign group, called Get the L Out - which means Get the L out of LGBTQ, in protest at the inclusion of ‘T’, i.e. trans people. It used a self-selected survey of 80 people to suggest 56% of lesbians “reported being pressured or coerced to accept a trans woman as a sexual partner”. They also relied on testimony from someone who elsewhere described trans women as “vile, weak and disgusting”. They accepted their headline was misleading, because it actually referred to alleged internalised pressure rather than pressure from trans women.

In actual fact, research by YouGov found that amongst lesbians who are cis - that is not trans - 68% have a ‘very positive’ view about trans people, 16% fairly positive, 10% neither negative nor positive, with only a tiny number having negative views. Indeed, cis lesbians have the most positive views towards trans people compared to gay men and bi people. Bisexual women had nearly exactly the same positive views.

There’s also the likes of the flagship BBC Today programme presenter Justin Webb, who does nothing to disguise his views about the topic. Indeed a complaint was upheld against him when he said, on air: “Trans women, in other words males.”

As for Israel’s genocide Palestine: the report focused on the BBC’s Arabic news service, which it is claimed sought to “minimise Israeli suffering” so it could “paint Israel as the aggressor”. Much of this relied on comparing its reporting to that of the main BBC news website, which we’ll come on to. There are claims about contributors who elsewhere said hateful things about Jewish people - obviously there should be proper vetting of all contributors.

It’s important to say that BBC Arabic have done more reporting to humanise Palestinians than many of their colleagues. They did work, along with the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring, on how Facebook censored Palestinian news outlets - this is work the main BBC should have done.

There is this claim that the BBC pushed false Hamas claims about the death toll. The basic undeniable fact is that the official death toll in Gaza is a drastic underestimate - as multiple academic studies have shown.

Even the right wing Economist - which backed Israel’s genocidal onslaught - estimated that as of May 5th, that is 6 months ago, the upper end estimate of violent deaths alone was twice as high as the official death toll. Their lowest end estimate was still 25,000 deaths higher than the official figures.

But here’s the overall point. The BBC’s reporting on Israel’s genocide is overall a national scandal. It’s a scandal because it whitewashed what a consensus of genocide experts have concluded is a genocide - not that you would know this from the vast majority of BBC reporting. It failed to report or give proper weight to statements of genocidal intent by Israeli leaders and officials, it failed to report on multiple Israeli atrocities or attribute responsibility for mass slaughters, it repeatedly framed reporting around official Israeli claims despite the objectively huge evidence that Israeli lies over and over again, it treated Palestinian life as having a tiny fraction of the worth of an Israeli life, - we could go on.

And that is shown in the facts. A report by the Centre for Media Monitoring earlier this year analysed 35,000 pieces of BBC content, from broadcast to online, in the first year of the genocide. It found that the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality, despite 34 times more Palestinians having been killed - and that is a drastic underestimate, because the official death toll doesn’t include large numbers of people killed. The BBC used emotive terms 4 times more for Israeli victims, and applied the term massacre 18 times more. BBC presenters failed to mention Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements at all. They interviewed much fewer Palestinians - 1,085 - than Israelis - 2,350 - on TV and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective - 2,340 times compared to 217 times.

These figures are just the tip of a scandalous iceberg.

The BBC top brass should be resigning - over the Corporation’s complicity in genocide. Instead, reality has been turned on its head - which the Labour government, in their efforts to protect themselves from scrutiny of their own complicity genocide, have helped.

Now more on Michael Prescott, who wrote this report. As the Guardian’s Jane Martinson reports:

“Concerns about an apparent conflict of interest were raised when Johnson appointed Prescott to advise Ofcom over its new chair four years ago. Prescott, whose PR firm Hanover was involved in advising media companies such as Sky, has also been described as a friend of Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative government head of communications who joined the BBC board after helping to launch the rightwing news channel GB News. However, Prescott was allowed to continue in that role, and a government spokesperson said on Prescott’s behalf that the appointment was “fair and open and there are no conflicts of interest”. He was later appointed external adviser to the BBC standards board.

Gibb himself is understood to have written a long and critical note about BBC coverage to the board in early September, a few weeks before Prescott. BBC sources tell me that the chair, Samir Shah, immediately ordered Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews, to work on a response and a briefing was discussed at the board on 16 October.”

Robbie Gibb sits on the BBC Board, and on the “Editorial guidelines and standards committee’. I wrote this earlier this year:

“The brother of a Tory minister, he joined the BBC as a political researcher after he graduated, before becoming chief of staff for Tory Shadow Chancellor Francis Maude. He then returned to the BBC as deputy editor of the flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, then became the editor for BBC political programmes such as Daily Politics, where he worked closely with its main presenter, Andrew Neil, then chairman of the hard right Spectator magazine. He then went off in 2017 to become director of communications for the Tory prime minister Theresa May. He then returned to the BBC, joining its Board.

He was singled out by the likes of former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis who said he was an “active agent of the Conservative party” who was shaping the Corporation’s news output by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”.

In 2020, he led a consortium bid to buy The Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper which rather than doing what is vitally important - offering media representation for Britain’s Jewish community - has acted as a zealous cheerleader of the Israeli state.”

As noted by Martinson, too, he helped found the right-wing propaganda machine that is GB News.

On Friday, the Guardian reported the following:

Sources have told the Guardian that Gibb was instrumental in the appointment of Prescott as an adviser to the EGSC. They have previously been reported as being friends. Prescott left his BBC advisory role in the summer.

Johnson said the idea there was an effort to undermine the BBC’s leadership was “complete and utter bollocks”.

The Guardian approached Gibb for comment, who referred them to the BBC, who said:

The BBC board is made up of 13 members, five of whom are appointed by government including Sir Robbie Gibb.

The editorial guidelines and standards committee is not involved in day-to-day output. It looks at editorial matters post-broadcast, including complaints.

[The editorial adviser roles] were advertised externally as part of the BBC’s open and fair competition process, and Michael Prescott was interviewed by a panel of board members who made the collective decision to appoint him.

The Guardian further note that “Gibb was on the four-person panel that interviewed Prescott for the role.”

In Prescott’s dossier, he is quoted as saying:

I have never been a member of any political party and do not hold any hard and fast views on matters such as American politics or disputes in the Middle East. My views on the BBC’s treatment of the subjects covered below do not come with any political agenda.

Here is what we do know. The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, is a former Conservative activist. The BBC’s political reporting - as well as its reporting on the genocide - is a travesty, having been bent to suit the interests of the Conservative Party during its 14 year reign. But for the likes of The Telegraph, and for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and The Daily Mail, the very existence of the BBC - however hobbled and compromised - is an affront. They want to destroy it.

Strikingly, according to David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun newspaper:

The fall of Tim Davie is a victory for populists , for a cabal of toxic plotters with links to the BBC board - who designed and executed a coup - and the circular firing squad in the UK press. It is not a good day for our values or our country.

And meanwhile the pro-Israel lobby wants to ensure that the British media is universally and unapologetically pro-Israel - with any deviation from that, however mild or useless, stigmatised. They are now celebrating what’s happened here, because they have seized on this saga to promote the idea that the BBC is somehow anti-Israel in defiance of all the facts.

The ousting of the BBC brass on these terms will have consequences: a BBC that is even more cowardly about reporting on Donald Trump, which promotes anti-trans beliefs even more stridently, and which is even more pro-Israel in its reporting.

Notably, they’re not even going to appease Trump, who has threatened legal action against the BBC.

This is a truly chilling moment, and it requires all of us to speak the truth more loudly.