Mick Hartley

This comes as no surprise. From the Telegraph:

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, refused anti-Semitism training for the broadcaster, the Government’s adviser on anti-Jewish hatred has revealed.

Lord Mann, Sir Keir Starmer’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, said he had visited BBC bosses to offer training on three occasions since taking up his role in 2019.

However, he said senior figures, including Mr Davie himself, turned down his repeated offers despite growing fears of an anti-Semitism problem at the BBC.

In a strongly worded condemnation of the broadcaster, Lord Mann accused it of failing to take seriously allegations of anti-Semitism and alleged anti-Israel bias in its reporting, saying there was an “arrogance at the top”.

He called for senior executives of the news corporation to be sacked for signing off on a controversial documentary.

Titled Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, it attempted to tell the story of children living in the Gaza Strip during the war between Israel and Hamas.

However, revelations that the narrator was the child of a Hamas government official in Gaza caused an uproar in February.

Hamas – which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK – orchestrated and carried out the biggest atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 2023.

An internal BBC review found “serious flaws” in the making of the documentary, which was pulled from iPlayer shortly after broadcast.

Referring to the scandal, Lord Mann said: “Heads should roll. And the heads that roll shouldn’t just be the little heads. You know that’s always the danger with organisations the size of the BBC. Oh hey, there’s something wrong, let’s get rid of a few of the people at the bottom. No, let’s get rid of some at the top, would be my view.

“Someone at the top should carry the can. It’s not acceptable and I’ve been in there several times, I’ve offered them training, they’ve never accepted it. I think there’s often an arrogance there.”

Also, from an interview in the Sunday Times today with Danny Cohen, former BBC director of Television:

For years after he left the BBC, Cohen was careful not to criticise his former employer publicly. The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, changed this. “I didn’t feel I had a choice,” Cohen says, making clear that he is speaking in a personal capacity. “If I’d said nothing, I’d probably look back in ten years’ time and think I let myself and my community down by not speaking up.”

After the massacre the BBC did not describe the Hamas gunmen as terrorists. Then, last month, the broadcaster showed a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, about the conflict in the region. Hours after it went out it emerged that the 13-year-old boy who narrated it was the son of a minister in the Hamas government. The BBC subsequently removed the documentary from iPlayer.

“It’s been a disastrous moment for the BBC, and they’ve had to acknowledge very significant failures of journalism and oversight,” Cohen says. “Very senior people at the BBC saw the doc before it went out and didn’t ask enough questions.” He doesn’t name her, but he means Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. Cohen has been calling for an independent inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the conflict.

“That is not an isolated moment — it’s an issue of systemic bias,” he argues, pointing to all the corrections — 80 in the first five months of the war — made by the BBC’s Arabic news channel after complaints of anti-Israeli bias. “The BBC continues to put defending the reputation of the BBC above transparency.”

Was it an issue when he was at the BBC? “I think there has always been a problem, but nothing on the scale it is now.”