Mick Hartley

A look at the BBC’s anti-Israel bias at the Times of Israel, with former governor Ruth Deech:

British parliamentarian Ruth Deech had a bird’s-eye view of the BBC’s attitude towards Israel when she served on its governing body 20 years ago during the Second Intifada and the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Then, as now, since conflict erupted following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel, a furor roiled the UK’s public broadcaster over its coverage, which many see as unfairly biased against the Jewish state.

“It hasn’t changed at all,” Deech, a prominent academic who sits as an independent in the House of Lords, told The Times of Israel in an interview.

“There is a sort of ‘group think’ — an elite, well-educated, sophisticated, southern British mindset — which is very well meaning, adopts liberal causes, but is very easily influenced to believe that there is just one liberal cause and only one side to it,” she said.

“When I was a BBC governor, you walked through the studios, and there were piles and piles of Guardian newspapers and hardly anything else,” she said, referring to Britain’s leading left-wing publication.

That mindset, Deech believes, includes “an absolute obsession over Israel” prevalent within, but by no means confined to, the BBC.

Like all journalists, staff at the corporation dislike their reporting being challenged, but this is exacerbated at the BBC by what Deech terms “an inflated notion of their trustworthiness.”

“They believe in what they’re doing, and they think they must be right,” she said. They don’t want to be challenged. I used to say to them, ‘Yes, the public trusts you, but being trusted is not the same as being accurate.’”…

Last year, Deech and Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, published a report examining the corporation’s reporting of Israel’s war in Gaza. The report — which was endorsed by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Community Security Trust and UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis — alleged that whenever it is “faced with the choice of whose account or narrative to believe, it seldom points in Israel’s direction. For Hamas in this war, proof is rarely necessary. For the IDF and Israel, proof is rarely enough.”…

Deech accuses the BBC of “utterly distorted” coverage, noting the manner in which headlines often cite assertions made by Hamas. By contrast, Israel’s response is frequently relegated to “much lower down,” with caveats that Jerusalem’s claims have not been verified by the BBC.

“People look at the headline, and that’s what impresses itself on them,” Deech said. “They mislead all the time on that.”

And when they do belatedly correct themselves, as with the Al-Ahli Hospital blast, they don’t care. Jeremy Bowen said he had “no regrets” over blaming Israel, wrongly, for the explosion. It’s not about the truth – it’s about taking a stand against Israel at every opportunity.

Deech is not too complimentary about the universities either, where antisemitism is allowed to flourish with little or no pushback from timid vice chancellors.