From the Telegraph – BBC’s bias ‘pushed Hamas lies around the world’:
The BBC’s Arabic news service chose to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza so it could “paint Israel as the aggressor”, according to an internal report by a whistleblower.
Allegations made against Israel were “raced to air” without adequate checks, the memo says, suggesting either carelessness or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”….
The BBC also gave “unjustifiable weight” to Hamas claims about the death toll in Gaza, which are widely accepted to have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes, and incorrectly claimed the International Court of Justice had ruled that genocide was taking place.
Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television – Now we have the evidence. The BBC knowingly helped spread Hamas lies and hate:
The leaked Prescott Report is a devastating document. It is an insider’s account of serious and widespread failings of impartiality, systemic bias and activist journalism spanning years of BBC news coverage.
It lays bare for the first time how senior BBC executives repeatedly tried to dismiss, downplay or excuse these failings in a total abdication of their responsibilities. In doing so, they failed to uphold the highest standards of public service journalism we must expect of the BBC.…
When The Telegraph earlier this year revealed the poisonous anti-Semitic social media posts of journalists regularly used by BBC Arabic, the BBC sought to downplay their role. Public statements referred to the men as “eyewitnesses” and “not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team”.
This leaked memo reveals that one of those men, Samer Elzaenen – who called on social media for Jews to be burnt as “Hitler did” – appeared on BBC Arabic 244 times between November 2023 and April 2025.
Ahmad Alagha, who described Jews as “devils” and Israelis as less than human, appeared a staggering 522 times on BBC Arabic news programmes during the same period. That is a remarkable amount of times to have been an “eyewitness”. Yet the truth of this has been hidden from licence-fee payers.
Not only was BBC Arabic routinely platforming Jew-hating journalists, it was also promoting Hamas lies over facts. A BBC Arabic article covering the harrowing story of a Yazidi sex slave rescued from Gaza devoted almost 600 words to a Hamas statement calling the woman a liar.
Faced with undeniable evidence of flagrant bias BBC executives chose, both in private and in public, to deliver a full-throated defence of BBC Arabic’s “exceptional journalism”.
And this rot is not confined to BBC Arabic.
The Prescott document also exposes how the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight highlighted claims that thousands of babies were on the brink of starvation in Gaza that it already knew to be false.
And it charts how BBC News gave extensive coverage to stories that painted Israel as the aggressor while burying stories that contradicted that narrative. Even the BBC’s own exclusive story that the media had widely misunderstood the International Criminal Court’s ruling on “genocide” in Gaza was buried.
As I read page after page of shocking revelations, I felt a growing sense of dismay towards those at the top of the BBC who have spent two years assuring me and others within the British Jewish community that they take issues of anti-Semitism and bias seriously. This report provides hard evidence that the BBC has been gaslighting us.
That the BBC has helped to push Hamas lies around the world and fuelled anti-Semitism at home cannot now be in doubt.
None of this comes as a surprise – but yes, it’s important to have this new evidence of the part the BBC has played in damning Israel, and stoking antisemitism here in the UK.
Mick Hartley 