BBC News Impartiality: Government's Role

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Michael Ellis]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Of course, it puts the BBC in that elevated status where the taxpayer is obliged to pay for it, and there are consequences from its poor leadership in this area. The BBC’s coverage of weekly pro-Palestinian marches has displayed an extraordinary disconnect from reality. It has repeatedly stressed that the marches are “mostly peaceful”, yet television reports have featured BBC journalists amidst crowds chanting genocidal refrains and brandishing flagrantly antisemitic placards. Not all viewers will have an understanding of those deplorable scenes and it is incumbent on the BBC to cover them responsibly.

On 30 October, the BBC posted a news item on its news app headlined, “Met Police chief wants clarity on extremism”. The article actually concerned the appalling displays of antisemitism and violent rhetoric at those pro-Palestinian rallies, but strangely the BBC saw fit to use a photograph of an Israeli flag as the banner image accompanying the piece. The message that would send to the casual reader is unmistakable: Israelis, or pro-Israel individuals, are the extremists.

I would like to touch on BBC Arabic now, which has repeatedly presented former Palestine Liberation Organisation Major General Wasif Erekat, who has celebrated the “heroic military miracle” of 7 October, as an independent military expert. Erekat has appeared on BBC Arabic at least 12 times since 7 October, despite having admitted to firing artillery shells on what he calls “Zionist positions” from Lebanon, and making outrageous remarks about how Hamas does not target civilians.

Concerns about bias within from the BBC are perhaps unsurprising when one considers some of the employment controversies engulfing the organisation, which I would like to touch on now. A scheduling co-ordinator for BBC3, Dawn Queva, branded Jewish people “Nazi apartheid parasites” and referred to the holocaust as the “holohoax”. In the wake of 7 October, BBC News Arabic journalists likened Hamas to freedom fighters and spoke of a morning of hope. A Beirut-based correspondent on BBC Arabic, Sanaa Khoury, tweeted that Israel’s prestige is “crying in the corner” and liked a comment about receiving sweets that were distributed in celebration of Hamas’s attack.

We have heard about Gary Lineker, who encapsulates the problem within the BBC. Lineker has shared a video with 8.9 million of his followers, with the offensive accusation that Israel is committing genocide and mourning the death of a Palestinian footballer, who was later revealed to be a “martyr fighter” for Hamas. He also shared a message calling for Israel to be banned from international football tournaments. Lineker has frankly made a mockery of new social media guidelines that had been drawn up following an earlier controversy over his politicised posts.

Amid that sorry state of affairs, it is perhaps unsurprising, though no less distressing, that the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, recently acknowledged that antisemitism was within the corporation. Perhaps that is not surprising, when “The Apprentice” star, who we have heard about recently, tweeted that Zionists were “odiously ogre-like”. The BBC compliance department apparently ruled that that was not antisemitic. Instead, they sent him on a diversity course. If Zionism were just a policy, and not a euphemism for Jews, as we all know it is, how can someone who supports a policy, of any sort, be physically ugly? That gives the lie to the whole charade. What they are really talking about when they say Zionists is, of course, Jews. Shamefully, BBC employees were prohibited from attending a major march against antisemitism last year, on the spurious grounds that it was controversial. Compounding that, BBC News saw fit to describe that as a pro-Jewish march.

The BBC has been criticised by Ofcom for its coverage, as many will recall, of a vile antisemitic attack on Jewish students in London in December 2021, finding that it had

“failed to observe its editorial guidelines on due impartiality and due accuracy.”

In that episode, the BBC had falsely accused Jewish victims of making anti-Muslim slurs. That was swiftly disproven, but the BBC failed to update its online news article for nearly two months, with no regard for the wellbeing of the attack victims and the wider Jewish community.

Simply, there have been too many examples of a lack of impartiality for the BBC to keep dismissing concerns. The BBC’s biased coverage throughout this conflict has undoubtedly had an impact on the public’s perception and the understanding of it, and has steered it in a more anti-Israel direction.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

What response has the right hon. and learned Member had from the BBC when he has raised these concerns? Is it taking action?

[Sir Michael Ellis]

I will be coming to that. We know that the BBC has received myriad complaints. The consequences of its lack of impartiality have been particularly acute for the UK’s Jewish community. Just as the Al-Ahli misreporting led to a violent spike in antisemitism across the world, so too has the relentless bias of BBC News coverage contributed to the record level of intimidation and attacks on British Jews.

It is interesting to note that more than three quarters of Jews in Britain—77%—believe that BBC coverage of the war in Gaza is biased against Israel, according to a recent poll by Survation for a newspaper. Dozens of current Jewish employees at the BBC are understood to have filed formal complaints related to their concerns about antisemitism, describing it as a “grim” and “frightening” time to be Jewish at the corporation. The BBC’s senior management has fundamentally failed to deal with this problem and uphold its own guidelines. The organisation now appears complicit in peddling misinformation and allowing antisemitism to fester. In those circumstances, I have come to the conclusion that the BBC is institutionally antisemitic.

It has now been 20 years since the Balen report into the BBC’s anti-Israel bias. The organisation has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of hard-working licence fee payers’ money to suppress that 20-year-old report. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to join me and add her voice to the calls for the BBC to finally publish that report. I wrote to the director general before Christmas, and he declined to release it. I also ask the Minister whether she would agree that the time has come to finally say that the BBC’s ability to mark its own homework must be removed. Existing complaints procedures are ineffective and do not command confidence.

I shall end by recounting the words of 22-year-old Noah Abrahams, who left his dream job at the BBC after its refusal to unequivocally call Hamas what it is: a terrorist organisation. Noah said that words have the power

“to fuel hate and put fuel on the fire…Words impact how we think, how we react, how we act. They have influence.”

I challenge all of us here to stand up for truth, challenge the BBC in its deeply entrenched bias, and call for accountability.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Thank you for your work in chairing today’s debate, Ms Bardell, and I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) on obtaining the debate. I will cover a few things, some of which have been covered and some of which have not been so much.

Public service broadcasting is incredibly important, and it is incredibly important that impartiality is measured and is there in the broadcasting. Many UK Government decisions have undermined the impartiality of the BBC, including the director-general being a former Tory candidate, and including a personal friend of Boris Johnson being made the chair of the BBC—a Tory donor who donated £400,000 to the party and lent £800,000 to Mr Johnson specifically. So there is an issue with impartiality—an issue with being seen to be impartial, as well as with potentially being impartial.

I have a BBC studio in my constituency that does local news in Aberdeen and has also been involved in some big events that have happened. For example, when the Queen passed away, it was the first on the scene reporting. I want to be clear to those people working in my constituency, and across the BBC, that we are not saying—nobody in this room, I think, is saying—that any of them individually are antisemitic, other than perhaps the ones that were mentioned by name. It is not—I do not think, from anyone—an attack on these individuals. I want to be clear that we value the work that they do and the fact that they do report in sometimes incredibly difficult conditions. Sometimes reporting is got wrong from every broadcaster; mistakes are made and they need to be as swiftly as possible rectified.

I want to be clear about the BBC’s position on what happened in relation to al-Ahli Hospital. It said that

“contrary to many reports—the BBC did not claim that the Israelis were responsible for the attack. We, along with many other…media organisations, reported initial claims by Palestinian officials and eye-witnesses…that this was an Israeli air strike…We attributed the claim to those making it.”

The BBC sought a response immediately from the IDF, and when

“the Israeli authorities countered those claims”,

the BBC “prominently and consistently” reported the position of the IDF. That is the BBC’s position. It may be an idea to watch back some of that coverage to see what exactly was said by the journalists at the time.

[Andrew Percy]

I like the hon. Lady and I hate to criticise her on this, but I think that that is not really credible. The BBC reported it, and I believe—I will check this—that it went out on push notifications. The fact remains that as a serious public broadcaster, on an issue as sensitive and as serious as this, the BBC should have applied independent verification to this story—as it demands and requires Israel to provide on claims—before it put that out and gave it such prominence. So I do not think that its response is really credible, with respect to the hon. Lady.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I just felt that this was the BBC’s position and I wanted that to be clear, because it does not have a voice in this debate right now.

[Sir Michael Ellis]

It may just help if I repeat the BBC’s breaking news Twitter account—the push notification to 51 million followers:

“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli airstrike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say”.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Which, in that, is attributed to Palestinian officials, but absolutely—I think it is worth watching it back. But the BBC position is that it was very clear about that.

On the ideas around the bias or the lack of impartiality, apparently 36% of the public see the BBC as neutral; 15% see the BBC as pro-Palestine; and 17% see it as pro-Israel. There have been protests outside BBC studios throughout Scotland suggesting that the BBC is in fact too pro-Israel. Those protests have taken place outside a number of BBC studios in Scotland, including twice in Aberdeen. Any of those things are concerning and worrying for staff. People absolutely have a right to protest. Whichever the view of the protesters, the protests can be worrying for people who are perhaps not anywhere near reporting on either what is happening in Gaza or on any other sort of foreign affairs.

[Andrew Percy]

I am sorry to do this again, but I heard this when I met the BBC. I have had it said to me that, “Look, a lot of people think we are pro-Palestinian. A lot of people think we are pro-Israeli.” That is irrelevant. It is about the actual coverage; it does not matter what the perception is. That does not mean that there is not an issue here. I have so far not found a single example of a BBC journalist who has had to be dealt with, suspended or reported for making pro-Israeli statements on their social media accounts, whereas there are plenty that relate to this. The fact that there might be that perception does not alter the fact that there is an issue.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Actually, I do think the perception is important. It is also important that, as the hon. Gentleman said, 77% of Jewish people in the UK think that the BBC is biased. Having said all of that about the views of the general population, it is none the less incredibly important to listen to the communities who have a long history of persecution, particularly Jewish people. It is incredibly important to listen to those views and to understand that, if a community feels that the BBC is doing something wrong, it needs to take that incredibly seriously.

[Sir Michael Ellis]

The hon. Lady has been generous in giving way. I reiterate the point, which I am sure she will agree with, that it is very easy for people to make any sort of claim or counter-claim, but there needs to be some evidence. I like to think that in my speech I gave numerous evidenced examples. If people are going to say that there is evidence of BBC pro-Israel bias, they need to be able to cite some examples of that. I do not think they will be able to do that.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Given that I came to talk more generally about the impartiality of BBC news and I had few notes on the conflict in Gaza, I am afraid I do not have an answer. I am not here to defend the BBC. I just wanted to be clear on what its position was, particularly around that one incident that was mentioned.

I met representatives of the Union of Jewish Students in the wake of the beginning of the conflict. We spoke about what was happening at the University of Aberdeen and how safe or unsafe they felt on campus. They raised concerns with me about reporting, but the concerns that they raised were not specifically about the BBC; they were about reporting in general. It is very important for us to listen to those people who are saying, “We are being discriminated against” or “There is bias against us” because, as a non-Jewish person, I do not feel, see or hear all the undercurrents. It is not only we as parliamentarians who must listen to such views; the BBC must ensure that it listens to members of the community who are the experts in this when providing diversity training, as the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) mentioned. I absolutely agree with his suggestion that the training should be carried out by those people who are genuine experts, such as Antisemitism Policy Trust. I will declare an interest. Members can look at my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in relation to that.

It is important to think about the regulation of the BBC. We recently had the first Media Bill in 20 years. It has been a long time since there was a change to the regulation of public service broadcasting in general. However, the BBC is governed by the charter and the agreement that comes alongside it. In some ways, Parliament is unable to take action on this; that is more in the remit of the UK Government. I ask the Minister, when she is looking at this, to look at some of the genuinely good work the BBC has done around increasing diversity—I have spoken to it about that in recent times—and to assess whether she, the Government, and the communities that are impacted feel that the 10-point plan and the impartiality and diversity training the BBC has put in place are sufficient, so that the BBC can be impartial, continue to be respected, and provide the public service broadcast that so many people rely on in order to get their news.