BBC News Impartiality: Government's Role

Theresa Villiers Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Sir Michael Ellis]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Michael Ellis]

The hon. Member makes a good point. The examples of biased content are great in number, and I simply do not have the time to document all of them.

[Theresa Villiers]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Sir Michael Ellis]

I will share a sample in a moment, but I will give way first.

[Theresa Villiers]

One of the most worrying examples of biased content on the BBC was their coverage of the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, where its rush to accept the Hamas allegation that it was caused by Israel genuinely created problems on the ground and made it harder to resolve things. It had a real-life impact. That is an example of how the BBC needs to be much more careful in its coverage of Israel.

[Sir Michael Ellis]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, and I shall come on to that in more detail momentarily.

BBC News has been roundly and deservedly ridiculed for its abject failure to identify Hamas as a terrorist group. Under immense pressure, the BBC eventually chose to acknowledge in its ongoing coverage that Hamas is proscribed in the United Kingdom, but it still refuses to explicitly label it as a terror group. That double standard was clear for all to see just weeks after Hamas’s heinous pogrom on 7 October, when BBC News immediately reported on its website an incident in Brussels as a “terror attack” linked to Daesh. Not only is the BBC failing to uphold the law of this country when it refers to Hamas as anything other than a terror group, it is effectively becoming complicit in Hamas’s well-orchestrated disinformation campaign.

The most dangerous example of the dissemination of disinformation during the current conflict came on 17 October—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) has said—when the BBC inaccurately reported that Israel was responsible for an explosion in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. BBC News’ breaking news Twitter account hurriedly notified its 51 million followers:

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

BBC News’ international editor Jeremy Bowen told television audiences that “hundreds” had been killed and “thousands” injured after the hospital was “destroyed” in what he described as “the attack”—terminology that would clearly lead viewers towards the wrong impression that Israel was responsible.

There was an urgent Israeli investigation into the explosion at the hospital, subsequently independently confirmed by non-Israeli sources, which revealed that the incident was in fact caused by a misfired terrorist rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even then however, BBC News saw fit to present claims and counter claims on its website, as if there was some sort of moral equivalence between a democratic state whose leaders are elected by their people and whose courts deal with their government, and a genocidal terrorist group that oppresses its people and murders children and innocent civilians.

--- Later in debate ---

[Theresa Villiers]

The BBC, in its language about Brexit, was not impartial, as illustrated by it persistently describing leaving without a deal with the EU as a so-called cliff-edge Brexit. No one wanted that outcome, but the BBC should not have been portraying it as a potential disaster via the terminology it used.

[Adam Holloway]

I wish I had thought of that for my speech. The reality is that the BBC fails to impartially report the multiplicity of viewpoints in the UK. It prides itself on diversity, but it has a real lack of diversity of thought. There is an intellectual homogeneity, which means there is no real balance of opinion among its staff. There is no recognition among those who make the decisions at the BBC that a recruitment policy that broadened its culture would better serve licence fee payers and better reflect the BBC’s viewers and the wider country.

Today the stakes seem very much higher, as we heard in the superb speech by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis). Given that the BBC has these huge resources made available to it via the licence fee, and given the heightened tensions here as a result of the crisis in the middle east, we thought it really could do a bit better. In 2021, colleagues and I wrote to the Prime Minister and urged him to consider directing Ofcom to deal directly with all impartiality events at the BBC, rather than letting the BBC do those itself in the first instance. Of course, that would need to be accompanied by some changes in Ofcom; to deal with complaints impartially and objectively, its contents board needs to change, because it seems to be stuffed with former BBC lifers. I also urge Ministers to consider requiring the BBC to set up an independent unit to monitor bias on an ongoing basis.