The BBC has proved itself to be a mouthpiece of a government facilitating genocide, argues Des Freedman

The BBC’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza has put paid to the idea that the Corporation – through its broadcast and online output – provides an impartial public service.

By amplifying Israeli voices and perspectives and by repeatedly failing even to consider the killing of some 50,000 Palestinians as a genocide, the BBC has alienated millions of licence-fee payers who might have expected it to reflect at least some of the anger towards the Israeli state and the massive support for Palestinians in Gaza and an end to occupation.

Even after fifteen months of bombing and ethnic cleansing, the BBC remains reluctant to attribute violence to Israeli forces (in a way that it certainly doesn’t do when reporting on Russian attacks on Ukraine). Its shameful headline back in February 2024, ‘Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza’remains unaltered despite multiple investigations showing that Hind and her family were killed by Israeli shelling.

On New Year’s Eve, the BBC tweeted: ‘Gaza babies dying from the cold as winter temperatures drop’. So apparently it’s just ‘the cold’ that is responsible for killing Palestinian babies and nothing to do with the fact that Israeli bombs have destroyed the homes where these babies would otherwise be living and warm. In this way, the BBC normalises the idea that Palestinians are simply unfortunate casualties of terrible circumstances and not the victims of an occupier’s violence.

The privileging of Israeli sources and perspectives is hardly new. An internal report by the BBC into its news coverage of Israel and Palestine that was commissioned by the Corporation’s governors in 2006 remarked on ‘how little history or context is routinely offered’. 

It also noted ‘the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and other lives under occupation.’

All this supports a conception that Palestinian lives are somehow less valuable than Israeli (or indeed Ukrainian) ones; the former are simply collateral damage while the latter are genuine victims.

What is also far from new is that the BBC is institutionally and politically shaped by government. Right now, Robbie Gibb – a former Tory communications director and co-owner of the passionately pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle – sits on the influential editorial-standards committee while director general Tim Davie was a Tory candidate in the 1990s.

Raffi Berg, the BBC’s online Middle East editor – a key gatekeeper for coverage of Israel and Palestine – used to work for the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service, run by the CIA, and has close connections to Mossad, as revealed in his book, Red Sea Spies. As one BBC journalist told Owen Jones, who wrote a long investigation into the corporation’s bias, ‘if it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before Curation even ok it.’

There are growing numbers of BBC staff who are outraged by their employer’s coverage of Gaza. Hundreds signed a letter to the Independent in November 2024 saying that ‘journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.’

But mainstream media like the BBC will never meaningfully challenge those governments who are aiding the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to existing foreign-policy interests that see Israel as a crucial watchdog for Western power in the region.

Only the global solidarity movement for Palestinian self-determination can challenge these narratives and deliver a real public service for the people of Gaza.