The BBC: Converging errors aren't mistakes

Twenty-five years ago, the Holocaust denier David Irving lost a famous libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt, who he sued for libel because she had called him a Holocaust denier. The trial went on for weeks and examined in forensic detail all of Irving’s historical writings, highlighting numerous errors of fact, interpretation, omission and attribution. Irving argued that these errors were just the normal stuff of historical writing: all historians make mistakes, after all. But the judge disagreed, for one important reason: because all these “errors” pointed in the same direction, namely to exonerate Hitler. “This convergence”, he ruled, “is a cogent reason for supposing that the evidence has been deliberately slanted.”

This legal ruling is worth bearing in mind when reading the 21-page Prescott Report that has detonated within the BBC, leading to the resignation of the Director General, Tim Davie, and the CEO of News Deborah Turness. The report covers a range of topics: the BBC’s coverage of the US Presidential election, alleged ethnic discrimination in employment, racial diversity, sex and gender, immigration, and, of course, Israel and Gaza. The errors are numerous. The misleading editing of Donald Trump’s speech has grabbed the most headlines, and deservedly so, but the entire report is a litany of jaw-dropping editorial and journalistic failings. In itself, this might not be such a big deal: the BBC is a mammoth of a media organisation, and across all of its TV channels, radio stations, podcasts and other content, it would not be hard to find mistakes. But - as with Irving - the errors highlighted in the Prescott Report all point in the same ideological direction, whatever the subject matter. And it is that convergence that is most damning, because it suggests that these errors are not random, but a product of an internal culture of bias and a particular political mindset.

Remember that Michael Prescott, the author of this report, was appointed by the BBC as an independent adviser to assist with oversight of its editorial output. He, in turn, relied on reports written by an experienced BBC journalist, David Grossman. Neither of them have a political agenda or an axe to grind: this is not a hatchet-job cobbled together by external enemies of the BBC. And just to be clear, I don’t have an anti-BBC agenda either. The BBC has serious failings in this area, but it has brilliant qualities in others, and remains a unique, trusted media brand. I wouldn’t support the end of public funding for the BBC, and I also think other media organisations get away with the same, or worse, failings, without attracting anything like the same degree of criticism. We would be worse off without it.

Now that the report is public, the BBC’s perma-critics will use it for their own political purposes. But that should not be used as an excuse to deflect from the deep, systemic flaws it has finally exposed. Eight of the 21 pages of the report address the BBC’s coverage of the war in Israel and Gaza; taken together, they confirm the worst allegations of institutional bias that have been heard over the past two years. BBC Arabic is a particular focus, based on an internal review by Grossman of five months’ worth of coverage, from May to October 2024. He found that stories on the BBC Arabic website repeatedly downplayed or ignored Israeli suffering, and minimised or ignored terrorism and other crimes by Hamas and Hizbollah. These all pointed in an anti-Israel direction: presumably if Grossman’s review had found examples of slanted reporting pointing the opposite way, he would have included them. That does not appear to be the case. The Telegraph has since reported that BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections in two years to its coverage of Israel and Gaza - that’s two per week. It’s staggering.

One issue that was already well known involves BBC Arabic using journalists who had made viciously antisemitic comments. Many of these had been reported in the media well before this week’s storm, but again, the Prescott Report shows the depth of the problem. In one example, Samer Alzaenen, who had suggested that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”, was used 244 times by BBC Arabic between November 2023 and April 2025. He was “consistently introduced as a journalist”, according to the report, as was Ahmed Alagha, who appeared 522 times on the BBC during a similar time period despite having called Jews “devils” and saying Israelis are less than human. When these cases were reported in the media, the BBC disingenuously called them “eyewitnesses”. But normally the same eyewitnesses don’t appear on TV over 500 times in less than two years.

The BBC’s use of journalists and commentators from the Arab world who hold antisemitic views is so frequent that it can’t be random error. It points to an institutional failing, and without an institutional response to fully understand why it keeps happening and institute systemic change, it is bound to recur. I raised this with a senior BBC figure earlier this year and was told that the problem happens because the BBC uses reporters from around the world, and those reporters reflect the norms of the societies they come from. This, seemingly, is the case even for societies where anti-Jewish and extreme anti-Israel sentiments are commonplace. It was an honest response, but hardly filled me with optimism that the BBC knows how to stop it from happening.

Taken together, its hard to think of a greater example of systemic bias than the failings of BBC Arabic, but according to the Prescott Report, the suggestion of institutional failings was rejected by the BBC’s Executive. As long as this element of denial is in place, it is unlikely that things will change. A good starting point would be to publish David Grossman’s original report into BBC Arabic and announce a full review into the systems and processes by which on-the-ground journalists are hired and used around the world.

If the problems of the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza were limited to Arabic then they wouldn’t cause as much upset in the British Jewish community as they do. The Prescott Report includes several examples of regular BBC reporting that fell well short of basic journalistic standards, relating to Palestinian casualty figures, false allegations of mass graves, unsubstantiated claims of imminent mass starvation, and so on. Yet again, they all pointed in an anti-Israel direction. This is found not just in the content of these reports, but their number and prominence relative to other stories. The BBC News homepage has a series of news tabs in the red strip at the top that begins with Home News and In Depth, and then the first specific news topic is ‘Israel Gaza War’ - before Ukraine, UK, World, Business, Politics or anything else. Needless to say, the war and famine in Sudan, on a scale far worse than Gaza, doesn’t get a tab of its own at all.

It’s just one example of how the BBC’s approach to Israel and Gaza feels like a product of that same ideological package the Prescott Report described, and now that it is out in the open, a lot of people will be saying ‘I told you so’. Danny Cohen has demanded an apology from the BBC to the Jewish community, and it’s a fair request. Whatever your views of Israel and Gaza, we all have the right to expect fair, unbiased and accurate reporting from our national broadcaster: and it is no longer in question that it has failed in this mission.

Update: Since posting this article, the BBC has published a response to many of the allegations made in the Prescott Report, and detailed work it has already put in place to address the problems at BBC Arabic. It is worth reading in full, which you can do here.