As the BBC’s director general and head of news resign amid an uproar over a misleadingly edited speech by US President Donald Trump, the narrative seems neat: an error, consequences, accountability.
But this latest scandal was prompted by the wrong controversy.
While headlines continue to focus on a single editing mistake, the real crisis at the heart of Britain’s public broadcaster runs far deeper, most notably in its failure to report Israel’s war on Gaza with honesty or courage.
And the irony is brutal: the BBC has been shaken by one of the smallest of its sins, while the greater one – its distortion of Palestinian reality – goes unpunished.
The scale of that failure is measurable. A stunning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed more than 35,000 BBC items published between October 2023 and May 2025, showed that the corporation’s coverage of Gaza consistently privileged Israeli perspectives, while marginalising Palestinian voices.
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The data is devastating. Palestinian deaths, reported as more than 42,000 during the study period, received 33 times less attention per incident than Israeli deaths. The BBC used words like “murder” 220 times for Israelis, but just once for Palestinians, and “massacre” 18 times more often for Israeli victims. Israeli officials and commentators were interviewed more than twice as often as Palestinian ones.
Even when reporting on humanitarian suffering, Palestinians were portrayed as passive victims – displaced, starving, dying – and rarely as people with rights, history or agency. Only 0.5 percent of reports referenced Israel’s decades-long occupation, and a mere two percent mentioned the word “apartheid”, despite its use by major human rights organisations.
Institutional bias
As the Centre for Media Monitoring concluded, the BBC has repeatedly adopted the language and framing of the Israeli state, while neglecting the voices of those under its occupation. That isn’t impartial journalism; it’s institutional bias towards Israel, presented as “balance”.
Yet the rightwing gaslighting and attempts to distort reality have not ceased. Two years ago, I wrote about how Israel’s complaints against BBC coverage were “being cynically exploited in a domestic culture war”. Each accusation of bias becomes a weapon for Britain’s right-wing politicians and pundits, who want to cow the broadcaster into permanent caution.
The BBC has spent the last year doing just that: appeasing the loudest voices, rather than standing by its journalists or its duty to report the truth.
Honesty starts with saying: we got it wrong – not in a film edit, but in how we told, and continue to tell, the story of an entire people
The resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and director general Tim Davie underscore this contradiction. In her departure note, Turness praised her newsroom’s professionalism and insisted that “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong”.
But that claim rings hollow when set against the testimonies of her own staff. In November 2024, more than 100 BBC employees signed an internal letter accusing the broadcaster of double standards, saying it had failed to hold Israel to account for its actions.
These tensions had already surfaced a year earlier. In November 2023, Turness reportedly told staff at a crisis meeting: “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October.” According to a report from Drop Site, rather than restoring order amid a heated exchange between journalists and senior staff, the remark only deepened anger among those who felt that framing the war solely through the lens of Hamas’s attack erased decades of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli occupation.
Journalist Owen Jones said staff described a culture of fear: an editorial environment where raising concerns about anti-Palestinian bias could be career-ending. Internal complaints, they said, were ignored or dismissed at the highest levels.
Outrage machine
Any time the BBC attempts to frame Israel’s actions accurately, the outrage machine ignites, the government weighs in, and the tabloids howl. The broadcaster, already battered by years of political interference, retreats into a posture of defensive neutrality.
The furore over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity. It’s a power play: the disciplining of a public broadcaster that still, nominally, answers to the public rather than the billionaire-owned media. It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponised.
The BBC is punished for the wrong things. It loses its leaders over an editing error, while escaping accountability for its editorial failures on Gaza. Like immigrants under the glare of Britain’s right-wing media, the broadcaster is not permitted nuance or error; only submission.
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Its resignations are not reckonings, but offerings. Each scandal appeases the tabloids for a week, while the real issue festers: the BBC’s institutional deference to political power.
As former Sun editor David Yelland observed, those who have effectively engineered a coup at the top of the BBC are after far more than a few heads on the chopping block. The ultimate prize would be the dismantling of the corporation itself – the greatest victory yet for the domestic enemies of public service journalism on Britain’s right, and its increasingly emboldened far right.
The BBC stands at a crossroads. Down one path lies self-censorship, appeasement and hollow apologies. Down the other lies the public it was built to serve: audiences who deserve reporting that recognises, among other things, that Palestinians are people, not problems.
The Trump documentary might have been mis-edited, but the story of Gaza has been mis-told for far longer. If the BBC still believes in its own motto – “Nation shall speak peace unto nation” – then peace must begin with honesty.
And honesty starts with saying: we got it wrong – not in a film edit, but in how we told, and continue to tell, the story of an entire people.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
