How the BBC got into a mess over Gaza

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, how the war in Gaza has shaken the BBC.

0:21For over 100 years now, the BBC has had a clear mission. to act in the public interest, to serve all audiences with impartial, high-quality programmes which inform, educate and entertain. Controversy has rarely been far away. But since the 7th of October attacks in 2023, the BBC has been under increasing pressure over its reporting. It represents the biggest loss of life in a single day in Israeli history. When I drove this morning... — That sounds like it was quite close to you, Rushdie. Rushdie, can you hear me? — We got out of the back of an armoured vehicle and walked into a wasteland. There has been anger within BBC ranks.

1:08It does not have a backbone. It gives into influence from lobby groups, complaint campaigns, and from the government. And outside the organisation, criticism is mounting.

1:25On Monday, after a relentless few weeks of negative headlines, a report found that a BBC documentary about the war in Gaza had breached accuracy guidelines. We've had some news come through in the last five minutes or so about the BBC review into the Gaza documentary.

1:46And on Tuesday, the BBC's annual report revealed that 300 ,000 people stopped paying their licence fee last year. So what now for the world's oldest public service broadcaster? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Under attack from all sides, will the BBC stop taking risks?

2:11Michael Savage, you are The Guardian's media editor, which means it's been a very, very busy start of the week for you. So thank you for being here. It's a joy to be here, Harry. And no media editor can escape reporting on the BBC because it's been controversial basically ever since it was founded 103 years ago. But its reporting and programming has come under particular scrutiny since the 7th of October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent bombing of Gaza by the Israeli defence forces, hasn't it? Can you just talk us through the main criticisms that the BBC has come under since those attacks?

2:47Yeah, sure. Well, as the national broadcaster, of course, everyone feels ownership of the BBC. It's this huge institution in all of our lives. And as a result of that, it very often finds itself at the centre of these disagreements and riles on these big, big issues. And of course, there's none more divisive than this one. From early after that moment, there were voices both saying that we weren't hearing enough Palestinian voices on the BBC, enough of those stories. You call the Israeli side hostages and you call our side the Palestinians prisoners. The Palestinian people, when they are described as prisoners, it gives the impression that those are criminals who have been convicted in a court, which is not the case.

3:26Yeah, and within a month of the attacks, a group of journalists within the BBC newsroom wrote a letter expressing concerns about the broadcaster's Gaza coverage. And a journalist called Karishma Patel was the instigator of that letter. And she eventually quit in protest and has become a leading voice on all of this. That could be true despite no evidence. They then went into that hospital, attacked that hospital, which is a war crime, which is in contravention of international law. And then the BBC followed them in and recorded the quote unquote evidence they claimed to have found there. that entire string of events was absolutely shameful, was not journalism.

4:04No work was done there to ascertain the reliability of that claim when it was made. And then we were essentially giving the Israeli military free airtime. But there's also been people accusing the BBC of anti-Israel bias. Danny Cohen, who's a former director of television for the BBC, has been leading that. And he's made repeated criticisms of that nature, basically saying the BBC and its staff are sort of left-leaning and more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I've written on it countless times. I've had conversations with it at the BBC. They want to keep saying it's individual mistakes. There is clearly a systemic problem at the BBC with anti-Israel bias, and they don't want to admit it because they think it will damage the BBC's reputation.

4:45So there's been criticism from both sides from very early on. Yeah. And I mean, there have been a series of reports, haven't there, accusing the BBC of anti-Palestinian bias. There was a report that came out from the Centre for Media Monitoring which analysed they claimed 35 ,000 pieces of BBC content. They claimed that the BBC has given Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality than per Palestinian casualty. So they've been having to deal with those sorts of allegations as well. And so let's fast forward to the 17th of February this year, which is when the BBC broadcast a programme titled Gaza, How to Survive a War Zone.

5:25Talk us through what that programme was and why it became so problematic for the broadcaster. Sure, so the documentary was a really interesting idea. My name is Abdullah. I'm 13 years old. I'm stuck here in Gaza. Have you ever wondered what you'd do if your world was destroyed? It was essentially to look at the conflict through the eyes of the children affected, and it did that by selecting a group of children and following their stories. Would you help people? Would you try and have some fun? The programme itself received pretty good critical coverage. It obviously told the conflict from a slightly different angle, which was interesting.

6:15God, you gave it five stars, I think. At the time, indeed. And the issue arose when it was claimed that the father of our narrator, a 13-year-old, one of the children involved, had a position in the Hamas government. And at that point, the BBC didn't immediately pull it from the iPlayer, obviously its digital platform. Initially, it added a message at the start of the programme describing that relationship. It then pulled the programme from iPlayer and then launched this internal investigation into exactly how the programme was put together. The BBC's Director General Tim Davey has said there is a lot of frustration and disappointment that a BBC documentary about Gaza has affected public trust in the corporation.

7:01And so just to be clear, so the narrator, this 13-year-old boy, it emerged, didn't it, that his father was the deputy minister of agriculture within the Hamas-run government in Gaza. And I think there were various other allegations swirling around about bias in the programme and questions also about money, who was paid what for this documentary. Exactly. So the moment that accusation emerged, there were obviously knock-on questions to ask. was he paid? Where did that money go? Was there any suggestion that money had ended up in the hands of people who faced financial sanctions, for example, by governments?

7:37Some really problematic issues could have arisen from that. At that point, the BBC just thought, there's issues here, we want to have a proper look. They pulled it and launched this investigation that we've got now. And how high up did this go at the BBC at the time, the decision to pull the documentary? With something this serious, Tim Davey, the director general of the BBC, he's now been at the helm of the BBC for five years. He's obviously had a huge amount of issues on his plate, not least trying to save the BBC from some of these big scandals that have rocked it in the past, as well as all the financial pressures we know about, and took the decision to pull this and have a proper look at it.

8:13I'm editor-in-chief. And if someone says, you've got a problem here, it's quite right that I go and ask the teams and say, have we got a problem and dig into it. Obviously, this is so serious when it comes to impartiality and accuracy. Samir Shah, the chairman, told a committee in Parliament that... This is a really, really bad moment. What we reveal goes to the heart, is a dagger to the heart of the BBC's claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy. Because absolutely, that is at the heart of what the BBC claims to be doing.

8:52OK, so this independent review was underway and has basically been hanging over the BBC's Israel-Gaza coverage ever since February. And we're going to come in a bit to talk about what the review said when it was finally published this week. But before we get there, can you just outline for us how the prospect of this review affected the BBC in the four or so months when they were waiting for it to actually be published? The problem for the BBC is as we've waited for this report in recent months, a whole load of other things have happened to make things look even harder. I mean, first of all, we had the incident of Gary Lineker.

9:29He's the presenter of Match of the Day, the sort of Premier Highlights football programme on the BBC. He'd become increasingly political in recent years, for example. He got in a bit of hot water for criticising the government's asylum policy a few years ago. Yep, in March 2023, he compared the then Tory government's asylum policy to 1930s Germany, didn't he? And he was suspended from much of the day as a result. Do you regret sending the tweet at all? No. Do you stand by what you said in your tweet? But rather than that silencing him, it seemed to galvanise him, embolden him, particularly after the 7th of October when he started saying things like, if you are silent on Gaza, you are complicit.

10:10And he was one of 500 celebrities who criticised the BBC for pulling that Gaza documentary featuring the teenage narrator earlier this year. And more recently than that, he reposted on social media a video about Gaza. Last week, I shared a post here on Instagram that contained an emoji that has awful connotations. Unfortunately, I did not see the emoji. If I had, I would never, ever have shared it. It had a picture of a rat, which obviously had terrible connotations from the Nazi era, relating rats to Jewish people. He left the BBC essentially over that incident. It was a sort of final straw. But since then, we've also had a huge incident around Glastonbury.

10:56The BBC was really worried about an Irish rat band, Kneecap, who were very, very political and make pro-Palestinian statements all the time. Since then, the band's been removed from the line-up of a series of summer concerts, notably in Scotland and Germany. Glastonbury, which has a reputation as a progressive left-leaning festival, resisted pressure to uninvite them. Everyone was worried about what they would do and say. A decision was made not to broadcast them live. The problem was there was a second band, Bob Villan, a punk rap band. Free, free! House side! Free, free! House side! But have you heard this one, though?

11:36It actually, in the end, caused a problem by starting a chant, Death to the IDF. This was broadcast by the BBC Live, albeit on a live stream rather than mainstream TV. This caused a huge amount of fallout as well. BBC dropped an enormous clangour at the weekend. It is an epic editorial failure, almost so inevitable that you could have seen it coming from space. Why did no one exercise any discretion at all? I would suggest, Shana, it's because so many people that work for the BBC come from the same background and have the same views. Is Glastonbury safe in the BBC's hands? No. The Director General had to apologise.

12:16The government put the BBC under pressure for showing it. And even since then, we've had a letter signed by many people within the BBC questioning the role of a guy called Robbie Gibb. Now, Robbie Gibb is a figure who worked at the BBC for a long time, but he then went into politics working with Theresa May during her time in Downing Street. He then went back to the BBC as a member of the board, but also as a member of a sort of editorial guidelines committee as well. So that potentially gives him quite a lot of power. He was also related to the takeover of the Jewish Chronicle. So there's been suggestions in a letter signed by many BBC people that he is sort of biased on this point of the Middle East and they don't want him involved in it.

13:01We are concerned that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle, an outlet that has repeatedly published anti-Palestinian, often racist content, has a say in the BBC editorial decisions in any capacity, including... There's been various accounts or suspicions that he's been interfering in programmes, nothing of which the BBC has said has any validation. When I talk to BBC people about him, their line tends to be, well, he's one voice among many, but his name keeps coming up in relation to this. And we've also had another separate Gaza documentary about medics in Gaza. Israel has been killing the very people trying to keep the healthcare system alive, its doctors and medics, despite hospitals and healthcare workers being protected under international law.

13:52And in that occasion, it was actually that the BBC chose not to broadcast it. The furore had broken out about this documentary following children. Clearly, at some stage, they decided this is just too close in terms of the subject matter. And in the end, it just said, we're not going to run it at all. And it ran for Channel 4. So all these things have been bubbling in these months while we've waited for this report.

14:21And so finally, at midday on Monday, the BBC released this 31-page report about the February documentary Gaza, How to Survive a War Zone, the one narrated by a teenager. And the report was written by a guy called Peter Johnston, who is the BBC Director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews. What was its key finding? So in this report, Peter Johnson, who obviously has a pretty tricky job, he always has to look into these things, he found that actually on the point of accuracy, the BBC had failed its editorial guidelines. And what he meant by that was actually by not disclosing the relationship that the father had in the Hamas government.

14:58Well, that was a problem. Viewers should have been aware of that. But there is also plenty of other things in the report that I think are very significant. The most obvious one is on the point of impartiality. I think that's really important. So what that's saying effectively is the BBC is able to make these sorts of programmes. It can get the impartiality right. It's this point about disclosing the relationship where it felt the BBC had fallen down. So essentially, the report found that the breach of accuracy was that the documentary didn't spell out for viewers who the narrator's dad was. And I guess had they done that, viewers would have been able to draw their own conclusions about him and what he was saying.

15:38Did the report find that the BBC knew full well who this lad's dad was, or were they misled by the independent production company that had made this documentary? The report's very clear in its findings on this. It found that essentially early on, three members of the production staff in the independent production company Hoyo Films, they knew about this relationship early on, but this wasn't passed on to the BBC. Now the plot slightly thickens there because the production company essentially thought that perhaps the relationship wasn't as important as you might think because, well, was there a divide between what is a sort of civilian civil service post and something more political?

16:21Was he even employed at that point because the Gaza government had collapsed all over the place by the point where this was made? And on the BBC side, he found that actually people were asking questions about the family, about the relationships. Those questions weren't answered, but the programme went out anyway. So there's a failure there from the BBC not to be ticking off the things it's asked and checked that they've been done. I've got a statement here from Hoyo Films, the independent production company, apologising for what it calls the mistake that resulted in a breach of the editorial guidelines.

16:55but they also say that the report proves the company staff did not intentionally mislead the BBC and they also say our team in Gaza risked their lives to document the devastating impact of war on children. Gaza how to survive a war zone remains a vital account and our contributors who have no say in the conflict deserve to have their voices heard and I also read Peter Johnson's report and he definitely echoed that last sentiment that this was a documentary made in incredibly difficult circumstances, given that no foreign media have been allowed into Gaza since the 7th of October. Absolutely. And one thing that senior BBC journalists say, actually all international journalists working in this arena say, access is just impossible for international journalists.

17:39This is a huge thing that just hangs over the conflict. If you listen to someone like Jeremy Bowen, very well known, respected BBC international correspondent, he makes this point repeatedly. One reason I'm standing here and not in Gaza is because the Israelis don't let international journalists like myself in there to report freely. We rely on very brave Palestinian freelancers to help us out and to do a lot of work for us. But I think the Israelis don't really want to see what we really want the outside world to see what they've done, which is why over 15 months they haven't let us in. So this is a point that always has to be remembered in Gaza coverage.

18:21The access to the actual arena is very, very hard, if not impossible in most cases. If you think back to when this controversy erupted, really, there were various allegations that members of Hamas might have received money from the BBC. What did the report say about that? So the report does look at the money trail, as it were, quite clearly. what it finds is there were payments to the narrator's adult sister the narrator was given a second-hand phone i think a voucher for a computer game as well but nothing the report finds it is sort of out of the ordinary and in terms of the sort of sanctions point did money end up in the hands or could it end up in the hands of people under financial sanctions well the report says the narrator, all the immediate family, including the father, they were looked at to see if they faced sanctions and they weren't.

19:14So he was happy on that point. And what did the report conclude or recommend? It really talked about some more curiosity essentially early on from the BBC when making what it calls sort of high risk programmes, perhaps even embedding someone from the BBC in an independent production company if it's making something like this. Maybe a bit more organisation, for example, having a definitive list of questions to make sure they've all been ticked off before broadcast. Those things probably would have saved the BBC from this problem. But then reading the report, it's clear that the BBC were asking a lot of the questions that you would expect in terms of doing their due diligence on who was appearing, who were they, what were their political affiliations, have they said anything on social media that should raise alarm bells.

20:02And to be fair to the BBC, the report concludes that there wasn't really anything. Yeah, a lot was done. That is clear from the report. But it's also clear that it asked questions that weren't answered and the programme went out. And that can't be ignored. And that's what's gone wrong, essentially.

20:23How has the BBC responded since the report dropped? Are we going to have a chance to watch this documentary on iPlayer again, do you think? Because on Monday night, Ofcom, the media regulator, said it was opening its own investigation under its rule, which states that factual programs must not materially mislead the audience. So the saga isn't over yet. The production company and the BBC seem to be talking about what can be done. There's certainly no commitment initially to put it straight back on iPlayer, for example. So we'll have to wait and see on that one. Tim Davey has admitted to this error in terms of asking the right questions.

20:59Also, Deborah Ternest, the head of BBC News, she's admitted to a similar sort of failing in that regard. Right. So let's just be clear. No one in the BBC knew that the father of this narrator was a Hamas official. No, exactly. That's what the report finds. Should they have known? Yes, they should have known because their questions should have been answered at the many times of asking by the independent production company. And when they weren't answered, they should have been pursued. Yes. And we have put in place today. The interesting thing is, and talking to BBC people too, there's some sense that what's on the way is another sort of process reorganisation.

21:38Is anyone going to carry the can? So it's the cliched deputy heads might roll, I'm afraid, again on this one. But we're yet to see anyone leave the BBC as a result of this. That could still happen, of course. We'll have to see. And how has the government responded? Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, has really been on Tim Davies' case on this, and not just this, actually. It's been quite striking for me to see that relationship really decline to be an incredibly low ebb. Nandy criticised Davies about the delays to this report. She said there were unanswered questions that she'd sent him about Gaza a couple of weeks ago in the House of Commons.

22:20That I am still expecting a response from the BBC about an earlier decision to broadcast a documentary about Gaza, which it was then discovered fell short of the BBC's own editorial standards as well. This came at the same time as the fallout from the Glastonbury broadcast. A live feed should have been pulled immediately when the chance death to the IDF began. So what I want to see from the BBC... So she tends to lump them together. I mean, she said explicitly that, you know, essentially once is a mistake and twice could be a leadership problem. So that's aimed squarely at Tim Davy. So the relationship between those two incredibly important figures, maybe the two most important figures in the media world, it's really a low ebb and it's a fascinating one to watch.

23:08And also this all comes as a huge debate comes around the future of the BBC with the charter renewal. It has to renew its own charter every 10 years. and these discussions are now happening in earnest. They go on forever, basically. But for this to be the backdrop and the setting to those conversations is quite something, really. How do you think this has all gone down with the public, given that people do seem to be turning off the BBC, if not accusing it of bias, whether that's on Israel, Palestine, or Brexit, or whatever else? We learned this week that 300 ,000 people last year stopped paying their TV licence.

23:42Half a million people did the same the year before. So they're really hemorrhaging audience. So as we said before, absolutely everyone feels ownership of the BBC. And that means like everything else, like schools that we all have an opinion about because we all went to one, everyone has a view on the BBC. So that immediately puts it in a difficult position where it's constantly being debated. Now, if you just look at the overall views of trusted organizations, globally, actually, the BBC is right up there. So the big picture is this is a trusted organization. But, of course, as we've seen, a lot of things have happened in a short succession.

24:18So the danger is that just undermines, cuts away at that trust at this institution. And we've seen the criticism of other institutions in recent years and what that has done. So public trust, it's there, but it's fragile. I think the BBC is aware of that. And the question is, is there a danger of it overreacting? How does it react in the right way to this? That's the big question it faces.