on media


The wrong people are in charge of BBC news


The board must replace those at the top if it is to justify its funding, says Raymond Snoddy


Y


ou can see and hear great journalism by accomplished correspondents from the BBC every day of


the week. People such as Russia editor Steve Rosenberg with revealing stories, including reports from Russian patriotic festivals, or international editor Jeremy Bowen’s baleful eye on tragic events in Gaza and Israel. But there are a growing number of


issues concerning BBC news and current affairs. They have few links other than serious questions that lead right to the top of the corporation. Unsurprisingly, there has been a nexus of controversies arising from coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. There was the documentary pulled from iPlayer because the teenage narrator’s father was an undisclosed Hamas deputy agriculture minister. More serious was the decision not to broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which detailed the killing of doctors and healthcare workers and the bombing of hospitals by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The decision was reportedly taken by


BBC director-general Tim Davie himself on the grounds that broadcasting it would make the BBC look ‘partial’. It is rather difficult to be impartial about killing doctors and destroying hospitals. Embarrassingly for the BBC, the documentary was broadcast by Channel 4 to widespread acclaim. At the same time, more than 100 BBC journalists signed, anonymously, a letter claiming that the BBC had become a mouthpiece for Israel and that they were being prevented from


doing their jobs, “delivering facts transparently and with due context”. Around the same time, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a Muslim Council of Britain project, issued a detailed report looking at more than 32,000 BBC broadcast segments and 4,000 articles. This said that, on a per-fatality basis, Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage in articles and 19 times as much in television and radio as Palestinian deaths. It also noted that the BBC pressed 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks while “equivalent questioning to condemn Israel’s actions resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths took place zero times”. Investigative journalist Peter Oborne, in general a BBC admirer, concluded the BBC had failed to challenge Israeli lies and constructed a framework where Israeli suffering was more newsworthy and tragic than that of Palestinians. There were strident complaints from the Israeli side that the BBC had failed to act quickly enough when punk rappers Bob Vylan led chants of “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival. Another raft of complaints involves


coverage of Nigel Farage and Reform. They go all the way back to the Brexit referendum campaign more than nine years ago when the BBC was accused of false equivalence in its coverage – treating the merits of the both sides as equal when they were anything but. The BBC has also been accused of


creating the public persona of Farage by platforming him 39 times on Question Time and in giving disproportionate coverage to a party with four MPs compared to the Lib Dems with 72. Indeed, in July, the Lib Dems


complained to Ofcom that the BBC had given ‘undue prominence’ to a Farage boat stunt to mark the Starmer- Macron deal on asylum seekers.


Separately, Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes warned the BBC was in danger of losing public confidence by failing to get a grip quickly enough on scandals, including those involving the behaviour of presenters. Extraordinarily, news leaked from a BBC meeting that news chief Deborah Turness discussed plans to alter the ‘story selection’ in news bulletins and ‘other types of output such as drama’ to try to win the trust of Reform voters. What next? Special story selection for Labour or Tory voters? This is not the first controversy


involving Turness, a former ITN and Euronews executive. She was responsible for stripping Newsnight of most of its journalists and turning it into little more than an upmarket chat show. It was Turness who closed HardTalk


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and made main interrogator Stephen Sackur redundant, despite its global fame for holding the powerful to account. The BBC faces budget constraints but choices can always be made. Those Turness chose were away from investigative journalism and towards 24-hour, breaking news – not journalism but churnalism as Sackur has it. You can defend individual decisions


You can defend individual decisions but they show a pattern. People with backgrounds in marketing do not reach the right decisions for future BBC journalism


but they show a pattern. People such as Turness and Davie, with backgrounds in marketing, do not reach the right decisions for future BBC journalism. They are decent, competent people


– but are they the right people to lead the BBC into next year’s negotiations for a new 10-year royal charter? Stand-out, courageous news and


current affairs should be a key distinguishing factor for the BBC as a public service broadcaster seeking to justify a universal funding mechanism. It is time for the BBC board to ponder


whether a change at the top might be the best way to deliver that.


theJournalist | 09


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