BBC Trump row: Pro-Israel bias over Gaza is the real scandal

 

The corporation stands at a crossroads. Down one path lies self-censorship and hollow apologies; down the other lies the public it was built to serve

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.

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.  (more...)

BBC Trump row: Pro-Israel bias over Gaza is the real scandal

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