Inaccuracies, omissions, and sneaky language have made Hamas a blameless victim
Asserson hardly finds these conclusions surprising. “I spoke to senior former and current BBC staff, and they tell me the BBC has no internal mechanism for logging the nature of their previous interviewees. How can they expect journalists to be fair when there’s no way of them knowing whose views they’ve already presented, and whose have been ignored?”
Another of the report’s conclusions was that many pro-Palestinian interviewees had a history of glorifying Hamas terrorism and/or expressing support for Israel’s destruction, clear evidence that the BBC are failing to do even the most basic checks on their interviewees.
“This stuff is so easy to find, it takes me minutes,” says Collier. “For example, the BBC ran a human-interest story on a couple from Manchester with relatives in Gaza whose whole family was killed, and they portrayed it as the deliberate murder of innocent civilians. Well, guess what? This Manchester couple had both celebrated October 7, and it didn’t take me long to find a picture of that very house in Gaza that hosted the funeral of a Hamas terrorist, so obviously this family were linked to terrorism and were totally unsuitable to provide perspective on an impartial outlet.
“Sometimes, it’s clear the BBC haven’t even done a Google search on the people they choose to interview. When the BBC talked about malnutrition and famine, they had a heartbreaking picture of a thin, sick child in hospital, where the mother talked about the devastation the conflict had wrought on this previously healthy child. But it turns out the child had multiple sclerosis, and they got the name of the child’s doctor wrong. They’re not doing basic due diligence to establish the facts.”
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