The headline story out of the recent report on the BBC’s unethical behavior was, quite understandably, about Trump. The Beeb had, according to a former network external adviser who prepared the report, edited video of the president speaking in Washington on January 6, 2021, so that it showed him saying “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
It turned out that this video quote was the result of the BBC splicing three separate Trump statements together. The Telegraph first broke the story on Monday after obtaining a copy of the report. But yesterday, the paper reported on the other revelations in the report. Taken together, the report paints a picture of a national broadcaster more akin to that of totalitarian regimes than a free and open society.
Hamas propaganda is at the center of the rot, writes Danny Cohen:
“When The Telegraph earlier this year revealed the poisonous anti-Semitic social media posts of journalists regularly used by BBC Arabic, the BBC sought to downplay their role. Public statements referred to the men as ‘eyewitnesses’ and ‘not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team’.
“This leaked memo reveals that one of those men, Samer Elzaenen — who called on social media for Jews to be burnt as ‘Hitler did’ — appeared on BBC Arabic 244 times between November 2023 and April 2025.
“Ahmad Alagha, who described Jews as ‘devils’ and Israelis as less than human, appeared a staggering 522 times on BBC Arabic news programmes during the same period. That is a remarkable amount of times to have been an ‘eyewitness’. Yet the truth of this has been hidden from license-fee payers.”
That was on BBC Arabic, but the problem extended far beyond that corner of programming:
“The Prescott document also exposes how the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight highlighted claims that thousands of babies were on the brink of starvation in Gaza that it already knew to be false.
“And it charts how BBC News gave extensive coverage to stories that painted Israel as the aggressor while burying stories that contradicted that narrative. Even the BBC’s own exclusive story that the media had widely misunderstood the International Criminal Court’s ruling on ‘genocide’ in Gaza was buried.”
The plain fact is that, if this report is accurate, the BBC has perpetrated a massive fraud on its country. But the fraud is deeper because of the mandatory fees that force members of the public to fund the network. And unlike, say, NPR, the BBC is seen and understood as the public-news voice of the country, not some left-leaning competitor who happens to also get public funds.
The BBC’s readers, listeners, and viewers are well aware that the Beeb gets the story wrong constantly. But it now stands credibly accused of knowingly doing so. That is, simply making it up.
All this is happening amid a surge in anti-Semitism that is worming its way into the cultural fibers of the UK. The BBC’s behavior makes the state culpable in this.
What’s being described here isn’t “bias.” It’s regime propaganda—just propaganda from a different regime. The report, then, raises questions of basic sovereignty: Who is speaking to and for Britain?
Last year, I wrote about how threats from pro-Hamas voices in Britain had managed to scare the House of Commons into breaking its own norms so that members of Parliament could avoid uncomfortable votes. Now it turns out the state broadcaster is feeding the violent, anti-Semitic mobs Hamas propaganda.
A country whose public broadcaster is knowingly pushing foreign propaganda while that propaganda is endangering its own democratic governance is a state that is practically at war with itself. What line has to be crossed to convince London it faces a crisis of democracy? Because honestly, there are very few lines left uncrossed in today’s Britain.
