"When they come to see me they speak insincerely, their hearts meanwhile gathering falsehoods; then they go out and spread bad reports." Psalm 41:6

BBC bias, its programmes and the Balen Report

Sadly, over many years the BBC has acquired a reputation as one of the world's worst Israel hating broadcasters. This reputation has been confirmed through their coverage of the October 7th war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. (see below)

After years of complaints and pressure over the BBC's blatant bias against Israel in all aspects of programming, but more particularly News coverage, the BBC commissioned the Balen Report.

( Why is the BBC biased?)

Wikipedia

The Balen Report is a document written by the senior broadcasting journalist Malcolm Balen in 2004 examining the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The report was commissioned by former BBC Director of News, Richard Sambrook, following allegations of anti-Israel bias.

Freedom of Information court case

A number of people requested copies of the report under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The BBC rejected these requests on the grounds that the report fell under a derogation in the FOI Act: "Information held by the BBC is subject to the Freedom of Information Act only if it is 'held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature'." The BBC contended that as an internal report aimed at checking its own standards of journalism, the report was held for purposes of journalism. The BBC's position was challenged by Jewish activist, and consultant commercial solicitor at London firm Forsters, Steven Sugar, who appealed initially to the Information Commissioner (who ruled in favour of the BBC) and then to the Information Tribunal (who ruled that the report was not held for purposes of journalism).

The BBC appealed against the decision of the Information Tribunal to the High Court on two grounds: that the Information Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to hear an appeal from the Information Commissioner in this case and that even if did its decision was flawed as a matter of law. The High Court decided that the Tribunal did lack jurisdiction and rejected Mr Sugar's challenge to the Commissioner's decision. The High Court did not consider the BBC's second ground of appeal. Mr Sugar's appeal to the Court of Appeal against the High Court's decision on the jurisdiction question was dismissed but his subsequent appeal to the House of Lords (then the highest court in the UK) was allowed by 3 votes to 2 on 11 February 2009. Thus the Tribunal's decision in Mr Sugar's favour was reinstated. The BBC retained its second ground of appeal and the case returned to the High Court on 2 October 2009, when Mr Justice Irwin ruled in the BBC's favour. His decision was that the information requested was held 'significantly' for the purposes of journalism and therefore was exempt under the Freedom of Information Act. On 23 June 2010, at the Court of Appeal the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, Lord Justice Moses and Lord Justice Munby upheld that decision and rejected Mr Sugar's appeal.

After Mr Sugar's death, an appeal by his widow was heard at the Supreme Court on 23 November 2011. On 15th February 2012 the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the appeal, on the basis that, even if information is held only partly for the purposes of journalism, art or literature, it is outside the scope of FOIA. Lord Wilson would have dismissed it on the basis that, if information is held predominantly for the purposes of journalism, art or literature, it is outside the scope of FOIA and that the Balen Report was held predominantly for those purposes

Alleged legal costs

The Daily Mail and others have reported that the BBC may have spent up to an estimated £200,000 in an effort to withhold the report, and noted that some BBC chiefs have been accused of wasting licence fee payers' money. Conservative MP David Davis called the block "shameful hypocrisy" in light of the corporation's previous extensive use of FOI requests in its journalism.

In August 2012, the centre-right political website, The Commentator revealed from a Freedom of Information request, that the BBC has spent 'at least one third of a million pounds' in legal costs. The actual figure of 332,780.47 does not include BBC in-house staff time or Value Added Tax.

The BBC's press release following the High Court judgment included the following statement:

"The BBC's action in this case had nothing to do with the fact that the Balen report was about the Middle East - the same approach would have been taken whatever area of news output was covered."

The claimant, Mr Sugar, was reported after his earlier success in the House of Lords in BBC v Sugar as saying:

"It is sad that the BBC felt it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money fighting for three years to try to load the system against those requesting information from it. I am very pleased that the House of Lords has ruled that such obvious unfairness is not the result of the Act."

A blatant broadcast of Hamas propaganda - 2025

In the wake of the war that followed the Hamas atrocity in southern Israel on 7th October 2023 the BBC broadcast a Documentary about Gaza in its prime Monday evening slot

Entitled "Gaza How to survive a War Zone," it presented a Palestinian perspective of life in Gaza during the fighting.

After the broadcast, the programme was pulled from iPlayer "after the broadcaster found serious flaws." In fact the true level of falsehood was uncovered by a journalist in three hours of digging. (David Collier.com) (www.youtube.com/results?search_query=david+collier%2C+gaza)

How could the BBC have been unaware of the problem - That the piece was, effectively, Hamas propaganda.

From an article by Robert Mendick and Neil Johnston - 05 March 2025

The family of Ayman al-Yazouri, deputy agriculture minister in Gaza's Hamas government was paid 790 GB pounds for his teenage son's role in the BBC Gaza documentary. The money was paid into a bank account belonging to the sister of Abdullah al-Yazouri, the 13-year-old boy who narrated "Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone." The use of a 13 year old boy as the face of the programme obviously made it more acceptable than having an angry Arab adult in the role, but it should be remembered that the children of Gaza are steped in jihad and violence from a very early age.

The BBC acknowledged its failure to disclose Abdullah's links to Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.

Abdullah has said that his parents did not write his lines in the film. "The director of the movie had guided me to the lines that I had spoken, and no, my parents weren't involved in any of the lines that I spoke as a narrator," he said. The money was paid by an independent production company Hoyo Films, which made the documentary under contract for the BBC. No payment went from the BBC directly to Abdullah's family.

The existence of the payment was disclosed in a statement made by the BBC last week, in which the corporation admitted its "own failing" in not uncovering the boy's family connection to Hamas prior to transmission. The BBC said: "Hoyo Films have told us that they paid the boy's mother, via his sister's bank account, a limited sum of money for the narration." The identity of the woman who received payment will be investigated.

The amount has never been disclosed until now. The Telegraph has learnt that the sum was equivalent to about a month's salary in Gaza.

The BBC has demanded a "full audit of expenditure" in the making of the programme by Hoyo. The company told the BBC that "no payments were made to members of Hamas or its affiliates, either directly, in kind, or as a gift". The size of the payment reassured senior executives inside the BBC that the money "represents an insubstantial sum,"" in the face of demands by campaigners for counter-terrorism police to open an investigation.

However, Abdullah said the contract was signed with the production company and his mother. Describing his involvement, he said "the story is pretty simple" and that "the cameraman eventually reached out to me and asked if I wanted to contribute to this documentary and I accepted." "I signed the contract between the production company of the documentary and my mother. There was no payment for me or my family. However, $1,000 was transferred to my sister's account which was for personal expenses - nothing else."

He said: "I was a character first. Then I was the narrator of the documentary talking about the stories of other characters during the war."

Safia al-Yazouri, who is believed to be his sibling, on her facebook account appeared to celebrate the Oct 7 attacks and to support other attacks on Israel, including a rocket attack on Tel Aviv that closed Israel's main airport.

The BBC has admitted that it wrote a "number of times' to Hoyo asking if Abdullah was connected to Hamas. In an official complaint to the police, UK Lawyers for Israel cited this as possible evidence that the BBC had enough concerns to have warranted contacting the police. Under terrorism legislation, an organisation has a duty to report to police any concerns that a terrorist offence is being committed. The BBC has insisted that it is aware of "our legal obligations" and complies with them.

The Metropolitan Police said it had received "a number of reports raising concerns" about the Gaza documentary. It said it was "currently assessing whether any police action is require." Police have stressed that no investigation had yet been launched and the scale of the payment to Abdullah's family, at under 800 pounds, makes that highly unlikely, unless the BBC audit finds other payments of concern.

It has been reported that the BBC paid Hoyo 400,000 pounds out of licence payers' funds to make the documentary, which took nine months to complete. Hoyo has said it was "co-operating fully" with the BBC's internal investigation to "understand where mistakes have been made".

All the above, somewhat contradictory, statements overlook the basic problem of the BBC's willingness to fund and broadcast a Hamas vesion of events.

It took investigative journalist David Collier less than three hours after the programme was broadcast to uncover the connection to Abdullah, his father and Hamas

If David Collier could uncover this link so quickly, it raises serious questions over the failure of the BBC's own due diligence, that they failed to see a problem at any stage in the production. Senior persons must have viewed the film and approved that it conveyed what they had paid for.

Follow this link for an interview with Mr Collier www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-O5VXy91CU

Why does the BBC propagate a skewed version of reality?

(including Israel and the Arab world)

A fascinating explanation from Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph in October 2013, during the arguments about regulation and freedom of the press.

telegraph.co.uk/finance/The-BBC-foists-on-us-a-skewed-version-of-reality (full article)

So this is where the bigger question comes in: what is the dissemination of news for?

For the BBC - by which I mean, for those who decide these things at the corporation - there is little doubt that the function of news broadcasting is to enlighten the public. I use that word advisedly, in its specialised sense, meaning not simply to inform but to "free from prejudice and superstition".

BBC news output is specifically designed to counter what it sees as ignorance and popular prejudices. Its coverage of issues in which it believes such prejudices to be rife - immigration, for example - is intended to be instructional and, specifically corrective of what its managers think of, and describe openly in conversation, as the influence of the "Right-wing press".

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the loathing that the BBC feels for the Daily Mail - and its readers. I once remarked at a corporation seminar on the visceral contempt that I had heard BBC news personnel express for "Right-wing" papers, the Mail and the Sun in particular: had it occurred to them, I asked, to compare the relative circulations of the papers which they despised, with the ones they embraced (ie The Guardian, The Independent, etc) and to ask themselves what proportion of the licence-fee payers they were serving?

But, of course, that was missing the point. The BBC approach to news is aimed precisely at those people who read the papers that are hated by its staff. It is intended to offer an alternative vision of reality in which immigration is not a threat to anyone, patriotism is a joke, religious belief (as opposed to ethnic identity) is not taken seriously, conflicting cultural values never create social problems and government spending is inherently virtuous.

The unabashed dissemination of this highly political official viewpoint is justified on the grounds that it is needed to balance the influence of scurrilous newspapers. One might ask, of course, what would happen if the "Right-wing press" really was extinguished: would the BBC then feel it could drop its social engineering function?

Under the most serious peace-time threat to open and uncensored expression in centuries, the news media are plunged into a bloody bout of gratuitous self-harm. But what they are actually engaged in is a political argument about whether the purpose of journalism is to report the world as it is and to reflect the perceptions of people as they are - even if the results are sometimes ugly or unfair - or to purvey an idealised view of what life might be like if everyone felt and behaved differently.

A large portion of the world was subjected for several generations to news media that tried to coerce its populations into seeing the world as ideologues believed it should be: it didn't work out. Britain, on the other hand, has had an irreverent, cynical and sometimes cruel tradition of social comment for a very long time. And we are still here.

BBC Watch Conference Cites Systemic Anti-Semitism in Coverage of Israel

bbc-watch-conference-cites-systemic-anti-semitism-in-coverage-of-israel/

Lesley Klaff, senior law lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, says the disproportionate attention given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the BBC, and the anti-Israel bias of its reports suggest it is institutionally antisemitic."

Speaking on how British media coverage of Israel affects British Jews, Klaff described at a forum organized by BBC Watch last month at Finchley United Synagogue in north London a BBC radio, television and online effort to skew news reporting in favor of the Palestinian point of view. She cited one glaring example in a BBC website headline that followed the murder of two Israeli Jews by an Arab terrorist at Jerusalem's Lion's Gate, which read: "Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two."

 

Another BBC bias

BBC and the E.U.

Between April 2011 and November 2013, the BBC secretly obtained about three million pounds in grants from the European Union. The BBC annual reports bear no trace of it, merely referring to 'other grant income'. This information had to be prised out of the BBC, using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator. The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, EU funds.

This shady deal came to light as Britain was drawing close to an IN / OUT vote on continuing membership of the E.U.

The BBC bias in favour of the E.U. was most inappropriate in light of this!

 

It is not just carelessness that brings all these complaints and criticisms.

A leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the Corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The memo, titled 'Covering the food crisis in Gaza', amounts to a top-down editorial diktat that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal-political framing as settled fact.

The existence of this email is a telling sign of how the Corporation works to ensure its journalists stick to its own ideological angles. The email, which was sent to BBC staff on Friday, begins by declaring that 'the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant' and instructs staff that 'we should say' the current distribution system 'doesn't work'. It explicitly favours a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza: one that blames The Gaza Humnitarian Foundation (GHF), a relatively new aid body established with US and Israeli cooperation, while glossing over the role of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza and a proscribed terrorist organisation under British Law.

Jonathan Sacerdoti The Spectator 28/07/2025

Updated 14/08/25

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