The BBC is like an ‘alcoholic’ that won’t admit its ‘chronic’ problem, Michael Gove tells JC event

Echoing an age-old adage, he went on: "As everyone knows, if you do have a problem, the first step in resolving it is acknowledging it."

"There hasn't been that acknowledgement [from] anyone who is still at the BBC.”

The broadcaster has been under fire in recent months over its coverage of the Gaze War, including a row earlier this year, stemming from the revelation that the teenage narrator of Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, a documentary aired on BBC 2 and subsequently withdrawn from iPlayer, was the son of a Hamas official.

It comes as the JC revealed that the BBC’s internal complaints unit rejected every appeal against the BBC Arabic service submitted by an independent media watchdog during the course of the Gaza War.

Also during the event, Gove delved deeper into the BBC scandal, in which its flagship Panorama programme was accused of selectively editing the speech President Trump gave as unrest unfolded at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, for a special feature on the events of that day several years later.

The evidence of the misleading edit, first published in Telegraph, resulted in both BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness stepping down.

Gove called the editing a "deliberate misrepresentation", adding: "It is as though you had a married man [and his] wife comes in to find him in bed with [another woman] and he looks up and says, 'this is a terrible mistake'. We know what [she] would [say] - 'come off it'… I don't see any hope if it carries on like this."

He also spoke about rising antisemitism in the UK, sharing his concern that nothing has been learnt from historical anti-Jewish atrocities.

He explained that, when people ask him why he is so concerned about antisemitism, he "doesn't want to raise his voice", but "I want to say, 'have we learnt absolutely nothing from the last hundred years; from the last thousand years; from the last two thousand years?'... We have seen this movie before, and we know it ends in tragedy. Can we do something about it now before we repeat the horrors of the past?"

Looking back at the Holocaust, Gove issued a dire warning that "[it] occurred in what had been the most civilised country in Europe”.

"It was carried out by lawyers, doctors, university professors. It was justified and brought about in a uniquely advanced society, using all of the tools of industrial sophistication and administrative excellence to destroy an entire people."

He then went on to speak about how Jewish safety ties in with the standards of society as a whole and that, throughout history, "when the Jewish community has found itself in peril" it has been an indicator that something sinister is happening.

And, moving on to the question of anti-Zionism, he said: "There is literally nothing that the state of Israel could do, other than abolish itself, that would satisfy people who are anti-Zionist – the clue is in the name and in the rhetoric.

"Unless one understands that, one does not understand what they are dealing with."