Exclusive: BBC Arabic ‘got it very wrong’ over Israel coverage says Lord Grade

Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, catalogued allegations of bias in the news department. Among his findings were concerns about reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“I’m used to reading rants from all sides of the divide, and I expected another rant,” Grade says. “I read it, and I realised there was real substance to the criticism and the accusations contained in it.”

He wrote to BBC chairman Samir Shah seeking assurance that the board had read the report and was taking its findings seriously.

What particularly concerned him was the history of major BBC scandals being exposed from outside rather than uncovered by the corporation itself.

He points to the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana and the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which centred on a young boy who was revealed to be the son of a Hamas minister.

“We the public, the licence fee payers, would never have known about them unless outside journalists had exposed it,” he says.

“It wasn’t the BBC owning up to their mistakes. It had to be exposed by outside people, which is a shocking indictment of an organisation that calls on everybody else to be transparent and accountable and open.”

The longest section of Prescott’s report concerned the World Service’s Arabic-speaking network, BBC Arabic.

Prescott concluded that the service had attempted to “paint Israel as the aggressor” and that allegations against the Jewish state were “raced to air” without adequate editorial checks.

Grade says there had been “clear signals that there were problems in the Arab service” and criticises the BBC for being “very, very slow” to respond. “It was absolutely shocking how slow they were to acknowledge it,” he says.

He does not want BBC Arabic scrapped, and believes in what he sees as its crucial role as “the one free and impartial news purveyor for that region; it is so important.” Grade is hopeful that the language service will improve because those in charge understand they are under scrutiny.

“They know they got it very wrong [and] they’ve got to put it right,” he says.

The wider question is how the BBC covers a conflict in which access to the opposing sides is radically unequal.Grade describes Israel-Palestine as “the most incredibly difficult subject to cover”.

Israel, he says, is a democracy and is “confident enough in itself to put spokesmen up on every occasion”, willing to take questions and answer criticism. But Hamas and Hezbollah offer no comparable access.

“So there’s an immediate imbalance in the coverage because all you’re hearing at these press conferences is quite correctly journalists from the BBC and everywhere else calling the Israeli government or military to account for stuff that’s happened or may have happened or is reported to have happened and so on.

“So you get wall-to-wall criticism because of that.”

Grade is the only person to have led all three of Britain’s major broadcasters: Channel 4, where he was chief executive from 1988 to 1997; the BBC, where he was chairman from 2004 to 2006; and ITV, where he was executive chairman from 2007 to 2009. He was  chairman of Ofcom from 2022 to 2026.

Speaking from his home on the Isle of Wight, Grade recalls the 2006 independent review of the corporation’s coverage of Israel and Palestine that he commissioned following the 2004 Balen report into the same subject, which Grade never read.

There had been criticism in some parts of the community that the Balen report should have been published, but Grade disagrees.

“It was not for the public or the Board, it was for the journalists themselves,” he says.

The report he commissioned subsequently concluded that the BBC risked creating a “misleading picture” by failing to use the word “terrorist”. It said the term should be used to describe violence against civilians intended to cause terror, “whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies”.

Decades on, the BBC’s decision not to describe Hamas as terrorists on October 7 and in the days afterwards was, he says, “misleading”.

He believes resistance to the term comes in part from the World Service, who he says “would argue that it can be regarded as being partial if you use that word in certain countries.”

But Grade rejects the idea that impartiality requires neutrality towards terrorism, and remembers an appearance on the Today programme when he was BBC chairman. Presenter James Naughtie asked him about the use of the word after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, when 10 bombs exploded on four trains, killing 191 people and injuring more than 1,800.

“I said in certain circumstances, it is accurate,” Grade recalls. “The people that have perpetrated that horror in Madrid, if they’re not terrorists, I don’t know what they are.”

His answer produced two very different reactions.“On the way out of the studio, Jim Naughtie put his arm around me. He said, ‘I’m so glad you said that, it’s driving us mad.’ And then I got a stream of abuse from journalists in the World Service saying I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Those two reactions, Grade says, were “interesting”. Twenty years later, he thinks the corporation has failed to heed its own findings. “They continue to refuse to use the word terrorist, which I personally think is wrong,” he says. “And I’m supported by that report.”

While Grade has strong criticisms of the BBC, he is particularly complimentary about Samir Shah.

“A seriously good chairman for the BBC, a very fine journalist who I’ve worked with over the years and I have every confidence that he will steady the ship and sort things out,” he says.

But Grade does think the BBC should change the way it handles complaints, with the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) reporting to the board rather than to editorial management.

“The ECU should report to the board, not to management, because management are responsible for pay and rations.

“There should be no way that the complaints unit should be marking their boss’s homework.”A board subcommittee overseeing the ECU could provide greater independence, he thinks.

One example is the ECU’s recent decision to reject a complaint about the phrase “moneybags Rothschild” used on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time. “Everyone knows what [Rothschild] means,” Grade says, and he encouraged the complainant to take the matter to Ofcom.

This, for Grade, is where context becomes essential and he does not think media organisations, including the BBC, have dealt with that particular issue. The BBC, he argues, should be able to stop and ask whether a story deserves the attention it is receiving, rather than following rival broadcasters.

“The BBC has secure revenue; it is not fighting for ratings and advertising revenue or subscription. It should set the gold standard for journalism, which is its mission, and most of the time it does.

“But there are times when they are a bit quick to be slaves to the narrative that’s building up. That worries me.”

“Nobody stops and says, well, I know that The Daily Mail are running this campaign, ITV are leading with it, but really, is this what we should be doing?”

He is cautiously critical of Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, after Bowen incorrectly suggested that a hospital in Gaza had been “flattened” following a Gaza blast and later said he “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting. Grade calls this “problematic”.

But he is waiting for the broader review of the BBC’s Middle East coverage before reaching a final judgment. “That will be the real test,” he says.