The director general stepped down following a series of scandals, including the corporation’s failure to deal with accusations of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias
November 10, 2025 14:17
The resignation of the BBC’s director general, Tim Davies, and CEO of news, Deborah Turness must mark the beginning of a “process of renewal” at the corporation if it hopes to regain the trust of the Jewish community, the Board of Deputies has said.
The statement came as it emerged that hundreds of Jewish members of staff have accused the corporation of “ignoring” their pleas for an investigation into alleged antisemitism at the broadcaster – and that the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two stories a week about Israel and Gaza since October 7 2023.
Commenting on the high-level resignations announced on Sunday evening, the Board of Deputies said: “The Jewish community has long had profound concerns about the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East, but this has sunk to ever-greater depths over the last two years.
”The BBC has been hit by scandal after scandal, whether in terms of a Gaza documentary involving the son of a Hamas official, its Glastonbury coverage, the open sore of BBC Arabic, or by refusing to call Hamas what they are – a terrorist organisation. Jewish staff and contractors have also repeatedly complained about their treatment at the corporation.”
It concluded: “In this light, Tim Davie’s and Deborah Turness’s resignations must be seen as the beginning, rather than the end, of a process of renewal. Deep cultural change will be necessary to once again restore trust in one of our nation’s most cherished institutions.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said Davie’s and Turness’s resignations “should be seen as an admission through gritted teeth that the much vaunted impartiality of the BBC has been a sham”.
In a scathing statement, the organisation, which has previously arranged protests outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House, accused the corporation of being “a mouthpiece for Hamas” and “feeding licence-fee payers a diet of propaganda that has been a central feature of the drumbeat of incitement across the West.”
It added: “There now needs to be an independent inquiry into BBC bias, with its results published for all to see, resulting in a rooting out of those who have hijacked the BBC into a vehicle that serves an increasingly warped agenda.”
Davies and Turness announced they would be stepping down from their roles following days of mounting pressure in the wake of the publication of a leaked memo that criticised the editing of a Panorama documentary about Donald Trump and accused the BBC of bias in multiple areas, including its reporting on Israel.
The damning letter – sent to the BBC’s board by Michael Prescott, who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards board – detailed anti-Israel bias on the corporation’s BBC Arabic platform, and broader issues with the broadcaster’s Gaza coverage.
According to the media bias campaign group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel – with BBC Arabic alone having to make 215 corrections and clarifications.
“The Jewish community has long had profound concerns about the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East, but this has sunk to ever-greater depths over the last two years,” the group said in a statement.
“Deep cultural change will be necessary to once again restore trust in one of our nation’s most cherished institutions.”
Meanwhile, some 200 Jewish members of staff have accused the BBC of ignoring their pleas for an inquiry into allegations antisemitism at the corporation, it has emerged.
Members of staff wrote to the corporation’s board on Friday, after a letter they sent in July 2024 to BBC chairman Samir Shah asking for an urgent formal investigation into “systemic problems of antisemitism and bias at the BBC, alongside senior management's demonstrable failure to properly address the issue” came to nothing.
Attached to the letter was a report titled "Being Jewish and working at the BBC” that included testimony from staff who said the broadcaster was no longer 'a safe space to be Jewish', The Daily Mail reported.
The BBC itself reported this morning that Turness told the BBC News team today: “I'd like to make one thing very clear, BBC News is not institutionally biased. That's why it's the world's most trusted news provider."
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