The BBC is just like Harry and Meghan – and we’ve had enough

Now with the departures of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, it seems the BBC has reputationally transformed itself from Prince Harry to ex-prince Andrew; there’s nowhere lower to sink. And just like with the Royal Family, the question is whether the wider institution can survive.

The leaked report documents hundreds of appearances by individuals who should never have been allowed on our publicly funded broadcaster. People who called Jews “parasites,” praised Hitler, and lauded the October 7 massacre as a “heroic military miracle”. And what did the BBC do with this flashing red light when it was raised internally? They buried it. Sat on it. Pretended it didn’t exist. Internal warnings were ignored or downplayed. They stuck it in a drawer and hoped no one would notice.

This won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. I experienced this circus in years past as a frequently invited expert on the BBC, when I saw close up the minefield of mistakes and misrepresentations on their part.

The BBC’s failures, particularly around its Israel coverage, have been so consistent that they feel less like accidents and more like policy or part of a wider culture.

In 2012, I was interviewed on the BBC about the killing of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari. They aired footage of a supposed Palestinian casualty being whisked away dramatically, only for the same man to appear seconds later walking around, scratching his crotch. When this clip went viral, the BBC said there was nothing wrong with this prime example of ‘Pallywood’.

Fast-forward to February 2021. In the midst of the pandemic, beamed into their big red newsroom by Zoom, I corrected a BBC presenter on air when he insisted the Oslo Accords made Israel responsible for vaccinating Palestinians during the pandemic.

In reality, the Accords assign healthcare to the Palestinian Authority. They only conceded they were wrong after a viewer complaint, when the damage had already been done. Only readers who happened to find the corrections page buried away on their website would ever get the real news.

That February, stuck at home under lockdown, I used my isolation time to expose multiple failings at BBC Arabic, identifying 25 Israel-related editorial breaches in just two years.

In response to my investigation for the JC, the BBC yawned and told us it wasn’t systemic, and how proud they were of their journalists.

In May 2021, in the JC, I highlighted that one journalist, Tala Halawa, had posted “#HitlerWasRight.” Another isolated incident, apparently. Then came February 2025 and the BBC’s crowning disaster: Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. It was marketed as a raw, emotional glimpse into the plight of Gaza’s children. In a satire, you might imagine some woke BBC executive choosing the son of a Hamas deputy minister to narrate it. At the BBC, that wasn’t a joke. It turns out they even paid your money to the Hamas minister’s family via the child’s sister.

My analysis suggested the ‘documentary’ faked a sequence. A young child who we were told was a paramedic appeared in scenes supposedly spanning one day, but his shoes changed four times, and his hair visibly changed length. They’d stitched together footage from different days, used the same T-shirt for continuity, and presented it as a single sequence of events.

So the Telegraph’s revelation that the BBC deceptively edited Donald Trump in a Panorama documentary to make him appear to incite violence is not at all surprising. The report lists eight more ways the BBC is believed to have displayed anti-Trump bias during the US election. But who didn’t already know that?

Even the late Queen wasn’t spared this indignity: back in 2007, dodgy BBC editing for a trailer falsely suggested she stormed out of a photo shoot when no such thing had happened. Nobody is immune from the BBC’s grubby disregard for accuracy.

Even when it comes to accurately reporting something as simple as what people actually say, they can’t help themselves: the disgraced Gaza film mistranslated "Jew" as "Israeli", sanitising antisemitic Palestinian rhetoric.

And now we learn from the Telegraph that all along, the BBC knew about its Arabic arm platforming extremists and antisemites. It didn’t care. It acted only when caught.

But, dear reader, they knew for years: I have been regularly doing all I can to let them know. That’s not even to mention the titanic, unceasing work of CAMERA and David Collier over decades. Most of us already know the BBC has an ideological agenda. Not just on Israel, but on American politics, the environment, Brexit… The list goes on.

The BBC was once a fine idea. But it has failed at the very points where its existence is supposed to matter. It is insulated from market pressure, funded not by merit or trust but by compulsion. That financial independence could have liberated it.

It could have freed the BBC to resist every passing hysteria, every angry street mob, every digital purge. Instead, it squandered that freedom. From its warped coverage of Trump to its contorted portrayals of Israel, it has repeatedly misled the public, not by accident but with full awareness, as the leaked report now confirms. They knew.

But changing the faces at the top will do nothing. A new director-general, a new head of news – these are cosmetic tweaks. Imagine their outrage if a real reformer were appointed, someone willing to clear out the blinkered ideologues and anti-Israel obsessives.

The BBC cannot be saved with small gestures. Unless it is turned upside down and rebuilt from the ground up with honest, rigorous journalists – and they do exist – then it is finished.

Everything it once offered is now available elsewhere, and often done better. If it cannot commit itself to what is accurate, truthful, and responsible, especially in the places where commercial broadcasters fear to tread, then it no longer deserves its privileged status. In that case, let it go. A broadcaster that chooses distortion over duty and ideology over truth should not be preserved for sentiment’s sake. It should be dismantled, not out of spite, but simply because it has outlived its usefulness.