BBC Serves as Torchbearer for Israel in the British Press
By Luke Peterson
Sept/Oct 25
State media institutions maintain narrow parameters of discourse to control the dissemination of information, preserve state power, and ultimately, to maintain the status quo. In the United States, for example, there are no communist columnists at The New York Times suggesting a wholesale redistribution of national wealth and an end to state corporatocracy. The powerful political and monied interests of the U.S. prevent such voices from finding a mainstream outlet, and therefore, they are suppressed or silenced altogether.
Like the U.S., the United Kingdom is also a corporatocracy manipulated by two powerful political parties both with a vested interest in maintaining state power and preserving the status quo. To fulfill this drive, the business and political elites rely on the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), a storied standard bearer of mainstream news information in the U.K. and the world for over a century. But when it comes to coverage of Israel and Palestine, this standard bearer assiduously champions the state of Israel and carries its violent, racist, apartheid message happily to its audiences. And since Israel’s 2023 slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, this evident bias from Britain’s best-known corporate media outlet has only become more pronounced.
The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring
In a wide-ranging study examining more than 35,000 pieces of news published since Israel’s systematic genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza began, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CFMM) identified a plethora of examples of both implicit and explicit bias by the national media conglomerate sustaining and/or qualifying an Israeli narrative of events in Palestine. For example, the CFMM, which monitors how British media reports on Islam and/or Muslims throughout the U.K., found that the BBC applied emotive, layered, and/or sensitive language to describe Israeli deaths during the Hamas action on Israelis on Oct. 7 much more commonly than they did when describing the killing of Palestinians by Israeli assault forces.
Additionally, Israeli deaths, only about 3.5% of the total deaths since Oct. 2023, have accounted for more than 33 times the amount of coverage in news items generated by the BBC during that period. The depth of language applied in describing dead Israelis versus the callous descriptions of murdered Palestinians coupled with the sheer volume of those descriptions of Israelis compared to the greater number of dead Palestinians indicates a systematic bias by the BBC, This points to their embrace of the Israeli state view that considers Palestinians to be less human and more as set pieces to be destroyed as necessary while forwarding the narrative of a wholly represented people, the Israelis (Oscar Rickett, “BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza ‘systematically biased against Palestinians’,” June 17, 2025, Middle East Eye).
Context from a Certain Point of View
The CFMM study says that Hamas-led assault on Israeli positions throughout Gaza and southern Israel is typically rehashed and emphasized within news narratives to condition Israeli murder of Palestinian civilians as a response to Hamas action. This partial narrative strategy was often accomplished by inserting a reminder to readers at the end of each piece that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and caused 1,200 casualties. The effect is to leave the reader remembering Hamas/Palestinian aggression as the last or most relevant issue in the news coverage even if the piece in question focuses on an Israeli assault in a civilian area and the resulting innocent Palestinian deaths.
The context scarcely mentioned in the thousands of news reports and articles examined in the 2024 CFMM study was the actual fact of ongoing Israeli occupation in Palestine along with the 18-year long Israeli blockade of Gaza. This blockade rendered the 40-mile-by-2-mile strip of land in effect an open-air prison for a subject Palestinian population of more than 2 million people. The preemptive war of 1967 has scarcely made it to BBC pages in their coverage of the Israeli genocide, nor were the abject conditions within the Gaza Strip regularly reported by BBC. In effect, this absence of historical context created a critical hole in the BBC coverage that encouraged readers and viewers to understand the Israeli assault on Gaza as a military response to an unprovoked attack. Gone from this reportage was Israeli military rule, the dispossession of Palestinian land, the Nakba of 1948, or any mention of the regular Israeli military assaults of 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2014 on Gazans. According to the CFMM, “While the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7 were referenced in at least 40% of the BBC’s online coverage, just 0.5% of articles mentioned Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem” (Rickett, “BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza,” June 17, 2025, Middle East Eye).
In effect, and over the course of a year of coverage of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, this narrative structure pushes news audiences to understand a woefully abbreviated timeline of events, one that leads to an ahistorical picture of Israel’s long-running destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. Instead, audiences are left with a narrative that starts the political clock on Oct.7, 2023, that represents Hamas as unrepentant and irrational killers and couches wholesale Israeli slaughter of Palestinians as an understandable military response rather than what it is: an attempt to complete the genocidal cleansing of Palestinians from historic Palestine.
Journalists and Public Figures Protest
The persistence of this unmitigated bias within the BBC routinely accepts Israel’s narrative of events while minimizing the value of Palestinian lives. In Nov. 2024, more than 100 BBC staffers signed and filed a letter to the company’s Director General, Tim Davie, and CEO Deborah Turness protesting the agency’s coverage’s ongoing partiality. They accused the BBC of abrogating its basic journalistic duties in the coverage of the carnage in Gaza, citing verifiable instances of the agency kowtowing to pressure from Israeli representatives in either the omission of facts or in their decontextualization.
The signatories charged the BBC for failing in each of the following essential journalistic endeavors, “reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza; making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims; making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines; including regular historical context predating Oct. 2023; and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews” (“Over 100 staff accuse BBC of bias in coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza,” Nov. 2, 2024, Al Jazeera News). They were joined by more than 200 additional signatories from the worlds of art and culture in contemporary Britain calling for a reexamination of BBC coverage of Palestine that stops short of providing hasbara for Israel, and that goes a substantial way towards representing Palestinians as fully human.
The letter was not the last public complaint against BBC’s partiality in its coverage of the slaughter in Palestine. In July, an additional 400 public figures wrote calling for BBC non-executive director Sir Robbie Gibb to step down from his role with the media company given his obvious conflicts of interest concerning coverage of Palestine and Israel. These signatories include 111 journalists in Britain as well as recognizable British personalities such as Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, and Mike Leigh.
The July 2025 letter challenged the BBC’s coverage of Israelis onslaught in Gaza as being “crippled by the fear of being perceived as critical of the Israeli government” as well as being altogether inconsistent with principles journalist integrity not to mention basic human decency in the coverage of Palestine’s now more than 55,000 victims of Israeli state terror (Tara Conan, “More than 400 media figures urge BBC board to remove Robbie Gibb over Gaza,” July 2 2025, The Guardian).
Together, these two public commentaries present a damning condemnation of Britain’s largest media conglomerate chastened into doing the bidding of an aggressive and expansionist state whose officials have publicly endorsed the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip while indiscriminately bombing hospitals, schools, playgrounds, shelters, and most recently, food distribution centers all the in the abject name of state security.
Whether this prominent cry for meaningful change in BBC’s coverage of Palestine and Israel results in any significant shift in the documented biases of the British national news flagship company, though, remains to be seen.
Luke Peterson has a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Cambridge University. His latest book, The U.S. Military in the Print News Media: Service and Sacrifice in Discourse (Anthem Press, 2024), is available for purchase at most online book sellers.