The Telegraph has just got a major scoop from a whistleblower about the rot at the BBC.
It is a private internal dossier (made public) on the corporation’s blatant biases which then, even worse, after having made serious journalistic errors, BBC executives opted to hide them from the public rather than correct the record.
This is huge news.
I’m going to comment on the three aspects in the reports.
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Dishonest editing of President Trump
Being biased is one thing - but deliberately distorting and lying is quite another.
The internal memo on the BBC’s Panorama programme about Donald Trump is utterly damning. The BBC had artificially spliced together two v. different and unrelated sections of video to create an impression that President D. Trump had said something he did not actually say. The BBC wanted audiences to get an impression that the former President expressly incited the Jan-6 riots. Not true.
In America, the best example of an organisation crossing-the-line was CBS, last year. It surreptitiously & selectively edited their much-vaunted “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. She gave a ridiculously meandering “word salad” answer on the subject of Israel. And so, the network distorted and edited it to create an alternative version in which she looked “better”. It gave an impression that she rendered a more “succinct” answer (as opposed to a kindergartener fumbling to find words). I think Mr Trump was right that these were covert attempts - by the quondam “reputable” establishment - to sway the presidential election in their preferred way.
Some people hate Donald Trump so much that they’re prepared to accept a major broadcaster breaking its own rules of impartiality merely to read negative news on Trump - I don’t accept this compromise at all.
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Trans ideological capture
The memo accuses the BBC of “effective censorship” of its coverage of the transgender debate.
This is completely true.
The BBC has been completely and ideologically captured by the “progressives” in the trans debate.
E.g. JK Rowling recently attacked BBC gender identity “ideology” after the BBC used the word “she” to describe a male neo-Nazi who was jailed for incitement of hatred in Germany after switching genders through a simple declaration. The BBC’s use of language couldn’t be clearer. It’s a rolling back on the rights of actual women and spreading of misinformation about reality.
Then, there’s Dame Jenni Murray. Host of BBC Radio 4’s show “Woman’s Hour” (a joke, right!!). She says she was “banned” from discussing her TERF views for fear of a backlash at the organisation. Why can’t a decent & honourable lady, like her, express reasonable views in the organisation? Why.
Or, as Suzanne Moore has pointed out (“The BBC is spouting gender nonsense again with its new trans drama. When will it learn?”, Telegraph), a new BBC drama What It Feels Like for a Girl is based on a 15-year-old boy’s transgendered memoirs. Yes, an adult man is supposed to tell us all what it feels like to be a girl.
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Pro-Hamas bias
This is the worst part of the BBC.
I’ve been cataloguing the BBC’s failures for some time. It’s not just that they make mistakes - it is, as the memo reveals, they consistently take a pro-Hamas slant in their reportage (particularly the BBC Arabic service which is basically a toilet, at this point).
First, the BBC didn’t, and probably still doesn’t, wish to call Hamas “terrorists”, esp. after Oct-7. From the point of view of the BBC, they don’t think it’s their function to demarcate the bad guys from the good guys. I don’t have the words for this dereliction. It strikes me as total insanity. How can you equivocate on using the correct moral language to describe an event/phenomena? Then, as an example of bias, the rush to blame Israel for negative things even before the facts arrive (same blog: in the context of the Al-Ahli Hospital).
Then, there’s the tendency on the BBC (and especially Channel 4) to dispatch a reporter to discuss a bomb site in Gaza to report on the tragedies of that day, without ever correspondingly addressing what Israel had to respond to. The net effect is that viewers get only the half story. Israel made to appear to kill for the heck of it.
There are plenty of other things - like allowing the son of a Hamas official to narrate a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone for the BBC. That’s basically terrorist propaganda on the waves of the UK’s major broadcaster! Hamas, and their civilian sympathisers, have been playing the media for decades. Channel 4 eventually bought the rights and broadcasted this garbage.
Well ... in breaking this news, Mr Gordon Rayner writes in “BBC’s bias ‘pushed Hamas lies around the world’” (Telegraph, Nov 2025):
The BBC’s Arabic news service chose to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza so it could “paint Israel as the aggressor”, according to an internal report by a whistleblower. Allegations made against Israel were “raced to air” without adequate checks, the memo says, suggesting either carelessness or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”.
BBC Arabic, which is funded partly by a grant from the Foreign Office, gave large amounts of space to statements from Hamas, making its editorial slant “considerably different” to the main BBC website even though it is supposed to reflect the same values, managers were warned.
The BBC also gave “unjustifiable weight” to Hamas claims about the death toll in Gaza, which are widely accepted to have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes, and incorrectly claimed the International Court of Justice had ruled that genocide was taking place.
An aspect which I found v. interesting in Mr Rayner’s report is the BBC’s prevarication over their dishonesty with regards to the much-repeated genocide claim against Israel:
The BBC repeatedly reported that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled in January 2024 that there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.
It was mentioned by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, among others, and on Newsnight and various television and radio reports.
Joan Donoghue, the former ICJ president, told the BBC’s HardTalk programme that the media had widely misinterpreted its findings and it was not correct to say the ICJ had found a plausible case of genocide.
An internal BBC review into the matter found that the ICJ’s ruling “is very clear and explicitly states that the court is not making any determination on the merits” of claims of genocide, but only on whether what was being alleged was covered by the genocide convention.
Mr Prescott said in his letter: “The ICJ report runs to just 26 pages and is written in non-technical language. Had no BBC reporter troubled themselves to read it?”
It took months for the BBC to issue a clarification.
Mr Prescott wrote: “The BBC is prone to downplaying criticism by saying it receives similar numbers of complaints from both sides. Looking at the evidence set out above, it seems very hard for any pro-Palestinian observers to make a compelling case that the BBC has a pro-Israel bias.”
Here is a video of Mr Rayner on the pro-Hamas bias.
That's not good.
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