Tim Davie’s resignation is welcome – the BBC has lost its compass | UK | News
BBC director general Tim Davie and news director Deborah Turness finally resigned; but this is because of an incident that pales in comparison to much more serious failures. The final straw was the poorly edited Trump speech in the Panorama documentary. Incorporating images suggesting the US President incited violence violated basic editorial standards, but given what they chose not to do, resigning for this reason feels almost insulting.
Frankly, anyone who has watched the BBC’s Israel coverage since the atrocities on 7 October could see that something was terribly wrong with the state broadcaster. The company admitted to broadcasting anti-Semitic hate from Glastonbury into the nation’s living rooms, then said it was happy with the decision.
Journalist Samer Elzaenen, reporting from Gaza for BBC Arabic, called for Jews to be burned “like Hitler did”. After his appalling comments emerged, the BBC rehired him. Senior staffer Dawn Queva called Jews “parasites” who had invented a “hoax”. There are many examples like this. No wonder Hamas’ statistically improbable casualty figures were reported as fact, while an article falsely associating “fanatical Jews” with 9/11 took 400 days to correct.
But deliberately mistranslating “Jews” as “Israelis” and using Hamas officials as “analysts” to sanitize antisemitism not only violates journalistic standards but also incites hatred against a defenseless minority. Former BBC director Danny Cohen described this institutional bias as “out of control”.
But when 200 Jewish staff demanded an investigation into what they called serious institutional racism, BBC management refused. Tim Davie rejected antisemitism training from the government’s antisemitism adviser Lord John Mann on three separate occasions. “Heads should roll,” Mann said of these scandals.
However, they did not do this and the distortions continued.
Then last week, the leaked report by outside investigator Michael Prescott revealed a pattern of failure from the activism of pro-trans journalists to distort the BBC’s coverage of so-called gender-critical campaigners; combines video clips into ‘fake news’ Panorama piece that suggests Donald Trump He had incited the Capitol riots; Israel’s daily attacks; It often reinforces the propaganda of Hamas, whose founding charter calls for slaughtering Jews and destroying Israel in a genocidal holy war.
Consider false reporting about mass graves allegedly dug by Israeli soldiers, with images uploaded to social media by Palestinians months ago. The Prescott report shows the BBC knew about this but published it anyway.
In an age of information chaos, who will hold the power to account when BBC News betrays its core mission? Instead, viewers turn to alternative sources and often find worse.
The BBC needs urgent reform, not resignations over relatively minor infractions while systemic biases remain unaddressed.
- Alex Hearn is director of Labor Against Antisemitism
