BBC forced to correct two Gaza stories a week

[Twiglets1]

The BBC has been forced to correct two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, The Telegraph has revealed.

BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading.

The figures follow a week of revelations by The Telegraph of one-sided reporting at the BBC, disclosed in an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower, which also accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza to “paint Israel as the aggressor”.

On Monday, the BBC is also expected to apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary, putting further pressure on Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, to quit.

The media bias campaign group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) obtained the corrections after over 100 of its complaints over BBC Arabic’s coverage were upheld.

One of its complaints involved a BBC Arabic report in January this year about the treatment of hostages by the Al-Qassam Brigade, in which the Hamas unit was described as “guarding” the hostages and being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

BBC Arabic – which is part of the World Service and is funded mainly through the licence fee – has also been forced to make more than 40 corrections after Camera complained about stories that incorrectly referred to communities inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/09/bbc-forced-to-correct-two-gaza-stories-a-week/

The Israeli government has allegedly spent so much money and done so many favours for British politicians that the least they could expect from the BBC, a UK Government funded news corporation, is partiality towards Israel. This impartial stance must drive them nuts.

I don't think it is can ever be easy (especially on an issue as complicated as Gaza) to be entirely neutral and just give the facts.

It's hard to even understand what is factual and what is lies when you hear competing answers given as to what happened after an event, and no one really knows who is telling the truth and who isn't. News sources with a very clear bias like Al Jazeera will be more focused on propaganda than truth, so they don't even bother reporting both sides. However, more moderate sources do at least try to acknowledge fault on both sides. The Times of Israel for example has a pro Israel bias, but they will also criticise the Israel government and report where IDF soldiers have been caught attempting to cover up crimes etc.

I agree with you that it would be unrealistic to expect the BBC to be perfect and never to report the news in anything other than a way which is 100% neutral and unbiased. Because of the unusual way it is funded, however, the British public have the right to expect that they will at least try to present the news without bias. This is something they obviously failed to do with the Trump documentary edit. There is also a lot of evidence in the dossier that they have failed to control bias to an acceptable standard in their reporting of the Gaza war and also over transgender issues.

It's the gap between the bias exposed in the dossier and what is expected of them as a publicly funded corporation that explains why 2 extremely senior people resigned yesterday. Their own values boast that "TRUST is the foundation of the BBC we're independent, impartial and truthful".

Exactly right. No one says it's easy, and it's not meant to be, but it was right the resignations happened. I'm tired of excuses. The BBC's job (as paid by everyone) is to uphold the truth.

That last sentence ... reads like a creepy pick up line.

😂

The Equality and Human Rights Commission report found otherwise. But you could have read about that at the time or simply googled it which you clearly haven't bothered to do. So I'll just conclude youre not bothered by the truth but just have an agenda to push.

Ditto the report into bias on BBC Arabic. Its unequivocal.

I've no idea what you hope to achieve when denying the obvious. It's a bit silly really.

The irony..

Maybe they just want the truth. That thing that they appear to ignore....."Broadcaster’s Arabic service has had to make 215 corrections over the past two years"

Clear examples given of lack of impartality

The irony is, the fact they corrected so many mistakes when they were discovered shows their impartiality but you can spin it any way you like. I'm more interested in who the whistle blower is just in case they may have some kind of motive. They may have been named in the thread but I seriously cannot go back to read them all. I don't mean Camera either, we know their raisIn d'etre.

It's somewhat surprising that anyone would try to spin BBC Arabic being forced to correct hundreds of "mistakes" (all in Hamas's favour) to say this "shows their impartiality" but this is why I don't engage with you much.

The "internal whistleblowing memo" had been sent to the BBC's editorial standards board.

It was written by Michael Prescott, a former journalist who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board (EGSB). It did not seem as though the BBC was going to taken much action against the allegations of bias, until the dossier was leaked to the Telegraph who published it in full.

Trump sends letter threatening legal action - BBC

Donald Trump has sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action, according to BBC News.

The corporation confirmed to BBC News that it has received the letter and will respond in due course.

It comes after the BBC's chair expressed fears of the US president taking such a measure

Earlier, Samir Shah said the BBC "would like to apologise" for an error of judgement after a Trump speech was edited in a way that "did give the impression of a direct call for violent action".

The clips were spliced together from sections of the US president's speech on 6 January 2021 to make it appear he told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to "fight like hell".

Trump responded to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness' resignations last night, describing them as "very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election" in a post on Truth Social.

https://news.sky.com/story/bbc-resignations-director-general-tim-davie-and-ceo-of-bbc-news-issue-statements-after-resigning-13467560

Fucking great.
Really hope my double license fee goes towards some massive settlement for that utter cunt. 😬🤬🤬🤬🤬
Excuse my language, enough internet for me today.

😂😂😂

Sorry I found that hilarious.

Michael Prescot was the initial Whistleblower or was it perhaps Gabi Avital's claim that started the whole thing. I don't know who else has a motive to stir all this up but I do know Camera and Avital do. I have no idea what Prescot's agenda or motivation was. He may have been genuinely concerned that there was bias and he didn't like it. I have no idea. I have checked the BBC's ECU Adjudications website and found nothing on it so the corrections you talk about must be an internal issue. Would love to see what they actually were. The BBC really messed up with the Trump speech and for that alone, heads should have rolled but I can't help but feel the rest could be a well orchestrated witch hunt.

No idea why you would speculate about other authors when Michael Prescott wrote the internal whistle blowing memo and has clearly put his name to it.

He said he wrote the memo in "despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light".

He went on: "On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems."

Whistle blowing is vital in organisations. They aren't referred to as 'witch hunts' unless you want to cover things up or attempt to smear the Whistle blower!

How about the BBC need to get its act together and be less biased and more focused on delivering neutral news, specifically (in these cases) on Trump, Gaza and wanting to promote trans issues (rather than factual biological reality...)

Priti Patel, Shadow Foreign Secretary has written to Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, demanding the Foreign Office should reconsider the funding given to BBC Arabic through its grant for the BBC World Service, if “serious bias issues” were to continue.

Her letter says: “With the FCDO funding part of the BBC, you should be taking firm and robust steps to address this disgraceful situation rather than preside over the BBC becoming the Hamas Broadcasting Service.”

She added: “The Prescott report is a damning indictment on the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel bias that seems to run through the BBC, causing reporting to be distorted, impartiality to be severely compromised and the public in Britain and around the world to be misled, misinformed and deceived.”

BBC Arabic is funded mainly through the licence fee, but also receives support from the Foreign Office through its World2020 programme.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised that this led to resignations. It would have been par for the course for the bbc to just keep lying. I read Gareth Roberts' piece in the Spectator and he said that what people fail to understand is that the bbc really sincerely think they are the good guys, so changing the news to suit their narrative is the good and right thing to do.

I'm so glad it's been exposed. I wonder if it will change any of the narrative about the 'genocide' in Gaza, or if people who fell for this will maybe start to question a bit more.

People who fell for all the claims about genocide and mass starvation won't start to question anything a bit more. I've seen them already on MN saying they can't be bothered to read the report properly but they discredit it anyway.

The person exerting great pressure on the board is Robbie Gibb who is hardly unbiased in his regard for Israel.

In 2020, he led a successful consortium bid to buy The Jewish Chronicle. The consortium's bid was backed by journalist Sir William Shawcross, former Labour MP John Woodcock, and journalist John Ware.

Gibb has refused to say who funded the consortium bid, believed to be around £3.5 million. In his declaration of interest on the BBC website, Gibb stated that he owned a 100 per cent holding in Jewish Chronicle Media.

Alan Rusbridger, writing in The Independent, made the point that, "the BBC board's own website commits them to 'submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office'. They should restrict information 'only when the wider public interest clearly demands'."

Rusbridger continued by saying that Gibb had "flatly ignored my questions about his role as the sole named director of the JC. Nor will he tell anyone whose money is behind the paper he 'owns'".

According to former Chroniclejournalist Lee Harpin, Gibb made a habit of coming into the office and checking what stories were topping the news list; Harpin was told the new owners wanted more views "well to the right of the Tory party".

(from Wikipedia)

Given that the previous Conservative government were basically Lib Dems, I don't think that views "well to the right of the Tory party" are anything to be concerned about.

Good points. They have decided what they want to believe so any evidence to the contrary will be dismissed. That's what useful idiots to terrorism do.

George Orwell and Paddy Chayefsky are my top two soothsayers pertaining to media and political zeitgeist and its string pullers.
I hope that they are both finding time to pay themselves on the back ( wherever they are) as well as being horrified that they were not being self indulgent in their storytelling.