Media: no longer British

By Richard North - October 26, 2023

An interesting and possibly healthy side effect of the Gaza war is the behind-the-scenes impact on our national broadcaster, the BBC. For years, we have been used to the BBC running its own agenda, which often seems to have little to do with the aspirations and expectations of ordinary people and more in common with the views of London metrosexuals, pointing in the general direction of Islington.

But now, it seems, the reporting on the war is creating such serious stresses in the organisation over the disparities in reporting that, according to The Times, it has staff “crying in the toilets” and freelancers sacrificing earnings by not showing up to work because of the distress caused. Many people, we are told, “are feeling deeply disturbed”.

At first sight, this could be seen as a variation the stratagem often adopted by the BBC when airing controversial subjects. As here, where it points out that it has received an almost equal number of complaints about it being biased towards and against Israel, it can retreat into a self-made comfort zone, justifying its reporting by saying that if it is upsetting people on each side of a divide in equal measure, it must be getting its coverage about right.

In this case, the BBC is being taken to task by some of its own journalists, who accuse it of being “too lenient” on Israel and “dehumanising” Palestinian civilians – this giving rise to the lacrimation episodes.

This goes further, though, than a temporary increase in Kleenex consumption, to the extent that concerns have been raised with senior editorial figures in a meeting this week, with an email sent to Tim Davie, the director-general, setting out fears that the BBC was “treating Israeli lives as more worthy than Palestinian lives”.

But this, to quote a certain personage, “did not happen in a vacuum”. The disquiet comes after upset among Jewish staff which was caused by the decision not to describe Hamas as terrorists, compounded by a reference to the Nazis in a blog by the veteran broadcaster John Simpson.

In order to resolve this apparent schism, the BBC has been holding meetings with staff “from Jewish, and Palestinian and Arab communities “to hear their concerns – without, it appears, any immediate success. As a result, one (anonymous) insider observes that it risked “tying itself in knots”. “What Hamas did was atrocious, and nobody is excusing its actions but the mood from a lot of people in the building is that we aren’t getting the coverage right”, this source says.

Ring-leader of the dissenting voices, we are told, is Lebanese national, Rami Ruhayem, who joined the BBC in 2005 as a staff member for the BBC’s Arabic service, graduating to the position of Arab Affairs analyst at the BBC World Service, before taking on a TV reporting role, currently based in Beirut.

It is he, apparently, who has been e-mailing to Davie, making sure his correspondence is being widely shared with BBC News international staff. Expressing “the gravest possible concerns” about the output, he, specifically, has accused his employer of valuing Israeli lives more highly than Palestinians.

In his email, he points out that “words like ‘massacre’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘atrocities’ are being used prominently in reference to actions by Hamas, but hardly, if at all, in reference to actions by Israel. He thus raises the question as to whether this raises “the question of the possible complicity of the BBC in incitement, dehumanisation and war propaganda?”

In this, Ruhayem is displaying a little bit of difficulty in distinguishing the actions of Hamas terrorists in deliberately seeking out Israeli civilians and butchering them, and the actions of the Israeli military in attacking Hamas targets in the heavily populated Gaza strip, thereby causing civilian casualties.

Nonetheless, this Lebanese national, from a country which has at many times been at war with Israel and is the unwilling host of the Hezbollah terrorist group, feels that BBC journalists are frequently going easy on Israeli officials in interviews and allowing them “comfortable airtime” to justify their actions.

Ruhayem is calling for “accurate, balanced, fair and truthful representation” of events leading up to the war, as he claimed “dehumanising language” from Israeli officials describing Palestinian civilians as “animals” has been avoided. Presumably, he wants to level the playing field by branding Israeli actions as “massacres”.

In an attempt to take the moral high ground, though, Ruhayem declares: “The BBC has taken upon itself in recent years the task of fighting fake news, disinformation, hate speech and such things, a trend in western media”. But he then asks: “Where is the content analysing the flood of incitement against Palestinians and tracking its impact?”

Unsurprisingly, The Times tells us, other staff members have raised questions about Ruhayem’s objectivity and impartiality. They highlight a tweet he sent on 17 October in which he accused western media of being “complicit in Israel’s attack on Palestinians in Gaza”.

But Ruhayem’s “sins” go back much further, to 2016 when he managed to secrete a piece into the BBC website, assessing the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine”, which he characterised as the use of “disproportionate power” against a civilian population.

Controversial in its own right, it has attracted many criticisms, although the objective is to deter a protracted guerilla war and thereby avoid a long-term accumulation of casualties. But, in his analysis, no one could accuse Ruhayem of “accurate, balanced, fair and truthful representation”.

Faced with the disparity of passionately-held views and divided loyalties, we are told that “news chiefs” are resorting to exerting pressure to ensure that the BBC is showing the “visceral” moments of people’s lives in Gaza. They are thus side-tracking attention onto the “daily emote”, relying on human interest stories rather than clinical analysis, highlighting the reports from the BBC correspondent Rushdi Abualouf and Panorama at War: Crisis in the Middle East, which was aired on Monday.

However, this rather transparent ploy has not been enough to offset concerns in some quarters that the “bosses” are too nervous about causing further anger and complaints from the government and negative reaction in the press, leaving one unnamed presenter to complain that, “We feel utterly at sea. There is enormous ferment” (sic) – I think they mean “foment”.

Simpson himself is still taking flak for his stance, admitting that he has lost “plenty of friends” by publicly backing the BBC’s position. But, like the Corporation, he relies on the same formulaic justification, pointing out that it has received an almost equal number of complaints about it being biased towards and against Israel.

“People rail at the BBC because they hope they can force it to come down on their side; and when that doesn’t happen — and it’s not going to — they get angrier still,” he wrote in the New Statesman, typically resorting to a sympathetic, left-wing journal.

Artfully, he complains that some newspapers and politicians have a vested commercial or political interest in doing down the BBC, attempting to deflect criticism by pointing out that there is nothing new or surprising in any of this, recalling that he once took the brunt of Thatcher’s fury about the BBC’s steady refusal to call the IRA “terrorists”.

For all that, the BBC has a case to answer. A spokesman for the media monitoring service Camera Arabic said that BBC Arabic staff (with whom Ruhayem works) were failing to meet its journalistic standards. It points to the fact that six staff had been taken off air last week for posting messages on social media in support of Hamas.

“These propagandistic and highly incendiary allegations must be seen from within the context of the ongoing failure demonstrated by the BBC’s Middle East-based employees, to meet the journalistic standards of their own workplace”, the spokesman said.

Talking to Arab News,” one former employee of BBC Arabic said: “The BBC management and the British government itself have been warned several times about the hidden agendas of a big chunk of the Arabic service”.

She complained of “a culture where one nationality dominated, and favouritism (was shown) for political Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood views”, adding that this workplace culture was one of the reasons that ultimately led to her departure, saying that staff witnessed “years of systematic targeting of particular Arab governments, while justifying extremist views and acts as freedom of expression”.

“What we were doing was not journalism, it was activism”, she said, observing that “there is a difference between challenging those in power, which is the job of a good journalist, and giving a platform to a radical voice or extremist views”.

Underlying all this, in my view, is an issue which is rarely mentioned and not properly discussed. When the BBC glibly talks about being responsive to its audience, it rarely talks about its nature.

Over the years, though, the BBC has transformed itself from a domestic broadcaster, with the World Service tacked on as a separate entity. Now, it is in the process of amalgamating the two services, to assume the character of a global broadcaster, with a single news and current affairs output.

Where that has its impact is that the target for the global audience is 500 million, whereas the domestic TV news market is a mere six million. The British Broadcasting Corporation has ceased to be British in any meaningful respect – it has completely lost touch with its roots.

This largely explains why, increasingly, journalists and news presenters are of non-English heritage, and why the Arab tail seems to be wagging the management dog over Gaza coverage. The BBC needs to make up its mind what it is and be mindful of the fact that its minority UK audience is financing the larger global audience to which it is increasingly pandering.

How the BBC continues to handle Gaza may turn out to be a make or break issue. For some, it is reaching the limits of tolerance.