Business as Usual at the BBC
Allegations of systematic bias within the corporation continue to unfold
The furore that erupted with the leaking of the ‘Prescott Report’ last month, alleging systemic bias in BBC reporting on the editing of a Donald Trump speech, the Israel-Hamas conflict and other issues, has hardly faded. Indeed, it seems to many that the Beeb is continuing as if nothing at all happened.
Surely there are few that would deny that much of the BBC’s journalism is well-researched, factual and informative (I have never known my local BBC radio station to show political partiality, for example). Many other programmes produced and aired by the BBC are of high quality – and in some cases outstanding.
This notwithstanding, it is to be regretted that the corporation’s general much-publicised left-wing bias continues unabated, even as it waits for Trump to make a final verdict on suing the BBC for defamation.
Ongoing revelations: Reform
Just last week (Thurs Dec 4th), the BBC became embroiled in a fresh row, after small boat migrants were invited to take part in a Question Time audience. Zia Yusuf of Reform UK, who was on the panel, said the broadcaster had created a situation he likened to asking “convicted burglars to debate law and order” after he was quizzed on-air by two men who admitted entering Britain illegally. Reform UK has accused the BBC of a “serious failure of impartiality” and Yusuf has lodged a formal complaint.
It has been apparent for many years that the left-leaning BBC is biased against more right-leaning political parties, notably Reform. Hence, perhaps, its determination to prove that Farage bullied Jewish pupils while at school (and ignoring his current overtly pro-Israel sentiments). The BBC’s anti-Farage stance might also help explain the extraordinary claim recently made by historian and best-selling author Lisa Hilton, that BBC make-up artists deliberately painted Farage’s face with brushes containing “human saliva and other bodily fluids” when appearing on its programmes.
It is all too apparent that the corporation’s general much-publicised left-wing bias continues unabated.
It was also perhaps no surprise that last Sunday’s Laura Kuenssberg’s morning show featured a wide-ranging panel of guests – but no-one from Reform, for the second week in a row – creating an angry backlash from the public.
Colonialism
Further fresh claims of BBC bias aren’t difficult to find. Shockingly, it was recently revealed that so biased against Israel has the BBC become that it was forced to correct an average of two stories a week over the past two years about the Gaza conflict – that’s a total of 215 corrections and clarifications on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading.
Meanwhile, 
concerns have been raised that the BBC documentary, Empire, a new three-part series charting colonial expansion from the Tudor period to the First World War, omits details so as to fit a “relentlessly negative” narrative – its suggestion that there were little to no benefits of the British Empire for colonised territories being historically illiterate.
This is a recent example of repeated “activist” historical bias at the BBC, which is said to have once again overlooked crucial details to peddle a skewed narrative. Previously, Oxford and Cambridge professors had accused the corporation of rewriting history by producing documentaries on subjects including slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine that distorted the truth. (Read also)
Just this past Remembrance Sunday, the BBC was accused of having “insulted our glorious dead” by politicising the matter in noting that many African soldiers who died in the two world wars never received a proper grave. Just as recently have emerged allegations that the BBC is backing a biased film that paints British troops in World War 2 as little better than Nazis.
Diana-gate
Then there’s the 1995 Princess Diana interview. In a new book Dianarama, UK author Andy Webb has exposed a shocking list of BBC wrongdoing before and after the notorious Panorama interview by Martin Bashir. Webb claims the BBC went to shameful lengths to protect its star journalist. Had it not been for this BBC cover-up, he claims, Diana’s life might not have followed its deadly trajectory.
Had it not been for this BBC cover-up, he claims, Diana’s life might not have followed its deadly trajectory.
The Diana scandal, Webb asserts, should have cost four BBC bosses their jobs. Instead, for 30 years, directors-general have repeatedly escaped due accountability for one of the worst debacles at the corporation in recent memory.
Beeb in denial
The BBC itself is in utter denial about its systematic bias. A few weeks ago, BBC Radio 4’s flagship 
morning programme, Today delivered a three-hour broadcast of defiance and denial designed to show that the BBC, ‘the most trusted news organisation in the world’, was under a conspiratorial populist right-wing attack. Lead presenter Nick Robinson, clearly infuriated that the BBC’s impartiality and ‘moral superiority’ had been challenged, delivered two long, almost-identical monologues during the broadcast, each described as being “strident editorials light years away from objective journalism.” If there existed any evidence of bias within the Beeb, it was to be found in this programme.
Among the most prominent charges of longstanding bias within the BBC are in regard to its coverage of the Israel/Gaza war, the trans debate and US President, Donald Trump; along with its climate change agenda and its consistent misinformation, scaremongering and propaganda in connection to the Covid outbreak. Let us consider some of these issues in turn:
Antisemitism and the Israel/Gaza War
Just an hour after the resignation of the BBC’s director general and head of news, the Campaign Against Antisemitism called for an “independent inquiry into BBC bias”. Additionally, more than 200 Jewish staff, contractors, suppliers and contributors accused the corporation’s Board of “ignoring” their pleas for an investigation into alleged anti-Semitism at the BBC, having originally complained in July 2024 that the corporation was no longer “a safe space to be Jewish”. Jewish columnist Miranda Levy went as far as saying that the BBC has “abandoned British Jews. The BBC no longer speaks to me, nor for me.”
A study of BBC headlines since the Oct 7 attacks by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has found that the BBC was “three times as likely to vilify Israel over Hamas”, with 11% of BBC headlines being critical of Hamas, compared to more than a third (35%) appearing to be critical of Israel. References to Hamas committing possible war crimes appeared once in the broadcaster’s coverage, while those featuring claims of Israeli genocide, famine and starvation appeared 45 times.
The 2004 Balen Report – a 20,000-word document which examined hundreds of hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – has never been released.
Last year, a report that was compiled by researchers led by British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson using AI to analyse the first four months of the broadcaster’s coverage of the war in Gaza. It suggested that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during that critical phase of the conflict.
The BBC’s refusal to face up to its anti-Israel bias is not new. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has noted that the Jewish community’s concerns about the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East stretch back long before the atrocities of October 7, 2023 (Read more in this article by David Longworth).
Curiously and disturbingly, the 2004 Balen Report – a 20,000-word document which examined hundreds of hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – has never been released. Equally concerning, the BBC has been sitting on an internal dossier for many months – one which details persistent anti-Israeli bias – with no evidence that the BBC has done anything to check it.
Prominent among the plethora of claims of anti-Israel bias by the BBC are the following:
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A dogged refusal to label Hamas fighters “terrorists”.
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Errant and biased reporting in the BBC’s coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital blast.
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The BBC documentary, “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone”, was narrated by the 13-year-old son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
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The allowing of their highest-paid presenter, Gary Lineker, to wade into controversies surrounding the conflict in Gaza on a number of occasions, before temporarily suspending him.
Climate change
The public 
is still being shamefully ill-informed by the BBC about differing views on climate change policy – on the science, the efficacy of government intervention, the real costs, the possibilities of adaptation, and so on. They downplay the reality of problems with wind turbines, heat pumps, solar panels, new pylons, electric vehicles, charging points, and about our energy security being threatened if we have no fossil fuels.
At long last, the BBC has said it is preparing to launch an investigation to assess bias in its climate change and energy policy coverage, after a string of controversies. It has been forced to make a series of corrections, with some programmes being removed altogether. Chris Morrison, the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor, claims that over the last two decades, climate science reporting at the BBC has been reduced to “cherry-picking the worst ‘scientists say’ clickbait remarks to promote the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy.” Debate has been abolished, the scientific inquiry process trashed, and the intelligence of the British public insulted on a daily basis, Morrison asserts.
Covid and the lockdowns
Trust in the BBC, while in decline for years, for many people finally died during the Covid era, when the national broadcaster took on the role of chief cheerleader for the lockdowns, with no dissent allowed. “People were suggesting eminently qualified experts as alternative voices, but in my experience not one of them was put on air,” an ex-BBC employee told the Telegraph in 2023.
Veteran BBC hacks described a “climate of fear” in the newsroom during the pandemic, in which anyone questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy was “openly mocked”.
Veteran BBC hacks described a “climate of fear” in the newsroom during the pandemic, in which anyone questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy was “openly mocked”. There have been calls for the BBC to conduct a thorough inquiry into the failure of its news division to live up to its commitment to impartiality as enshrined in the BBC Charter – these, no doubt, will go unheeded.
Trans debate
The BBC is facing mounting accusations that it has failed to report impartially on transgender issues. A formal complaint was recently made to Ofcom by the Bayswater Support Group, which represents hundreds of parents who believe the broadcaster has promoted one-sided coverage of sex and gender. The group accuses senior editors of failing to reflect dissenting views, glossing over safeguarding concerns and presenting gender identity as an uncontested fact. One couple sensationally blame the BBC for their children’s decision to become trans.
Sue Evans, 
who blew the whistle on the Tavistock clinic, which eventually led to it being shut down, claims the BBC
had been “infiltrated by activists”, that it was biased in its coverage of the Tavistock saga, and that it allowed misinformation to “dominate” discussions by letting statements go unchallenged. She alleges that a flagship Radio 2 show told her she would only be able to give her opinions before representatives from pro-trans groups gave theirs, denying her the chance to rebut statements that were “clinically inaccurate”.
Female staff at the BBC repeatedly raised concerns over several years about the nature of reporting on gender issues, but BBC bosses ignored them. One veteran BBC broadcast journalist has claimed she was forced out over her gender-critical views, saying that younger specialist LGBT reporters had been able to “gatekeep” which stories on transgender issues were covered because older editors were wrongly deferring to them on such subjects.
Insiders claim that the BBC persisted with overwhelmingly positive coverage of otherwise controversial athletes, including Lia Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, and the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. Meanwhile, it has been claimed that a BBC gender correspondent “tried to block coverage of a women's rights campaign group” amid the trans rows - while colleagues backed the newsreader who “broke BBC rules” by pulling a face at a script referring to “pregnant people”.
Finding a way forward
Public trust in the BBC has never been so low. The BBC lost more than £1 billion through licence fee evasion and cancellation last year, despite making two million enforcement visits to people’s homes – a massive 50% up on the previous year. One in eight users now evades payment despite using the BBC, at a cost to the corporation of £550m. A total of 3.6 million households now say they do not have a licence because they "do not need one."
Reports of BBC bias and misinformation continue to appear on an almost daily basis
Some believe the BBC cannot be reformed – that its very purpose is propaganda and disinformation. Others hope that reform is possible, but cannot see it happening while it continues to deny systematic bias, and while it lashes out at any criticism of itself as being a ‘Right-wing plot’ (a notion many find risible – read here, here and here).
The BBC has treated the public it is meant to serve as irritants. Perhaps if it had listened to them, it wouldn’t be sinking so fast. In a sombre article, a former BBC news producer and BBC PR executive has called on the BBC to:
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Abolish its self-regulation.
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Remove Ofcom from the picture – useless as a public guardian of impartiality due to being “full of BBC apologists”.
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End compulsory funding, and
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Rebuild trust through transparency. Every guest list, every complaint, every correction must be public. Rigorous systemic monitoring of BBC output, both internal and external must be compulsory.
Perhaps all BBC managers, editors and reporters could do with a heady dose of unconscious bias training. For reports of BBC bias and misinformation continue to appear on an almost daily basis – the latest being claims that Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ on the ‘Today’ programme is left-wing propaganda dressed up as Christianity – wearing the skin of tradition while promoting radical open borders ideology. For other very recent reports, read here, here, here and here.
Certainly, radical change is required if the corporation is to survive and thrive. That change can only occur if the corporation is open to see its own glaring blind spots and if it begins to show more respect for the British public it claims to serve.
Tom Lennie, 12/12/2025