What the BBC gets wrong about the Gaza conflict

This week, the BBC was accused of breaching its own editorial guidelines on more than 1,500 occasions and displaying a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel in a report that drew its findings from an analysis of four months of BBC output.

Editorial bosses at Broadcasting House have questioned the methodology of the research, which was led by litigation lawyer and pro-Israel campaigner Trevor Asserson. But having worked inside the BBC newsroom throughout the conflict, I have drawn some unsettling conclusions of my own when it comes to the Gaza conflict.

To find out how we ended up here, we must return to the beginning. Four days after the October 7th outrages were committed, the BBC defended its decision not to label the Hamas gunmen who butchered men, women and children – including hundreds of young people at a music festival – as ‘terrorists’. No lesser a figure than World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, was deployed to write a piece explaining the rationale behind this editorial stance.