The BBC’s former director of television has said that had he been running the national broadcaster on October 7 he would have resigned over its failure to call Hamas fighters terrorists.
Danny Cohen told the JC’s Israel War Briefing podcast there had been a “consistent pattern of problems” with journalists at the corporation defending Hamas or expressing bias while senior executives refused to confront the issue.
The former BBC apparatchik oversaw much of the broadcaster's output between 2007 and 2015 before leaving to found his own media company. He has since become a prominent critic of the broadcaster’s coverage of the Israel Palestine conflict.
Cohen said his former employer had both a “bottom up” problem with its reporters and a “top down” problem with those responsible for disciplining them.
“You've got individual journalists showing bias, celebrating [the October 7] massacre, and repeated failures of impartiality,” he said.
“And from the top you've got a senior management failure to effectively deal with it and acknowledge it and that's very serious, because if you have a situation where in a large organisation mistakes happen but management accepts and acknowledge and you can see them fixing it, you might feel differently about it.”
Following Hamas’s 2023 invasion of Israel, several contributors to BBC Arabic, a channel run by the World Service, celebrated the ensuing massacre.
Earlier this year, the JC revealed that a former PLO general who had praised October 7 as a “heroic military miracle” had appeared on the channel as a “military expert” at least 12 times following the attack.
BBC Arabic previously told the JC that it was committed to “due impartiality” and that it invited a range of contributors on to reflect, “a broad spectrum of voices and perspectives.”
Several BBC Arabic journalists were meanwhile subject to an investigation over "biased" social media posts following October 7.
This included reporter Sally Nabil, who liked a tweet saying the attack was a “morning of hope”, and Salma Khattab, who liked a post referring to Hamas members as “freedom fighters”.
Cohen said: “You see with BBC Arabic a lot of the problems you see more widely across the BBC: antisemitism, anti-Israel bias, a failure of management to effectively deal with it and a failure of management to effectively acknowledge there is a problem.
“And after this amount of time and this amount of problems, the fact that that hasn't even been acknowledged I think is really bad.”
He added: “I don't think you can solve any problem unless you recognise you've got one. And the BBC won't even recognise they've got one.
“And that to me is very damning in itself, because if it was a private organisation, you could argue it's no one else's business, but we all pay for the BBC. We all know its public impact.”
Journalists who had indicated their support for the October 7 attack, Cohen argued, should have been fired as soon as possible.
“If you've got someone who celebrates a terrorist massacre, it should not take eight months to deal with the problem,” he said.
“And if you've just given someone a wrap over the knuckles for celebrating a terrorist massacre [you’ve said], ‘go ahead, keep reporting.’ That's clearly unacceptable and deeply offensive to many Jewish people.”
Following the massacre by Palestinian militants, politicians including Lord Cameron told the BBC the broadcaster should begin calling Hamas terrorists.
The broadcaster refuses to do so because it is a “loaded word” that tells the audience who is good and who is bad, world affairs editor John Simpson has written.
Cohen said: “If I had been there in the aftermath of October 7, I wouldn't be there now. I'd have had to resign.
“After what happened, that unwillingness to call it a clear terrorist act, I think I couldn't sustain my position as a member of the BBC board at that point.”
Part of the issue, he continued, is the lack of officials at the BBC who are Jewish.
“We've also seen the thing of senior managers at the BBC who are not Jewish telling Jewish employees what is and isn't antisemitism,” he said.
“I don't believe they would tell another person with an ethnic minority [background] or another religion what is racism against them, that just wouldn't happen. But apparently that's okay to do with antisemitism and Jews.”
Too often, Cohen claimed, the BBC has attempted to manage complaints over its reporting as merely a public relations issue.
He said: “I think… the management of the BBC feel like they are managing their way through a reputational crisis and that's what they're managing rather than resolving an issue of racism and bias.
“I've been in that position myself a number of times and when you're there, there's a lot of incoming fire… and you [are] often managing issues around reputation and you can sometimes get into a headspace where managing the crisis is the most important thing and not doing anything which too badly damages the reputation of the BBC.”
To begin to solve the impartiality issues at the BBC, Cohen said, the corporation must first accept there is an issue with their coverage.
“I think you have to have an independent investigation into failures of impartiality and anti-Israel bias at the BBC and its reporting,” he said.
“I think you have to have a separate and independent investigation into incidents of antisemitism that the BBC’s Jewish staff have experienced.”
The public broadcaster must then carry out a “wholesale rewriting” of its social media guidelines because they have failed to restrain high profile presenters including Gary Linekar, who sparked outrage after comparing the government’s language on migration to Nazi Germany, Cohen added.
Frustrated Jewish viewers should meanwhile continue taking action over the BBC’s coverage of Israel Palestine when it is flawed, he said.
“I think [people should] keep complaining,” Cohen said.
“When you see things, point out the errors, point out the inaccuracy, point out the bias, because I think we just need to keep cataloguing this stuff because quite frankly, with every day that goes by, the case becomes stronger and stronger.
"And at some point in our case, I think we'll break through in some way.”
Responding to Cohen’s critique, a BBC spokesperson said they, “do not agree with this characterisation of the BBC.”
They said: “Our starting point is always impartiality, and we take that incredibly seriously. That’s why we take so much effort to get our coverage of significant and complex world events right.
"BBC News Arabic shares exactly the same principles of accuracy and impartiality as BBC News in English and we strongly reject the suggestion that its impartiality is compromised.
"BBC News Arabic’s team of experienced editors and journalists come from across the Middle East and around the world and are subject to the same strict editorial guidelines.
“We have also made it clear that we take allegations of breaches of our social media guidance very seriously and we took urgent action to investigate each case in detail. We do not comment on individual staff matters, however, if we find breaches we take the appropriate action.”
