A leaked internal memo that exposed “a deep and pervasive bias” within the BBC, including two years of false and misleading coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, was published in full by The Telegraph on Thursday.
The report, written by Michael Prescott, a journalist and former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee, had “regular and detailed access to evidence of the BBC’s journalistic failures and groupthink,” Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television, wrote of the report prior to its publication on Nov. 4.
Cohen described the 19-page dossier as a “devastating document,” providing “an insider’s account of serious and widespread failings of impartiality, systemic bias and activist journalism spanning years of BBC news coverage.”
Prescott’s “memo to the BBC’s Board exposes in forensic detail a deep and pervasive bias in the BBC newsroom and the chronic failure of the BBC’s most senior management to deal with it,” Cohen wrote.
Among its disclosures, the report reveals that BBC Arabic repeatedly featured antisemitic figures as on-air contributors, including Samer Elzaenen, who “called on social media for Jews to be burnt as ‘Hitler did.’” He appeared on BBC Arabic 244 times between November 2023 and April 2025, according to the memo.
Another frequent contributor, Ahmad Alagha, “who described Jews as ‘devils’ and Israelis as less than human,” appeared 522 times on BBC Arabic news programs during the same period, per the report.
“The rot is not confined to BBC Arabic,” Cohen wrote, noting the report revealed that the network’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight “highlighted claims that thousands of babies were on the brink of starvation in Gaza, that it already knew to be false.”
“That the BBC has helped to push Hamas lies around the world and fuelled antisemitism at home cannot now be in doubt,” Cohen wrote.
In response to the release of the report, Kurt Schwartz, CEO of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, stated that the group “has repeatedly warned that BBC Arabic’s content violates the BBC’s own editorial standards and undermines its global credibility.”
“This leaked dossier confirms what CAMERA’s Arabic- and English-language monitoring teams have consistently shown: a pattern of systemic bias, factual distortion, and ethical negligence that damages the BBC’s reputation and fuels antisemitism worldwide,” Schwartz stated.
HonestReporting, an organization that monitors and exposes anti-Israel bias in the media, wrote: “BBC bias wasn’t a mistake—it was policy.”
Gil Hoffman, executive director of HonestReporting, told JNS that, “Throughout the war, the BBC was spreading lies for Hamas unchallenged both in Arabic and in English” under the leadership of Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general.
Davie “should have already been fired when he was physically present at the Glastonbury musical festival, as a singer there kept on shouting ‘death death to the IDF’ and he didn’t stop it from being broadcast,” he said.
Hoffman told JNS that he is doubtful the BBC will make changes after the report’s publication.
“I worry that, like many other critical reports of the BBC and its biased coverage of Israel, lessons will not be learned,” he said. “And it’s dangerous. Anti-Israel bias leads to antisemitic violence.”
“Bias kills,” Hoffman told JNS.
