BBC director general and News CEO resign in bias controversy
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In fact independent checking reveals the BBC is consistently centrist with a slight leftward skew, and scores highly for accuracy/reliability.
(For example: https://adfontesmedia.com/bbc-bias-and-reliability/ )
(And to be clear, this is on the non-US left/right axis. The entire US is skewed so far to the right that it's not comparable.)
Or you could just actually read/listen/watch for yourself.
What people think of the BBC is quite a useful canary for that persons own biases.
realistically it generally functions more of a bellwether for what the british elites wants people to think rather than as a news outlet.
the cackhanded attempt to smear trump that led to this resignation was part of that and the crackdown signifies that the British establishment has largely shifted from "fervently anti trump" to a policy of appeasement / cordial relations. Two years ago this kind of dishonest editing would probably have been tolerated if not outright encouraged (as it was when done to Jeremy Corbyn).
The way that Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy declared powerless "not President Trump" a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath" but is now keen on cordial relations is another reflection of this narrative shift: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2z1zm1pk3o
I'm not even sure the Jan 6th reporting was dishonest. Does anyone have an edit/unedit comparison to show us that isn't ridiculously long?
Note that they took two parts of the speech and merged them together so it sounded like
"We're going to march down to the capital and we fight like hell"
Rather than
"We're going to march down to the capital. (later in speech -- usually something like a fade to white and back) We fight like hell"
Of course in reality Trump didn't march down to the capital, but his supporters did fight like hell.
a measure of how out of touch this comment is:
among the reasons for her stepdown and accusations of bias according to this article was literally that BBC (especialy BBC Arabic) parroted Hamas a little too much at times.
Edit to reply: Do you actually watch BBC? I watch BBC a lot. As in I sub and don't just get what algorithms throw at me. I didn't get even a slightest feeling they were slavishly pro Israel. Their videos about Gaza were regular and almost all negative of Israel reporting about destruction and suffering in Gaza. Just go to bbcnews youtube and search Gaza. You can also search Gaza genocide. didn't watch every video but headlines are telling.
It feels like talking to somebody who says things that exist in their head and not reality
(accusations of being pro hamas for providing an honest account of the situation is the racist's calling card of 2025...)
the bbc journalists have been in near open revolt about being told to misrepresent and lie on behalf of Israel: https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/forced-to-do-pr-...
The current leadership relented a little on the crackdown on their journalists in the last ~6 months ever since the UN declared it a genocide and allowed slightly more honest reporting of the genocide. Im pretty sure that recent glimmer of honesty will stop under new leadership.
>Do you actually watch BBC?
Yes, and I know people who work there too. Which is why found the journalists' revolt over management's orders to push racist Israeli tropes about "avoiding being too pro hamas" to be entirely unsurprising.
I heard if you work for BBC you can't even mention a toothbrush maker without going through alternatives. yes they are anal about bias.
in this case on one side there is a jihadist organization (and civilians who judging by polls support it) with stated goal of genocide and many examples of attempting it as best they can, currently shooting its own people accused of collaborating with the enemy, vs country that done a bunch of stuff like settling villages outside of its borders and protecting them with violence, fighting that jihadist organization with civilian casualties, blocking borders etc.
if what you are saying is that things are clear and there is no "bias" in painting one side as baddies and the other as goodies, I can't see that. therefore it's important to stick to factual reporting and if you work for a big news org regular people trust you and you should avoid bias even if you publish on your own twitter.
from https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines/impartial...
> They may provide professional judgements, rooted in evidence and professional experience, but may not express personal views on such matters publicly, including in any BBC-branded output or on personal blogs and social media.
> Achieving due impartiality requires awareness that unintended biases can result from the use of loaded language, from subconscious assumptions and from choices about prominence. For example, a phrase like 'the burden of taxation' might imply a view of taxation that is biased. Advice is available from Editorial Policy
I think BBC is very cool for having this rules. And it sucks they broke their own rules editing Trump speech. And I say that as mostly Trump hater
> accusations of being pro hamas for providing an honest account of the situation is the racist's calling card of 2025...
Ah yes. I have not mentioned race but there we go American white guilt... people from Palestine are ethnically all super similar including Jews, just with different religions/politics.
I didn't watch/read BBC Arabic but on main channel I think they so far had pretty factual coverage and I hope they keep it up...
It depends on the politics of the BBC at the time. It used to be that being critical of Trump attracted no lashback.
Being supportive of Ukraine on social media will not raise any eyebrows.
So in essence: what youre saying is flatly untrue. BBC policies are not applied indiscriminately.
>in this case on one side there is a jihadist organization
There's that Islamophobic trope again. This is not a war on Hamas. Hamas is nearly irrelevant. It is a racist war on Arab civilians, with Hamas used as the excuse to commit genocide.
There is clear and simple proof of this: Israel has already tried to ethnically cleanse the region. They had their own equivalent of Hitler's Madagascar Plan. Like the Madacascar Plan it failed.
>if what you are saying is that things are clear and there is no "bias" in painting one side as baddies
There are three sides here: Israel committing genocide, Hamas who committed Oct 7th atrocity and civilians.
Im on the side of innocent civilians, you're apparently (if Im reading correctly) on the side of the racists committing (according to the UN) a genocide.
>Ah yes. I have not mentioned race but there we go American white guilt
This has nothing to do with white guilt. If somebody didnt mention race but denied the Holocaust what would they be?
Exactly.
There is no bias and shades of gray when you talk about who attacked whom in Ukrainian war...
> It used to be that being critical of Trump attracted no lashback.
Ah yes, except that literally the CEO got fired totally no pushback,
>>in this case on one side there is a jihadist organization
> There's that Islamophobic trope again.
You can personally attack me all you want but at least read what jihad is first. Islam != jihad.
> This is not a war on Hamas. Hamas is nearly irrelevant. It is a racist war on Arab civilians, with Hamas used as the excuse to commit genocide.
This can't even begin to compute.
You aware that Israel has a lot of Arab Muslim civilians who live in peace, work and own businesses, enjoy social security and all? I guess Israel is really bad at killing Arab civilians because they are right there under their nose
You know how many food trucks were authorized by Israel to enter Gaza (a lot of them were diverted by Hamas but still) to feed civilians, the same civilians you are saying Israel wants to kill? If you don't know here enjoy: https://app.un2720.org/tracking/arrived
There are facts of human rights violations by IDF and then there is parroting propaganda about ethnical cleanse. Why are you excusing the crimes of one side and call rapists and murderers "irrelevant"? why do you say other side commit genocide if they cause civilian casualties fighting terrorist militia that hides in comfy tunnels it built for own protection under hospitals and residentail buildings?
IDF are no goodies but if you want to make call out IDF for doing bad stuff during war you really hurt your ability to do it in the eyes of other people by being so biased for the other side that you make up fantasy. If BBC told its journos off for doing exactly this sort of stuff then they are totally justified...
> This has nothing to do with white guilt.
There's a lot of white colonialist guilt around this issue.
> If somebody didnt mention race but denied the Holocaust what would they be?
They would be what commonly known a Holocaust denier. A racist can deny Holocaust happened but Holocaust denial is not racist outside of context.
Anyway I think IDF and Netanyahu did a lot of things they should be investigated for. But if I wanted to convince people about this I would not put what's happening next to Holocaust. Why? Because then somebody who knows a few facts will not believe my other statements.
This is accurate: the BBC is definitely not seen as speaking truth to power by anyone, independent of their political allegiance.
Their coverage of the genocide was revealing of this, if one only cared to look.
Yes, it's suspicious when too many people at the same time think for themselves and speak their minds freely, and not parrot the committee approved talking points. The government should moderate that via Digital-ID™ and Chat Control™.
- UK logic apparently
In the same tune, all the "independent graphs" all show how the economy today overall is up-up-up since 2019, but if you talk to people on the street when life was better and more affordable for them, they'd all say 2019 and not today, so nobody cares what independent Name Brand™ think-tanks say.
The objective reality that matters, is only how the majority of people feel. You can deny this all you want, but you'd be in for an unpleasant shock at election times.
Because this "independent checking" you speak of, is not some scientifically indisputable facts, like gravity, the speed of light or the earth's rotation around the sun, but only someone else's interpretation and opinion, that is biased from their viewpoint.
Boy, if that ain't a motto for the 21st century.
Denying this would be denying our history and what makes us human.
Also, regardless of which, both facts and feeling don't matter in the real world. What actually matters is the enforcement at your disposal that you can use to uphold either of them, typically by force and violence. Because facts without force backup to match are always destroyed by feelings that have the superiority on force projection and violence.
Like for example, Galileo was right in his facts, however that didn't stop the church from burning him at the stake. And the world of today is really no different. Like Ghaddafi and Saddam didn't in fact have WMDs, however that didn't stop Bush and Obama having them killed over made up bs, and getting away with it.
Biases towards scientific and biological accuracy?
>I'm pretty sure their only "agenda" here is to be inclusive.
Assuming anyone other than biological women can get pregnant is not "being more inclusive". Who exactly are you being more inclusive towards here? The masses of previously excluded pregnant men out there? What is that if not an agenda?
You see, this is why people hate and distrust the BBC and left leaning MSM in general and swung a lot to the right. Because they're picking the weirdest purity test hills to die on when people have other way bigger problems right now they want covered.
What people want from media is to poke politicians on how are they gonna fix: the economy, their jobs market, their housing market, their public health system, inflation, immigration, public school and childcare spots, rising CoL, addressing corruption scandals and false political promises, not to focus on making the word pregnancy more inclusive.
You are free to call yourself whatever made up gender you want in public and social life, but to the doctor treating you at the ER or to the forensic specialist examining your skeletal remains, you are still a biological woman according to science.
Science and medicine deals in absolute details, not in blankets covering everyone. When a doctor needs to treat you, they need to know your sex, weight and age, since the dose or treatment is highly specific on those variables, there's no such thing as an inclusive thing to cover everyone the same. Inclusivity here would get you killed.
> It harms no-one to say “pregnant people”
It also helps no-one now, and it also harmed no-one in the past to say "pregnant women", since no-one other than women can get pregnant. So why did it have to be changed other than for virtue signaling?
> It is. XX genes. End of story.
Legally in what sense? I don't think they're being sent to men's prisons. I hope not anyway...
What does this mean?
At my workplace, one of my male colleagues calls himself "non-binary" and has "(they/them)" in his email signature. He looks like any other man to me.
As far as I can tell, it's more like a religious belief than any kind of distinct visual style.
And “visibly” as in I get funny looks and sometimes shouted abuse from passing cars. Is that enough for you?
My male colleague who self-describes with a "non-binary" identity has no obvious visual markers of this.
There is no "purity test" hill. There are simple reporters who are trying to use words that are inclusive. You're turning this into a "purity" discussion about who is or isn't a "real woman".
> What people want from media is to poke politicians on how are they gonna fix: the economy, their jobs market, their housing market, their public health system, inflation, immigration, public school and childcare spots, rising CoL, not to focus on making pregnancy more inclusive.
These things are not mutually exclusive, and I'm not sure why you seem to think they are.
To whom are they inclusive? You haven't answered who exactly is the phrase "pregnant women" supposed to be excusing that it needs more inclusivity?
You keep repeating yourself while beating it around the bush not answering the question.
If so, what makes her a woman?
If not, should she ignore advice targeted to pregnant women?
Such a bad faith argument.
I assume you are aware that anti-gender and gender-critical people assert that "woman" means specifically "adult human female"? Where have those people said that pregnant girls are also included as women? Which law says 16 year pregnant girls and mothers are adults?
For example, Trump's Executive Order 14168 declares that women and girls refer to "adult and juvenile human females, respectively"? Following EO 14168, in the US federal bureaucracy, "pregnant woman" only refers to "pregnant adult human females". A military doctor following this EO, in the scenario you described elsewhere here, is supposed to refer to a pregnant 15 year old in ER as a pregnant girl, not a pregnant woman, even if the treatment is identical.
I don't know about you, but "pregnant people" sounds better to me than "pregnant females" as the latter seems to strip away humanity, while sounding like a bad science fiction film.
The bad faith argument is to insist that "woman" means "adult female woman" while also insisting that "pregnant woman" also somehow includes pregnant 15 year old girls.
Why do you care so much about someone's biological gender?
Seriously, it comes off with the same sort of creepy vibes as someone who cares way too much about someone's skin color, or height, or some other biological characteristics.
Just assume it, instead of constantly doing psychological projections on others.
Even worse than the Trump edit (which was bad -- for want of a flash of white to make it clear the second part of the quote was from later in the same speech, not directly after)
Nuance matters.
That it's generally accurate and generally leans left doesn't contradict the issues raised in the article and comments. Most topics MSM reports on are not critical for artificially pushed narratives, so MSM can afford being generally accurate.
The Guardian leans way left, scores highly on accuracy, but, for a lot of leftists, has demonstrated its bias and subservience to the elite narrative by cheerleading the slander efforts against Corbyn.
Those people should have resigned in any case: whether it's over their coverage of the genocide or over some right-coded scandal doesn't matter much.
> commenters showing up suspiciously quickly > useful canary for that persons own biases
Thinking that HN is a prime target for organised covert BBC defacement (?) and making dark implications on the BBC critics' character is ridiculous. Get out of American team-based politics.
The offense is pretty egregious and serious. This was a huge issue w dire consequences, and BBC wilfully spread doctored evidence. Watch the clip yourself
BBC is government funded and running misinformation and fraudulent editing to affect a foreign regime
There is no pretense that fox news is somehow objective. At best people say it balances out the bias of nearly every other mainstream publication. For instance check 2016 newspaper endorsements Trump had 28 compared to over 600 for not trump
Newspaper endorsements in the 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia https://share.google/jOTQxKDCycI7bm04i
Don't newspapers have to at-least pretend to be neutral in a democracy i.e. on the side of people. Is there some dynamic here due to America being effectively a two party democracy that I'm missing.
I feel like endorsing one candidate over the other is a public declaration/acknowledgement that their future reporting on failures of their endorsed candidate will be soft and reporting on the other party will be aggressive.
Someone who regularly follows news on both sides may be able to tell whether this has been true so far or not.
While the BBC does receive government money, that money is used exclusively for the BBC World Service. It is misleading to say the BBC is "government funded", when the majority of their output is funded by the license fee.
Dan Rather, a leading anchor for 60 Minutes, tried to shame George W Bush by airing forged documents. When revealed, Rather was fired.
When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it. A shared letter signed by 50 ‘experts’ called it ‘Russian disinformation’. Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true. This was especially egregious given the proximity to the 2020 elections.
Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
Those are direct political hits. They’re worse than examples like the Covington High vs Native American hoax, Katie Courics second amendment edit, Anderson Cooper standing in a flooded hole, etc.
Please give me a single example of a news source telling such outrageous lies against a Democrat. Note that the above examples are not second hand lies repeated— they are lies coming straight from the news source.
> When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it [...] Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true
To be clear, it turned out to be true that it was Hunter Biden's laptop. It did not turn out to be true that it contained anything damning concerning Joe Biden.
> Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
To be clear, the problem wasn't that Stephanopolous said that Trump was a rapist. It was that he said that Trump had been found liable for the rape E Jean Carroll in her lawsuit against him. In fact Trump was found by the jury to be liable for sexually abusing her but not for raping her.
However, in Trump's counterclaim against Carroll for defamation because she repeatedly claimed he raped her the judge dismissed the claim saying that her words were "substantially true". He said "The only issue on which the jury did not find in Ms Carroll’s favor was whether she proved that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of that term in the New York penal law".
The jury had been instructed that it could only find the Trump "raped" her if he forcibly penetrated her vagina with his penis. Forcible penetration by fingers is not rape under the New York penal code.
The judge noted that in contexts outside of New York penal law that would commonly be called "rape". BTW, that's also the case in the law of most other US states.
> Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
The overwhelming majority of legal experts considered that to be a frivolous lawsuit. Paramount (CBS' parent company) settled because they needed government approval for a merger they were involved in. The government approved the merger 3 weeks after the settlement.
So this is really about what he wants with the lawsuit.
Now I'm quite willing to accept that that particular Panaroma episode had a slant - they are not 'news' per se but an in depth perspective type programme - and so they reflect the views of the authors.
But that's just one episode by one set of programme makers - it's not such evidence of clear and consistent bias - it's just evidence that some programmes take a view - whether that balances out over time requires you to look at the output at a whole, not just a single clip of a single programme.
What dire consequences?
The documentary went out about a year ago with no direct airing in the US ( and to watch via iplayer you'd need to circumvent geographic controls ). I don't believe the documentary was an issue in the US at the time and I note Trump still won.
If it was incompetence, one could argue that nothing should happen, perhaps an apology or some useless corporate article. But it was malice, and to deny that is (imo) the real issue here. (I'm not saying you're doing it, I'm just saying some people do/did it)
I'm curious if you think people outside US/Western Europe (like me; greetings from EE[we've seen such edits in our communist period, fyi]) who disagree with the assessment that the BBC is "centrist with a slight leftward skew" are far-right with obvious biases? And if so, on what grounds? Most people who say BBC is propaganda(like me) don't consume MSM at all(or, in the case of US, stick to Fox or something). To say all alternative media I consume(which you'd be correct in assuming) is "skewing far-right" is to, ironically, behave like the ones you're pointing to. It's also incorrect: alternative media is infinitely more diverse today, even after all the reshuffling/restructuring in the past 10-12 months(which culled a decent amount of the left-leaning alternative media) than MSM.
This one got through because it doesn’t mention Israel, I presume. But the BBC bias has been egregious and constant with respect to the Gaza conflict, as opposed to a one time editing of a Trump speech.
Exterminated Gazans can not. They have no political power in the UK.
The only reason they get any air time at all is because A) it's usually a little too obvious to ignore and B) enough BBC journalists are close to being in open revolt over the management's attempts to crack down on honest reporting over the genocide: https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/forced-to-do-pr-...
"Hamas propaganda" is simply the racist trope used to describe that.
Can you provide a link showing that the UN is saying this? I kind of doubt the UN ever called it a "Nazi-style" genocide, and I don't think anyone serious is alleging anything of the kind (including serious people/groups who do call it a genocide - I don't think they'd characterize what's happening as a "Nazi-style" genocide, and nothing they say implies they think it.)
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
They expressed no opinion about whether the intent on the genocide was due to a culture of racial supremacy. That isnt their job. But, there is a multitude of other evidence demonstrating that it was.
This is why the people who try to downplay it on internet forums or elsewhere are exclusively racists, similar to holocaust deniers.
Sadly over recent years the BBC has become a political football in the UK and wider, with pretty much all sides complaining about bias. This is just the latest chapter.
I'd argue that most of this complaining is done by people who are frustrated that they can't buy or commercially bully the BBC to take their side.
The way I read this episode is that the US poltical pressure over the Trump speech editing, created the required pressure for the current government to get rid of Davie. Now all sides are trying to use this crisis to further their ends.
For what's it's worth, my view is that the BBC is made up of a range of people with a range of views - some of which I agree with and some of which I don't, and the only bias is a tendency for a pro-establishment lens ( whatever that is at the time ).
this[0] article by the BBC covers the details of that fine. here's the meat of it, for the extremely lazy:
> In his speech in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, Trump said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women."
> However, in Panorama's edit, he was shown saying: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."
> The two sections of the speech that were edited together were more than 50 minutes apart.
> The "fight like hell" comment was taken from a section where President Trump discussed how "corrupt" US elections were. In total, he used the words "fight" or "fighting" 20 times in the speech.
> After showing the president speaking, the programme played footage of flag-waving men marching on the Capitol, the Telegraph said.
> According to the leaked memo, this "created the impression President Trump's supporters had taken up his 'call to arms'". But that footage was in fact shot before the president had started speaking.
it is worth considering the bar that is being demanded here, and how every single other news source in the world would compare against that bar.
the reason this is in the news now is that someone "leaked" an internal memo from the BBC that discussed the show. the claim is that it was fundamentally unfair to suggest that trump was encouraging these people. since that day he has:
- explicitly claimed he supported them and what they did [1]
- given federal pardons to ~all of them, including ones who had commited previous crimes and then after being pardoned committed further crimes [2]
0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzkyk7knzo
1: https://apnews.com/article/trump-jan-6-evolution-downplay-vi...