BBC news has a long record of disinformation. But this time it chose the wrong target
By JONATHAN COOK
The BBC’s now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it’s too ‘leftwing’
The BBC is in turmoil, its director-general and head of news forced to resign after a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph highlighted editorial malpractice at the state broadcaster’s flagship news programme Panorama. The documentary had spliced together two separate clips of Donald Trump speaking on 6 January 2021, shortly before a riot at the Capitol building in Washington. The speech’s sentiments that day may not have been much misrepresented, but its contents technically were.
But Panorama, and the BBC more generally, have been exposed peddling far worse misinformation. In those cases, there have been precisely no consequences for such out-in-the-open journalistic abuses.
The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets. This is just the latest, particularly damaging skirmish in a years-long battle by the right to bring down the BBC – while, in the meantime, ensuring that the corporation turns even more pliant than it already is in promoting the right’s interests.
We are now in a death loop in which the BBC becomes ever more craven to the billionaires, thereby shifting the political centre of gravity ever further rightwards. Much of the British public have been convinced by the billionaire-owned media that the BBC is actually “leftwing”. And as a result, the right grows ever more confident in advancing the billionaires’ self-interested agenda, knowing there will be no pushback.
British politics, as Keir Starmer illustrates only too keenly, is in exactly the same death loop. The billionaires are in charge, whoever leads. The main political battle is over image-laundering: where to direct the hate.
Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Starmer wants us hating chiefly on those who criticise him from the left, such as opponents of his support for Israel’s genocide. Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Nigel Farage wants us hating chiefly on the immigrants. But, of course, both hate the left and immigrants.
If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.
Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.
Israel is also the laboratory where they can test and refine the surveillance technology, the weapons and the policing methods they will need if they are to keep their own publics controlled and subdued as austerity bites ever deeper. Gaza may be coming to street near you soon.
Here are two examples of crimes against journalism from Panorama that illustrate what you can get away with as long as you keep the billionaires happy.
The first gave Israel cover for the crimes it committed against peace activists trying to bring aid to Gaza in 2010 – thereby setting the tone for subsequent coverage that would ultimately lead to, and justify, the Gaza genocide.
The second marshalled disinformation to cement Jeremy Corbyn’s reputation as a supposed “antisemite” in the immediate run-up to 2019 general election. Starmer would go on to use the confected antisemitism row to seize control of Labour, oust Corbyn, approve as opposition leader of Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population, and back Israel’s genocide as prime minister.
Death in the Med (2010)
In 2010 reporter Jane Corbin fronted Panorama’s “Death in the Med”, about an Israeli commando raid a few months earlier on the lead aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in a humanitarian flotilla that was trying to reach Gaza, despite an illegal Israeli blockade.
(The programme now serves as an unwelcome reminder that the “conflict” between Israel and Hamas did not begin on 7 October 2023, as the western media would have us believe. For the proceeding 17 years, Israel had been trapping the people of Gaza inside the tiny enclave while blocking food and medicine from reaching them – what Israel referred to as “putting them on a diet”.)
The commandos attacked the ship in international waters and killed nine activists on board, several with close-range shots to the head. The illegality of invading a ship in international waters was not mentioned by Panorama, nor were the execution-style killings. Instead the programme featured “exclusive” interviews with some of the commandos, largely presenting them as the victims.
Ludicrously, Israel had accused the activists of belonging to al-Qaeda. A central justification for its violent raid was footage Israel had produced suggesting that it was the commandos who had been attacked by the peace activists, not the other way round. Israel also released a radio communication in which an activist could supposedly be heard, shortly before the raid, telling the commandos to “Go back to Auschwitz”. Corbin referred to this as a “warning sign”.
Panorama made no mention of the fact that Israel had seized all media equipment from the journalists and activists onboard the Marmara. The activists were forcibly taken to Israel, where they were held incommunicado for several days. The purpose was clear: to ensure that Israel exclusively controlled the narrative while the Mavi Marmara incident was making headlines.
Early on, the Foreign Press Association in Israel warned that the Israeli military was “selectively using footage to bolster its claims that commandos opened fire only after being attacked”. The Committee to Protect Journalists similarly denounced Israel’s editing and distribution of the footage it had confiscated.
By the time Panorama aired “Death in the Med” three months later, the Israeli-imposed fog had lifted further. Israel had been forced to make a “correction”, admitting that it had doctored the incendiary “Auschwitz” recording and that it had no idea who had made the comment. The voice was from someone with a strong southern US accent, but none of the people on the Marmara with access to the radio were American.
It was quite extraordinary that the programme posed as the central question whether this was a case of “self-defence or excessive force” by Israel. Israel had no right to “defend” itself in international waters from unarmed peace activists. But the question was even more preposterous given all the critically important evidence that emerged subsequently but that Panorama chose to ignore.
Instead, Jane Corbin excitedly joined Israeli commandos on a “training operation” and breathlessly interviewed some of the men who had attacked the Marmara. Corbin’s introduction gave a taste of her approach:
They called it Operation Sea Breeze, but what these Israeli naval commandos encountered on the Mavi Marmara was anything but a breeze. It caused a storm of international condemnation. But did Israel fall into a trap, and what was the real agenda of some of those people who call themselves peace activists?
This is a staple of journalistic malpractice from the BBC when it comes to Israel. Appear to offer contrasting possibilities, while actually offering only one – the one that encourages sympathy for Israel. According to Panorama, either heavily armed Israeli commandos were lured into a “trap” (presumably by peace activists bent on violence), or the peace activists were not as peaceful as they seemed (because they were actually bent on violence).
Panorama was effectively helping Israel to justify an act of piracy on the high seas, the siege of Gaza, and the murder of nine humanitarian activists.
Is Labour Antisemitic? (2019)
In the run-up to the 2019 election, Panorama broadcast a special, hour-long episode on the state of the Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. For the programme-makers, the question mark in the title was entirely redundant. Panorama was bent on proving that Labour was indeed antisemitic, whatever the evidence.
Corbyn, the first leader of a major British political party to place the right of Palestinians to be free of Israel’s illegal occupation ahead of Israel’s supposed “right” to continuing its illegal occupation, had been the target of relentless criticism since he was elected leader in 2015. The media accused him of overseeing – and encouraging – a supposed “plague of antisemitism” among party members.
To anyone who was paying attention at the time, those allegations seemed, at the very least, to be highly convenient, particularly given that the British establishment was all too obviously rattled by the risk that a politician who was an avowed socialist and was calling for a wide-scale redistribution of wealth might become prime minister.
But the malicious purpose of the antisemitism smears should be far clearer by now. Millions of Britons who have gone out to protest against the Gaza genocide have been defamed as antisemites. As have students setting up encampments to stop their universities from colluding with the genocide. As have Jews who oppose Israel’s genocide. As have the West Midlands police for trying to stop Israeli football hooligans, many of them likely to be Israeli soldiers who have helped carry out the genocide, from bringing their brand of racist violence to the UK’s streets. We could go on.
The Panorama programme on Corbyn made its case through serial misrepresentations – too many to document here. But the case against the Panorama episode is dealt with fully in this documentary here.
Those deceptions included a series of interviews with unidentified “party members” who claimed to have faced antisemitism in Labour. What Panorama did not tell viewers was that these talking heads belonged to an aggressively pro-Israel lobby group inside Labour called the Jewish Labour Movement.
By the time Panorama aired its programme, senior members of the JLM had already been exposed in a series of filmed investigations by an undercover Al-Jazeera reporter. The series had shown the JLM’s leaders, such as Ella Rose, who featured prominently in the Panorama special, conspiring with the Israeli embassy to oust Corbyn as Labour leader. None of this important context was mentioned in the Panorama programme.
Nor did the BBC interview the significant number of Jewish Labour party members – many of them in the group Jewish Voice for Labour – who disputed the JLM’s claim that the party was antisemitic. Many of these pro-Corbyn Jews – branded the “wrong kind of Jews” by the media – regarded the JLM as effectively an anti-Corbyn, entryist group.
Other examples of journalistic malpractice included an email from a top Corbyn adviser, Seumas Milne, which had been misleadingly edited by Panorama – echoes of the Trump episode – to wrongly suggest he was interfering in disciplinary hearings and doing so to protect antisemites.
An interview with a JLM member, Izzy Lenga, was also edited misleadingly – to put it charitably – to suggest she had been subjected to horrifying antisemitic abuse in Labour, such as comments that “Hitler was right”.
In fact, that was not true, as the clip below, from an Al-Jazeera exposé, shows. The antisemitic comments Lenga referenced had happened four years earlier, when she was at university, and had nothing to do with the Labour party. At the time, Lenga had told the Daily Mail about neo-Nazis placing “Hitler is right” posters around her campus.
The BBC issued a correction – a minor one, hidden away on its corrections page – three years later. It was barely noticed and came long after the damage had been done to Corbyn.
Notably, Lenga’s unedited quote, cited in the correction, shows that Panorama’s editors were fully aware of what had really happened to Lenga. Their doctoring of the interview looks designed to deceive viewers, encouraging them to think Corbyn presided over an institutionally racist Labour party. That deception happened just weeks before a general election.
Similarly, Panorama misrepresented an interview with two pro-Corbyn party members in Liverpool under investigation by Labour for antisemitism. The programme failed to mention that both women were Jewish. That fact would have substantially undermined the premise of Panorama’s programme.
Instead the documentary concentrated on the fact that the man interviewing them, Ben Westerman, was Jewish. He claimed to Panorama that he was on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse from the pair. He said the women had asked: “Where are you from? Are you from Israel?”
He told Panorama: “What can you say to that? You are assumed to be in cahoots with the Israeli government. It’s this obsession with the fact.. that it spills over all the time into antisemitism.”
However, as the same Al-Jazeera exposé revealed, the women had taped the interview, with Westerman’s consent. The recording shows they made no such comment. One, Rica Bird, can be heard asking at the end of the interview: “I’m just curious because I haven’t been in the Labour party very long, and I’ve certainly never been to anything like this informal interview before. So I’m just curious about, like, what branch are you in?”
Panorama is the BBC’s flagship news investigations programme. It spends months working on programmes and has a huge budget. Westerman’s claim that the women had been antisemitic needed to be checked with them. They had a right to respond to his allegations. The fact they themselves were Jewish made his claims even less plausible.
Had Panorama done the most elementary fact-checking – checks that any journalism student would be expected to do – its researchers would quickly have learnt from the women that the interview was recorded. The recording would have shown that Westerman’s claims were untrue.
Proper checks weren’t done in the case of “Death in the Med” or “Is Labour Antisemitic?” because Panorama editors knew that no one in power would care. Defaming peace activists trying to bring aid to a besieged population; smearing a socialist standing to be prime minister. No one would hold the BBC to account.
Why? Because those weren’t errors by the BBC. That’s its job. That is what it is there to do. It is there to uphold narratives that support the interests of the British establishment, as its founder, Lord Reith, explained in the 1920s. “They [the government] know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”
The fact that the BBC is now in hot water for editing a Trump speech – altering its contents without altering its sentiments – is a sign that its senior staff have been misreading the political climate. The establishment itself is now at war – over strategy. Between the traditional right, desperately trying to enforce a crumbling popular, liberal consensus, and the MAGA far-right trying to exploit the crumbling consensus to their own advantage.
It is a sign that the far right is now too far in the ascendant to be given even a small taste of the treatment regularly faced by the left or Israel’s critics. The far right – backed by, and serving, the billionaires – is winning. Time for the BBC to catch up, and bow even lower.
