Tim Davie may be hoping that the storm surrounding the BBC’s pulled Gaza documentary is drawing to a close. I fear it is only just beginning.
On 21 February the broadcaster apologised and removed Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from the iPlayer after it emerged that Abdullah, the film’s ten-year-old narrator, was the son of a Hamas minister. A girl featured in the film also has since been identified as the daughter of a former captain in the Hamas-run police force, while social media pictures emerged of a third child posing with Hamas fighters.
There are big questions for the BBC to answer, and no shortage of politicians lining up to ask them. A contract between the corporation and the documentary-makers, Hoyo Films, unearthed by the Mail on Sunday, reveals the corporation would “address editorial compliance issues as they arise by having regular updates and phone calls with the commissioning editor”. The first question has to be whether these updates ever took place. If they did, surely an editor must have asked: have we got written permission to film the children? From whom? What are their parents like? And, perhaps most importantly, why are they happy for their children to feature in this film? What do they want out of this – money, or something else?
These may sound like cynical questions, but having worked as an editor for many years, I know that the key to survival is being one notch more cynical than whomever you are dealing with. Which in this case turned out to be Hamas officials.
Of course, the film was made in difficult circumstances and sought to tell important stories of Palestinian children who’ve suffered so terribly in this war. All the more reason to ensure it was beyond reproach.
At first the BBC tried to blame the film company, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the outfit that publishes or broadcasts a report. Why did it take a letter from 45 prominent Jewish figures for the film to be pulled?
And then there’s the question Kemi Badenoch asked all over the front of the Daily Mail: did any licence-fee payers’ money make its way into the hands of Hamas officials? If there is any chance the answer to that question is “yes”, the damage to the BBC will be cataclysmic.
Caroline Dinenage, the Tory chair of the Culture Committee, has also said it will investigate. Meanwhile, the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, is to call on the broadcaster to emphasise “getting it right” in its coverage of Gaza.
I don’t for one moment think the BBC wanted to get it wrong. Mistakes happen in journalism, just as in every other walk of life. But in my experience they happen because a culture has enabled them. The question the BBC must answer is whether a wider culture around attitudes to Middle Eastern politics meant this journalism was insufficiently rigorous. For Badenoch asked one pertinent question: “Would the BBC be this naïve if it was commissioning content from North Korea or the Islamic Republic of Iran?”
The real crisis here is once again that trust in the BBC, one of our nation’s greatest institutions, is shaken. The real tragedy is that an opportunity to tell the world stories it needs to hear about the children of Gaza who have been killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced in this awful conflict has been wasted.
It is rare that every national newspaper and website from the Daily Star to the Daily Telegraph has the same message on its front page. But this week, titles across the UK were united in demanding that the government retreats from its plans to weaken copyright law. If the legislation goes ahead, it will have untold consequences for media and democracy.
Over the past decade, local and national news outfits have been starved of advertising revenue, which has instead been snaffled by Google and Facebook trading on their work. Now, Big Tech companies could be allowed to use journalism and other content, such as music, for their AI models without permission or payment. This will place greater – possibly unsustainable – financial pressures on news organisations. At a time when misinformation rages, it is pure recklessness.
Trump’s war on the US press continues. And so it must, for the president’s popularity depends on reminding supporters that despite the trappings of the Oval Office he remains their disruptor-in-chief, battling “enemies of the people”. So the Associated Press (AP)’s decision to take legal action against key White House staff over being barred from briefings is in many ways the perfect PR for the president.
Regardless, it’s a step AP had no choice but to take. What began as an exclusion over its refusal to change “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” in its style guide has become a battle for freedom of speech. In documents filed by AP, its legal team wrote: “The constitution does not allow the government to control speech. Allowing such government control and retaliation to stand is a threat to every American’s freedom.”
The case ought to be an easy win for the news agency. Even pro-Trump outlets Fox News and Newsmax have signed a letter opposing the ban. But will the Trump-appointed judge see it that way? The president, meanwhile, is just happy to keep the well-publicised battle raging.
[See also: The godfather of the Maga right]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World