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Hamas – which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK – orchestrated and carried out the biggest atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 2023.
An internal BBC review found “serious flaws” in the making of the documentary, which was pulled from iPlayer shortly after broadcast.
Referring to the scandal, Lord Mann said: “Heads should roll. And the heads that roll shouldn’t just be the little heads. You know that’s always the danger with organisations the size of the BBC. Oh hey, there’s something wrong, let’s get rid of a few of the people at the bottom. No, let’s get rid of some at the top, would be my view.
“Someone at the top should carry the can. It’s not acceptable and I’ve been in there several times, I’ve offered them training, they’ve never accepted it. I think there’s often an arrogance there.”
Also, from an interview in the Sunday Times today with Danny Cohen, former BBC director of Television:
For years after he left the BBC, Cohen was careful not to criticise his former employer publicly. The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, changed this. “I didn’t feel I had a choice,” Cohen says, making clear that he is speaking in a personal capacity. “If I’d said nothing, I’d probably look back in ten years’ time and think I let myself and my community down by not speaking up.”
After the massacre the BBC did not describe the Hamas gunmen as terrorists. Then, last month, the broadcaster showed a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, about the conflict in the region. Hours after it went out it emerged that the 13-year-old boy who narrated it was the son of a minister in the Hamas government. The BBC subsequently removed the documentary from iPlayer.
“It’s been a disastrous moment for the BBC, and they’ve had to acknowledge very significant failures of journalism and oversight,” Cohen says. “Very senior people at the BBC saw the doc before it went out and didn’t ask enough questions.” He doesn’t name her, but he means Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. Cohen has been calling for an independent inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the conflict.
“That is not an isolated moment — it’s an issue of systemic bias,” he argues, pointing to all the corrections — 80 in the first five months of the war — made by the BBC’s Arabic news channel after complaints of anti-Israeli bias. “The BBC continues to put defending the reputation of the BBC above transparency.”
Was it an issue when he was at the BBC? “I think there has always been a problem, but nothing on the scale it is now.”
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