Now we have the evidence. The BBC knowingly helped spread Hamas lies and hate
Danny Cohen
The leaked Prescott Report is a devastating document. It is an insider’s account of serious and widespread failings of impartiality, systemic bias and activist journalism spanning years of BBC news coverage.
It lays bare for the first time how senior BBC executives repeatedly tried to dismiss, downplay or excuse these failings in a total abdication of their responsibilities. In doing so, they failed to uphold the highest standards of public service journalism we must expect of the BBC.
Michael Prescott is a serious and respected journalist. As an adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee for three years he had regular and detailed access to evidence of the BBC’s journalistic failures and groupthink.
His 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.
It also provides a compelling account of Mr Prescott’s loss of faith in the BBC leadership. This includes Director General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, whose consistent modus operandi against all criticism appears to be to deny, defend and deflect.
For what is most striking about this report is the way it reveals how, having made such serious and misleading journalistic errors, BBC executives chose to hide them from the public rather than correct the record.
In doing so they consciously chose to mislead licence-fee payers. The idea that they should have been transparent with audiences about such serious failings does not seem to have occurred to anyone in a position of executive power.
Protecting the BBC’s reputation came before the duties and principles enshrined in the BBC’s Charter obligations.
Following disclosure of the BBC’s journalistic failings in its American Presidential election coverage, the revelations concerning the full extent of bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war are frankly shocking.
When The Telegraph earlier this year revealed the poisonous anti-Semitic social media posts of journalists regularly used by BBC Arabic, the BBC sought to downplay their role. Public statements referred to the men as “eyewitnesses” and “not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team”.
This leaked memo reveals that one of those men, Samer Elzaenen – who called on social media for Jews to be burnt as “Hitler did” – appeared on BBC Arabic 244 times between November 2023 and April 2025.
Ahmad Alagha, who described Jews as “devils” and Israelis as less than human, appeared a staggering 522 times on BBC Arabic news programmes during the same period. That is a remarkable amount of times to have been an “eyewitness”. Yet the truth of this has been hidden from licence-fee payers.
Not only was BBC Arabic routinely platforming Jew-hating journalists, it was also promoting Hamas lies over facts. A BBC Arabic article covering the harrowing story of a Yazidi sex slave rescued from Gaza devoted almost 600 words to a Hamas statement calling the woman a liar.
Faced with undeniable evidence of flagrant bias BBC executives chose, both in private and in public, to deliver a full-throated defence of BBC Arabic’s “exceptional journalism”.
And this rot is not confined to BBC Arabic.
The Prescott document also exposes how the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight highlighted claims that thousands of babies were on the brink of starvation in Gaza that it already knew to be false.
And it charts how BBC News gave extensive coverage to stories that painted Israel as the aggressor while burying stories that contradicted that narrative. Even the BBC’s own exclusive story that the media had widely misunderstood the International Criminal Court’s ruling on “genocide” in Gaza was buried.
As I read page after page of shocking revelations, I felt a growing sense of dismay towards those at the top of the BBC who have spent two years assuring me and others within the British Jewish community that they take issues of anti-Semitism and bias seriously. This report provides hard evidence that the BBC has been gaslighting us.
That the BBC has helped to push Hamas lies around the world and fuelled anti-Semitism at home cannot now be in doubt.
This explosive document has shredded any pretence to the BBC’s claims to be a trusted and impartial news source and should serve as a wake-up call to the Government as it embarks on Charter Renewal.
Those responsible for overseeing this deep offence to impartial journalism should hang their heads in shame and resign.
The BBC is not safe in their hands.
Danny Cohen is a former Director of BBC Television
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