Melanie Phillips: Defund the BBC

Recent revelations show it's betrayed its Charter principles and is a disgrace to journalism

The BBC has long been accused of left-wing bias. However, the revelation that it doctored comments made by US President Donald Trump to make it appear falsely that he promoted the attack on the Capitol on January 6 2021 takes this onto a very different level.

An explosive memo surfaced last week in the Telegraph. The memo was written by Michael Prescott, who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC). He was utterly appalled at the nature and scale of the BBC’s biased, misleading and untruthful reporting that had been reported to the standards committee but had been brushed aside by BBC executives.

The flagship TV current affairs programme Panorama, he said, had spliced together two clips from separate parts of Trump’s speech on January 6 to make it appear falsely that he had exhorted his supporters to go down and fight on Capitol Hill. Panorama reported his comments thus:

We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.

What Trump actually said was:

We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

“We fight like hell” came 54 minutes later.

The “speech” clip was followed by video footage of the Proud Boys, Trump’s supporters, marching towards Congress. This created the impression that these supporters had taken up his “call-to-arms” that wasn’t. In fact, the Proud Boys had marched to Capitol Hill before Trump had started speaking.

This wasn’t just bias. It was journalistic fraud. Yet when challenged about this, Jonathan Munro, Global Director of BBC News, said:

It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.

What a marmalade-dropper. Editors often splice comments together for reasons of space and clarity. It is most certainly not normal practice to do so in a way that distorts or reverses the meaning.

Prescott also highlights systematically shocking behaviour by BBC Arabic — the channel that broadcasts to a supremely sensitive part of the world. The coverage of the war in Gaza, says Prescott, repeatedly played down Israeli victimisation and Arab aggression to minimise Israeli suffering and paint Israel falsely as the aggressor.

A separate report to the standards board had noted that the BBC, along with the UN and other media outlets, had stated that 70 per cent of all those killed in Gaza were women and children — a key claim made by those demonising Israel for wantonly cruel behavior. Yet the UN eventually revised this figure down to 52 per cent. Prescott writes:

In the report to the EGSC, we were warned that for too long the BBC had given “unjustifiable weight” to the 70 per cent claim, even though concerns about its credibility were well known.

He goes on to report that a BBC Arabic regular, Ahmed Qannan, who described a gunman who killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer as a “hero”, appeared 217 times on the channel between February 2024 and the April 2025. Introduced as a journalist from Gaza, he appeared both on BBC Arabic radio and Gaza Today.

Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils” appeared 522 times between November, 2023 and April, 2025, across BBC Arabic television, radio and Gaza Today. He was consistently introduced as a journalist.

Then there’s this:

In April, 2024, and again in June, the BBC covered two stories relating to the discovery of mass graves in Gaza. The first was discovered at Al Nasser hospital and the second at Al Shifa.

The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.

The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.

One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied.

It seems that the most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israel ground forces.

The EGSC was reminded that the BBC had itself reported extensively on Palestinians digging these graves at the time. These reports had topped its bulletins.

How could this then be forgotten in the subsequent BBC coverage that suggested something more sinister had occurred? The EGSC was offered no explanation.

The question becomes even more pressing when you learn the journalists responsible for the first set of stories were the same journalists who wrote the second set of stories suggesting the graves were evidence of Israeli war crimes.

How indeed. This is wicked, wicked stuff. And by a broadcasting outlet that is more influential around the world — including the volcanic Middle East — than any other because it is trusted as a kitemark of truth and fairness.

Prescott’s report amply reflects the deep concerns about the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war that have been repeatedly raised by Israel supporters for the past two years. These concerns have been brushed aside. Instead, the Jewish community has been gaslit and itself demonised for allegedly trying to sanitise Israel’s “crimes” by partisan shroud-waving.

Most troubling of all, Prescott reports that senior BBC executives repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve the problems that were being highlighted, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all. Prescott, a former political editor of the Sunday Times, has held various corporate roles. He says:

On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems.

Trump is reportedly furious at the damaging untruth perpetrated against him. The likely harm to US-UK relations, not to mention the possibility that Trump may take legal action, has sent the Starmer government into a state of panic. Under pressure to show that the BBC is taking appropriate action, its Chairman, Samir Shah, will reportedly issue an apology tomorrow to the Commons culture committee.

This is, to put it mildly, nowhere near adequate.

Prescott raises concerns about rotten reporting over a range of other issues, including his observation that a unit of rogue LGBT+ reporters is censoring coverage of the trans debate, and how none other than the BBC’s own flagship “fact-checking” service, Verify, produced a “thoroughly wrong” report suggesting car insurers were racist. Meanwhile The Sunday Telegraph reports today that the BBC is set to have a review of its climate and energy policy reporting over potential errors and bias.

You don’t say.

But the BBC’s journalistic calumnies over Israel are more than just bias. They represent the utmost malevolence towards Israel expressed through its systematic channelling of terrorist propaganda — an attitude displayed towards no other people, country or cause on earth — and, on some occasions, unvarnished bigotry against Jewish people. The BBC has a fundamental problem with the Jews.

And this has had consequences. As producers of Britain’s cultural mood-music, the BBC has been drip-feeding poison about Israel into the nation’s psyche for years while ignoring, downplaying or sanitising its attackers in Britain as well as in the Middle East. It is thus directly responsible for contributing to the tsunami of Jew-hatred being suffered by Britain’s Jewish community, as well as ramping up the already hysterical hatred of Jews in the Muslim world. The BBC has Jewish blood on its hands.

What needs to happen, in the first instance, is the sacking of at least two senior executives, Munro and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness. *But that won’t solve the problem. BBC executives, like many if not most of its journalists, believe that their left-wing mindset is the political centre-ground and thus embodies balance, fairness and truth. Anyone who challenges that mindset is therefore axiomatically regarded as an extremist or hopeless partisan and is self-righteously ignored.

The BBC embodies a hermetically-sealed thought system. It has betrayed its core Charter principles of truth and fairness and is a disgrace to journalism. The case for de-funding it is now overwhelming.

*Update: soon after I posted this, Deborah Turness and the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie, resigned.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE