BBC chief downplays Britain’s military support for Israel

A senior figure at the BBC has defended the broadcaster’s failure to investigate Royal Air Force (RAF) surveillance flights over Gaza by trying to minimise their significance.

Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, told Declassified last night: “I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel”.

Burgess’ comment came as he was being grilled over the corporation’s patchy reporting of RAF intelligence sharing with Israel.

The RAF has sent more than 500 spy flights over Gaza since December 2023, which the BBC news website has mentioned just four times.

This is despite the flights taking place on days when Israel committed major massacres of Palestinians as well as British aid workers.

Intelligence from these flights is shared with Israel, whose prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.

While the BBC has barely reported on the spy flights, Declassified’s small team has repeatedly investigated them.

We shot the only footage of the spy plane taking off from a UK base on Cyprus and made freedom of information requests for data from the flights.

Declassified also doorstepped Britain’s defence secretary John Healey and defence chief Admiral Tony Radakin over the policy.

In response, Burgess, who oversees 800 BBC journalists, said: “I think it’s important that we investigate stories like that, congratulations for the work that you’ve done on it.

“So we have reported it as you say – clearly you feel not enough… There are many angles to cover, I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel, it’s by far and away it’s the US that are the prime [contributors]”.

When challenged further on why the BBC had not investigated the British spy flight over Gaza on the day Israel killed UK aid workers, Burgess said: “I agree with you that there are important issues to discuss but my point was that we shouldn’t – we need to see it in the context of the overall arming of Israel.”

Labour MP Andy McDonald, who was watching the exchange, told Burgess: “To underplay the role of the UK is an error.”

New report

Burgess was speaking in parliament at the launch of a landmark study into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza.

The report, by the Center for Media Monitoring (CFMM), examined BBC content from 7 October 2023 to 7 October 2024.

A total of 3,873 articles and 32,092 broadcast segments (TV/radio) were analysed.

The findings are profoundly sobering and crystallise how the BBC has consistently failed to report Israel’s war on Gaza with the required impartiality.

A clear hierarchy of human life was reflected in the BBC’s output, concurrent with a selective application of emotive language.

The word “massacre(d)” was applied almost 18 times more frequently to Israeli victims than Palestinian victims in BBC articles.

Meanwhile, it appeared in article headlines five times – all exclusively for attacks on Israelis.

By contrast, it didn’t appear once for Palestinians.

This is despite a catalogue of gruesome massacres committed by Israel in Gaza, each so horrific that they required their own distinct names, such as the ‘Medic Massacre,’ the ‘Flour Massacre’, or the ‘Tent Massacre.’

Likewise, BBC articles used emotive terms (“atrocities”, “slaughter”, “barbaric”, “deadly”, “brutal”) almost four times as much when describing Israeli victims.

The term murder(ed) was referenced by BBC presenters and correspondents more than 220 times. Only once was it applied in relation to Palestinians.

This reflects a consistent theme of distorting the extent of Israel’s systematic slaughter, and downplaying the disproportionate human toll inflicted on Palestinians.

Who is the victim?

The report found that despite Gaza enduring 34 times more deaths than Israel since October 7, the BBC ran an almost equal number of articles profiling personal and humanising stories about specific Israeli or Palestinian victims – 279 for Palestinians versus 201 for Israelis.

This resembles the testimony of a former BBC journalist who exclusively told Declassified that within the corporation, there was a “deliberate focus on Israelis who lost their lives” that was not reciprocated for the Palestinians.

The opportunity for the Palestinian case to be made was also curtailed.

The number of Israelis platformed in broadcast was more than double that of Palestinians: 2,350 compared to 1,085.

And when Palestinians were allowed on, the procedure was characterised by unevenness: the BBC pressed a total of 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas’ 7 October attacks, but not once asked a guest to condemn Israel’s atrocities.

The Israeli version was also amplified by the presenter 11 times more than the Palestinian one, including key claims like Israel’s right to self-defence.

Don’t mention the genocide

The data further showed that in over 100 documented interviews, BBC presenters actively shut down any mention of genocide in Gaza.

Equally, when tracking the unambiguous statements of genocidal intent, they were scarcely mentioned in BBC articles.

For example, Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility for October 7 (“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”), did not feature in a single BBC article.

This chimes with Declassified’s own research in the immediate aftermath of October 2023, where ostensibly, a propaganda by omission strategy was detected in the BBC’s output.

Assessing the report, CFMM’s director Rizwana Hamid said: “The BBC has a duty to reflect the full reality of this devastating war, including the lived experience of Palestinians.

“When language, framing, and editorial choices consistently favour one side, the public loses access to the truth.”

Asymmetric coverage

The report also compared BBC coverage of Israel/Gaza with its treatment of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Despite Ukrainians and Palestinians both being on the receiving end of oppressive violence, the coverage was asymmetric.

Ukrainians were afforded considerably more attention: data shows there were approximately 10 articles daily for Gaza, whereas for Ukraine that number is doubled.

Likewise, the BBC discussed war crimes in Ukraine nearly 3 times as much as in Gaza, also mentioning Russia as the perpetrator almost three times as often as it mentioned Israel as the perpetrator.

In fact, Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians were mentioned in a total of 121 online articles, a meagre 3%.

For perspective, a litany of war crimes by Israel have been documented by respected human rights organisations, including starvation as a weapon of war, collective punishment and the crime of extermination.

The Centre for Media Monitoring concludes the report with some urgent recommendations: urging the BBC to value Palestinian lives, avoid passive language and reflect the reality that Palestinian casualties far outweigh the Israeli ones.