8,000 complaints to BBC over Gaza

More than 8,000 complaints have been made about the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war since Hamas attacked Israel in October, it has been revealed.

Concerns were raised about the perception of bias in the corporation’s reporting of the conflict, which has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, as top BBC staff faced questions from the UK Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee yesterday.

The broadcaster’s director of editorial policy and standards, David Jordan, told the committee: “As of this morning, we had just under 4,000 people complaining that our... output, rather, our coverage, was biased against Israel and over 4,000 that was biased in favour (of Israel).

“They are actually pretty similar, which reflects the differing opinions in the country as a whole on that.”

Elsewhere, BBC directorgeneral Tim Davie was also asked about BBC Arabic staff retweeting remarks that were described as “essentially pro-Hamas” by Conservative MP Damian Green.

Mr Davie said: “Some of those tweets that we’ve seen are unacceptable, and we have taken action and we’ll continue to take action. We are acting fairly and judiciously, and it’s not easy.”

Mr Davie also said that due to staff’s comments on social media, they had been told to leave the corporation.

He added that he was “very proud” of the BBC Arabic service.

Mr Davie was also asked about the BBC’s reporting of a submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa alleging that Israel was breaching the Genocide Convention with its military offensive in Gaza.

He said he gets “significant feedback from either side”, and added: “Overall, I think we have been pretty robust in covering the ICJ rulings. We’ve been in a reasonable position.”

Mr Jordan told the committee that South Africa’s and Israel’s submissions receiving different amounts of coverage on different days “only happened on our UK output”, due to the need to cover a hearing about the Post Office scandal.

“When news looked at it in retrospect, they did think that perhaps they did make a mistake by not making the two live coverages similar or the same, but all the other coverage was similar or the same,” he said.