Of the 47 error corrections which the BBC issued last year, around one-quarter (11) were linked to its reporting on Israel and Palestine. The second-most corrected topic was Reform UK, for which five clarifications were issued.
Further, in 2024 the BBC had 104 complaints about its Israel and Palestine coverage escalated to its executive complaints unit (ECU). However, 99 of these were not upheld.
READ MORE: Owen Jones: I investigated the BBC’s output on Gaza. Here’s what I found
Four complaints – three of which were about the same issue – were considered resolved, while only one was upheld all year.
The single complaint which was upheld related to a broadcast of The World At One on BBC Radio 4 on June 6, during which two expert witnesses of the Rwanda genocide were asked about parallels between what they had seen and what was happening in Gaza.
Both agreed that the events in Gaza could constitute genocide, the ECU ruled, therefore the BBC had faltered by “not challenging the impression of consensus or reflecting an alternative viewpoint”.
READ MORE: Israel ‘committed and is committing genocide in Gaza’, major Amnesty report concludes
Of the two issues which the ECU considered “resolved”, one complaint related to an Iranian academic on BBC News who expressed “strongly anti-Israeli views” without sufficient challenge, while the second related to a BBC journalist speculating that the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza had been destroyed by an Israeli air strike. Western intelligence later ascribed the explosion to a Hamas rocket misfiring.
Other complaints dealt with by the ECU referenced bias against or for Israelis and Palestinians, as well as misreporting of events in the assault on Gaza.
Elsewhere, the BBC received 119 complaints about an October interview in which host Emma Barnett was alleged to have “displayed bias in favour of Israel during her interview with the Lebanese ambassador”. The incident was not ruled on by the ECU.
The news comes with the BBC facing intense scrutiny over its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.
Dr Tom Chivers, campaign coordinator for the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), told the Sunday National: “This evidence of routine mistakes, biases and omissions shows how the BBC, like most of the world’s media, is failing disastrously to report on Palestine and Israel with accuracy, impartiality, or basic humanity.
“The reality is that these corrections only scratch the surface of the BBC’s distorted coverage of the war on Gaza. For years, its reporting has been plagued with unevidenced accounts, political interference and the uncritical parroting of claims by military and government officials.
“The ongoing atrocities and humanitarian crisis in Palestine mean that now more than ever, the public expects the BBC to be rigorous, accountable and transparent. If the BBC seeks to rebuild trust with the British public, it needs to rediscover its commitment to truth, accuracy and impartiality – and above all to assert its political and editorial independence to ensure it can report without fear or favour.”
READ MORE: Keir Starmer challenged on unearthed report HE WROTE amid silence on Gaza ‘genocide’
A spokesperson for the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) pointed to an internal BBC report from 2006 which looked to “assess the impartiality of BBC News and current affairs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with particular regard to accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias”.
It found that “BBC coverage does not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”.
The SPSC spokesperson said it was “getting worse”, saying that more than 100 BBC journalists had “recently felt compelled to harshly criticise their employer’s coverage as ‘failing to humanise Palestinians’”.
The MRC was founded in 2011 by academics at Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and campaigns for “increased diversity and accountability of the British media”.
A BBC spokesperson said: “Our commitment to transparency means that if we get things wrong we openly say so on the correction and clarification pages.
“Our latest research on our reporting of the Israel/Gaza war shows that audiences are significantly more likely to turn to BBC News for impartial coverage of this story than to any other news provider.”