BBC digital news no longer republished

As BBC staff discontent resurfaces over Gaza bias, one national broadcaster has already stopped republishing reports on its digital platform.

The BBC’s Broadcasting House in London. (Photo: Flickr)

As news of discontent among British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) staff over their employer’s coverage of Gaza resurfaces, one state broadcaster has already scaled back using its reports.

Documents released under the Official Information Act (OIA) show Radio New Zealand (RNZ) management discussed the merits of a request by a Palestinian advocacy group in June 2023 to stop using BBC news reports on West Asia because these were considered notoriously biased and misleading.

Within months, BBC news content was quietly discontinued on its digital platform, although its radio output continued to feature BBC audio reports. RNZ also began republishing CNN’s digital reporting, itself considered a Western propaganda outlet, although arguably less crude in its approach.

This week, more than 400 public figures and journalists signed a letter to BBC management expressing “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine” and calling for the removal of a board member, Robbie Gibb, a Zionist with ties to the UK Jewish Chronicle newspaper.

The signatories included 111 BBC journalists, who remained anonymous to protect themselves from career repercussions.

They criticised the BBC for double standards, using the pretext of impartiality to exercise censorship and failing to hold the British Government to account for its position on Gaza and relationship with Israel.

“This hasn’t happened by accident, rather by design. Much of the BBC’s coverage in this area is defined by anti-Palestinian racism,” the letter reads.

The latest public criticism of the BBC followed its decision not to air Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which it commissioned but then pulled citing impartiality concerns.

The letter is part of long-running discontent at the broadcaster. In October 2023, a BBC staff member told The Times that colleagues were crying in lavatories and taking time off work over the broadcaster treating Israeli lives as "more worthy” and dehumanising Palestinians.

RNZ and complaint over BBC news reports

Months before Hamas’ October 7 Al Aqsa Flood operation that sparked Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, RNZ’s top management were already musing over objections made to its use of BBC news reports.

An OIA reply to an In Context reader, who asked RNZ to supply background details relating to its recently commissioned review of the broadcaster’s Gaza coverage, revealed the review’s genesis to be a complaint made by Palestinian advocate John Minto.

An email thread entitled ‘Request for RNZ and TVNZ to abandon using BBC coverage of the Middle East’ shows RNZ’s complaints coordinator, lawyer George Bignell, asking if CEO Paul Thompson, head of content Megan Whelan or news director Richard Sutherland had contacts at the BBC who could help reply to Minto’s objections.

Minto, co-chairman of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), had raised issues of terminology, pointing out reports called Palestinian resistance fighters ‘militants’ and had failed to use correct legal language, for example, to describe the West Bank as ‘occupied’. He also pointed out Israeli deaths were given wider and more sympathetic coverage than deaths of Palestinians.

The email exchange took place during RNZ’s ‘Russia edits scandal’, in the weeks after June 8, 2023, when management mischaracterized as possible foreign interference subediting that addressed Western bias and war propaganda in Reuters and BBC world news reports before republication.

It led to an independent review, which recommended RNZ assess aspects of its output against its editorial policy through the use of “targeted proactive reviews”.

The email thread reveals Bignell suggested RNZ staff assigned to identify “inappropriate editing” in international news wire copy should also “use it as an opportunity to review the content of what we have published online for say 24 months re Israel/Palestine to see what the evidence says”.

Genesis of Feslier Report

Instead, RNZ decided to use former employee and government spin doctor Colin Feslier to review content over a 9-month period following October 7, presenting it as the first of its pro-active annual reviews.

His now notorious report, published in March this year, exonerated RNZ for its republication of BBC and Reuters stories and justified cultural and institutional bias in news reporting by referencing news ‘proximity’ - the idea that RNZ’s Western audience identified culturally with Israel, so naturally wanted to know more about their experiences than those of Palestinians. Feslier found “nothing that indicated a systemic problem in meeting the standards or any general variation from accepted news gathering and reporting”.

However, in the months following Minto’s original complaint, RNZ quietly stopped republishing BBC world news stories on its digital platform. Around the same time, it began republishing stories from Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Atlanta-based Cable News Network (CNN), itself accused of being an epistemic tool of empire and displaying deep ideological bias in its newsroom practices.

In October 2024 independent journalist Kyle Church put in an OIA request asking for emails and meeting minutes over any management decision to discontinue use of the BBC news copy and the reasons it had decided to use CNN news stories on its website.

Bignell replied that RNZ maintained its relationship with the BBC, while it had a longstanding relationship with CNN and that a decision to subscribe to its service had been taken in the 1990s. In actual fact, there was no arrangement to use CNN news stories on the RNZ website prior to 2023.

Because of a lack of transparency, the reasoning behind these moves is clouded and why RNZ remains reticent over the issue is open to speculation.