Anti-Israel Bias at the BBC and the ABC

Once upon a time, Britain’s publicly-funded national broadcaster, like Australia’s, was known for scrupulous objectivity, in accordance with the terms of its charter. As this article will demonstrate, with Israel as its central theme, the BBC’s embrace of leftism, now so marked a feature of its output, as it is of the ABC’s, was clearly discernible during the 1960s.

In 1970, some months after the June general election that swept Harold Wilson’s Labour government from power, Tory MP Harold Soref (1916–1993) scathingly attacked the BBC’s left-wing “public brain-washing”, citing, among other examples, leftist propaganda in BBC programs for schools and dramatic productions. “Such programmes as Any Questions [analogous to the ABC’s Q&A] are invariably loaded in the Left’s favour as are [flagship radio news program] The World at One and [weekly current affairs television program] Panorama,” he continued. “The choice of ‘experts’, the sympathetic programmes on Marx and Lenin, compared to the vilification of any country fighting or containing Communism are self-evident.” He concluded: “The future seems hardly brighter. Each year the BBC offers six highly-prized manager traineeships. These people are expected to rise high within the Corporation. Last year 1,000 undergraduates applied for these six posts. Four of them went to left-wing students.” (Liverpool Daily Post, 10 November 1970.)

That the BBC favours leftists became clearer with each decade, as successive intakes of managers hired staff in their own ideological image (again like the ABC), resulting in fully fledged wokeism and the reservation of some internships for BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) applicants only. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/jan/08/uknews;https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-36443113 In his memoir When One Door Closes, published in 2011, former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons (1942–2019) described the BBC’s pervasive left-wing “mindset”:

At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left. By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are the Guardian and the Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of the Guardian and told “it’s all in there” … I am in no doubt that the majority of BBC staff vote for political parties of the Left. But it’s impossible to do anything but guess at the numbers whose beliefs are on the Right or even Centre-Right. This is because the one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects at the BBC is letting it be known that you are at odds with the prevailing and deep-rooted BBC attitude towards Life, the Universe, and Everything.

He gave examples:

Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good—it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get … All green and environmental groups are very good things. Trade unions are mostly good things, except when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore.

Furthermore:

Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended. The increasing tendency for the BBC to interview its own reporters on air exacerbates this mindset. Instead of concentrating on interviewing the leading players in a story or spreading the net wide for a range of views, these days the BBC frequently chooses to use the time getting the thoughts of its own correspondents. It is a format … which often invites the expression of opinion. When that happens, instead of hearing both sides of a story, the audience at home gets what is, in effect, the BBC’s view presented as fact.

Stemming from that “mindset” are the brazenly anti-Israel reports, analytical comments, and tweets made by the BBC’s Middle East-turned-International Editor Jeremy Bowen and certain colleagues in contravention of their employer’s charter and producers’ guidelines. My research suggests that the earliest BBC correspondent of this ilk was Keith Kyle (1925–2007), who upon graduating from Oxford joined the BBC World Service as a talks producer but from 1953 to1958 was the Economist’s Washington correspondent. He first appeared on BBC television during the early 1960s, reporting from southern Africa. Undisguisedly sympathetic to black nationalism, he delivered his reports in characteristically impassioned booming style, as his obituary in the Guardian (27 February 2007) admiringly recalled. During the tense prelude to the Six-Day War, he broadcast that “fundamentally in this dispute the Arabs are completely in the right. There can be no question about this at all.” That biased assertion, flagrantly breaching the BBC’s obligatory objectivity, was repeated in the June 1, 1967, issue of the BBC publication the Listener.

Kyle also flouted the objectivity requirement by openly aligning himself with the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), funded by Arab governments and set up in London soon after the Six-Day War to co-ordinate pro-Arab opinion in the UK and undermine the widespread support for Israel existing in Britain at that time. CAABU’s foundation members included household names such as Glubb Pasha, Professor Arnold Toynbee and former Conservative MP and Suez rebel Anthony Nutting. In 1956, when Nutting was a junior foreign affairs minister, Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden had railed against “the anti-Jewish spleen of you people in the Foreign Office”, and in 1969 Israel would deny Nutting entry, he having reportedly told students in Beirut that only “force” could solve the “the Palestine Question” and “it was up to the Palestinian guerrillas” to do so. (Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe, Vintage Books, New York, 2000, pp. 89-90; Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report, 12 November 1999).

In a speech to the faithful on July 27, 1977, one of CAABU’s zealous parliamentary stalwarts, Christopher Mayhew (by then a Labour life peer) recalled that, ten years earlier, an opinion poll by the Sunday Times had shown that only 2 per cent of Britons supported the Arab cause. Moreover, “almost all newspaper proprietors and editors, almost all the directing staff of the BBC and ITV, almost all MPs, and almost the entire publishing and film industries” were pro-Israel. “None of the founders of CAABU … expected to enjoy the experience of challenging the Zionist lobby … but it was plainly a job that had to be done by someone.”  

Among CAABU’s founder members were people with strong links to the BBC. Nevill Barbour (1895–1972) was an Arabic scholar who had lived in Mandate Palestine during the 1930s. Having returned to Britain, he joined the BBC in 1940 as Arabic Public Relations Officer. He launched the magazine Arabic Listener and subsequently became assistant head of the BBC’s Eastern Service, retiring in 1956. CAABU linchpin Doreen Ingrams (1906–1997), wife of British colonial administrator Harold Ingrams (1897–1973), a fellow member with whom she had travelled in Arabia, both clad in local garb, was from 1955 to 1967 a senior assistant in the BBC’s Arabic Service, specialising in content aimed at women. Michael Adams (1920–2005), father of Paul Adams, a future BBC Middle East correspondent, had worked for the BBC early in his career, but later joined the Guardian. Shortly before his appointment as CAABU’s Director that paper had sent him on a fact-finding trip (surreptitiously Arab-funded) to the Middle East which resulted in a series of Israel-demonising articles that made a Jewish Chronicle columnist (June 30, 1967) observe: “It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each morning.” In a despatch from Cairo, Adams reported the “forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza”. The Guardian later grudgingly admitted that those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army. Adams nastily characterised Israeli policy as the “final solution”. On BBC television’s Panorama he condemned “nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure” on British foreign-policy makers. Elsewhere he rhetorically inquired why the British press referred to “Arab terrorists”, continuing, provocatively, “I can’t remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France ‘terrorists’.” His obituary in the Guardian, avoiding such grubby details, was hagiographic. (In 2007, during the captivity in Gaza of the BBC’s Alan Johnston, kidnapped by the so-called Army of Islam, Michael Adams’s BBC-employed son Paul observed that Johnston’s role as Gaza correspondent was to report “the Palestinian predicament” there, surely a tacit admission of partisanship.)

Outrageously, Keith Kyle blatantly consorted with CAABU from the start, and his BBC bosses proved compliant. He gave a keynote address to one of CAABU’s first major rallies, at which a reporter for the Jewish Chronicle (November 29, 1968) noted “intense anti-Jewish feeling generated in the CAABU audience—and among some of the speakers—by the very existence of the Jewish State, referred to as the Zionist State” and mockery and rowdy heckling directed at pro-Israel Jewish questioners. In 1969 Kyle presented, on BBC programs such as 24 Hours, reports on the Middle East highly biased against Israel and replete with gratuitous comments of his own, causing a Jewish Chronicle columnist (May 9, 1969) to observe: “The casual viewer will doubtless have been fooled into believing that the Israeli occupation of Arab territories is barbaric and ruthless.” Kyle suggested that the nine Iraqi Jews convicted on trumped-up charges of spying and publicly hanged in Baghdad in January that year were indeed guilty, accused Israel of violating the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of populations under occupation, and denounced Israel’s policy of “massive retaliation”.

Another particularly shameful example of Kyle’s pro-Arab stance concerned the attempted hijacking in February 1969 by four PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) terrorists, of an El Al aircraft at Zurich airport as it took off for Tel Aviv. The attempt failed, but not before the co-pilot had been fatally wounded and several other innocents injured. Kyle had learned of the planned hijack from Arab contacts in Damascus, but “to avoid Israeli retaliation against it” had kept the information to himself. No wonder there was talk of Kyle being prosecuted as “an accessory before the fact” if he set foot in Israel, that Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban cancelled a scheduled interview with him, and that he was refused security clearance to examine the work of UN observers in the Suez Canal zone. Yet according to the Times (July 16, 1969) Kyle had the temerity to state: “I simply refuse to discuss the Middle East in terms of pro- and anti- … I have a bias towards peace.”

On behalf of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, future life peers Sir Barnett Janner and Victor Mishcon discussed communal concerns regarding Kyle’s “slanted” reports with the then Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC, Lord Hill. But following an investigation of the transcripts—by the BBC itself, as all complaints of bias to the BBC still are—the BBC took no action against Kyle: he kept his job not only as a BBC correspondent but as adviser on political and foreign affairs to BBC television’s current affairs group. (This in-house cosiness is again reminiscent of “your ABC”.) Meanwhile CAABU has in recent years been indoctrinating British schoolchildren with pernicious Israel-demonising information packs for teachers prepared in co-operation with the often openly anti-Semitic Palestine Solidarity Campaign. https://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/06/force-feeding-british-schoolchildren.html

Kyle, who made several abortive bids to enter Parliament, became prominently associated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) and increasingly fixated on the supposed crimes of Israel. In 1983 he invited to the RIIA as a speaker the Israeli anti-Zionist extremist Israel Shahak, author of a book containing the vile canard “In the Jewish State, only the Jews are considered human. Non-Jews have the status of beasts.” In view of the nexus that so demonstrably exists between the Guardian and the BBC, we need not be surprised that Kyle’s obituary in that infamously anti-Israel newspaper (February 27, 2007) observed that Kyle “would have made a wise foreign secretary”. Nor that it quoted the risible tribute of the BBC’s Sir Robin Day, an Oxford contemporary of Kyle: “His integrity as a journalist and as a person was, and is, absolute. Few journalists of any medium have been so scrupulous with the truth.”

ABC Parallels

Just as the BBC is funded by licence fees levied compulsorily on every household in Britain that owns a television, whether they watch the BBC or not, the ABC is funded by all Australian taxpayers regardless of their listening and viewing habits. It “has a statutory duty to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism” proclaims its Code of Practice (Section 4).

Aiming to equip audiences to make up their own minds is consistent with the public service character of the ABC. A democratic society depends on diverse sources of reliable information and contending opinions. A broadcaster operating under statute with public funds is legitimately expected to contribute in ways that may differ from commercial media.

ABC staff are obligated to “Gather and present news and information with due impartiality” and “Present a diversity of perspectives so that, over time, no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.” Staff must not “misrepresent any perspective” or “unduly favour one perspective over another.”

By the 1980s it was clear that elements within the ABC were pursuing an anti-Israel line. For instance, in 1986, at least two separate programs on ABC Radio reported sympathetically on Israel’s Arab enemies with no input from the Israeli side; one, featuring prominent anti-Zionist academic Dr Irwin Herrman, looked at Arafat and the PLO, giving free rein to Arafat’s biographer Alan Hart to extol the man and the organisation. To quote future Labor parliamentarian Michael Danby at the time:

Both these speakers have invested considerable, personal political capital in emphasising the validity of Arafat’s views. It was, therefore, not surprising that they did not question Arafat or examine the PLO’s continuing refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

The decade began a creeping imbalance in the choice of studio guests chosen by the ABC for interview. Harsh critics of Israel such Herrman, Dr Joe Camilleri and Dr Robert Springborg becoming almost ubiquitous interviewees, to the near exclusion of countervailing opinion-holders. Furthermore, the fact that some such favoured interviewees represented partisan organisations with aims detrimental to Israel was not always explained. (See Australian Jewish News, 18 June 1982, 7 August 1986, 1 February 1991).

The outrageous appointment in 2014 as Middle East Correspondent of proven left-wing pro-Palestinian “advocacy journalist” Sophie McNeill, whose contributions ranged from SBS to the Electronic Intifada, marked a new low for the ABC. Throughout her career there (she has worked for the notoriously selective Human Rights Watch since 2020) she demonised Israel with impunity in reports that were brazen and questionable propaganda pieces. See here, for example, and here. Others, swathed in the ABC’s prevalent leftist culture, have followed her example.

The aftermath of the ABC’s firing in December of Adrienne Latouff has laid bare the extent of staff collusion in anti-Israel bias, with, as reported at length by Al-Jazeera, (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed) a near-rebellion greeting new ABC Chairman Kim Williams’s strictures against staff involving themselves in political activism. Will he be the Hercules who clears out this particular Augean Stable? We can but hope.

Dr Hilary L. Rubinstein is a much-published historian who ran a popular pro-Israel blog for ten years. Her article “The Leftist Myth of William Cooper” appeared in the May 2023 issue of Quadrant.