Tim Davie, director general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, chief executive of BBC News, both abruptly resigned on Sunday night following a concerted campaign from right-wing media over the last week.
The campaign was launched last Tuesday by the Daily Telegraph newspaper when it published a front page article headlined ‘BBC’s Trump bias exposed in memo leak’.
The basis for this accusation – that the BBC is riddled with an anti-Trump bias – was an ‘internal whistleblowing memo’ written by Michael Prescott a former external advisor to the BBC’s editorial standards committee.
The Telegraph article alleged that the BBC, in a Panorama documentary, had ‘doctored’ a speech made by Donald Trump making it appear that he had actively encouraged the insurrectionary attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.
Although the Panorama programme edited Trump’s speech, which went on for over an hour, this in no way detracts from the fact that anyone listening to it was left in no doubt what Trump was calling for when he demanded the mob march to the Capitol to ‘save our democracy’ and prevent Joe Biden from being confirmed as president.
Although the fire and ‘righteous’ anger from the Telegraph initially focused on the Panorama documentary, it has been rapidly expanded to cover allegations of ‘systematic anti-Israel bias and antisemitism across a range of the BBC’s output.’
According to Prescott, who left the BBC in the summer, the BBC ‘pushed Hamas lies’ and ‘minimised Israeli suffering’ in an attempt to ‘paint Israel as the aggressor’.
This tissue of lies about the BBC’s ‘anti-Israel’ bias was blown apart in November last year when over 100 of its staff wrote to Davie and Turness accusing the corporation of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the genocidal war in Gaza and criticising its lack of ‘accurate evidence-based journalism.’
This letter concluded by saying that British media organisations such as the BBC, ITV and Sky ‘enjoy high levels of public trust’ and have a ‘duty to fearlessly follow the evidence.’
Davie proved his devotion to ‘fearlessly follow the evidence’ when in February 2025 the BBC pulled a documentary titled ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone’, a depiction of life in Gaza through the eyes of Palestinian children.
This was not the last of the BBC’s ban on programmes revealing the true extent of the Zionist regimes genocidal war crimes in Gaza. In June, the BBC announced it had decided not to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack,’ which it had originally commissioned, due to ‘impartiality concerns’.
Last week an article by Lucy Williamson titled ‘Inside Gaza, BBC sees total devastation after two years of war’ was published on the BBC website.
Williamson was accompanied at all times by Israeli officials, forbidden contact with Palestinians and her report had to be submitted for approval before being allowed to be published.
All these conditions were approved by Davie and the BBC leaders who have completely surrendered to the increasingly desperate Zionist lobby.
But even their surrender has not proved to be enough for the Zionist regime and its supporters who are now demanding the complete takeover of the BBC to stifle all evidence of the genocidal war waged with the support of US and world imperialism to crush the Palestinian resistance.
The Telegraph has been in the forefront of a massive campaign to defund the BBC and turn it over to private media moguls, creating the conditions where even the semblance of an independent news channel is ditched.
The complete failure of Zionism to defeat the Palestinian people and the overwhelming support from tens of millions of workers and youth across the US, UK and Europe has created a massive crisis for the Israeli regime and the Trump administration.
This latest frenzied attack on the BBC is the latest sign of just how desperate the situation is for the Zionist state and its imperialist backers.
The time has come for the working class to take action by demanding its trade unions call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments replacing them with workers’ governments and socialism.
