Can the BBC be saved? The rot inside Britain’s national broadcaster

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Nov 14, 2025

Hadar Sela, co-editor of CAMERA UK and a dedicated analyst of BBC coverage, sheds light on the alarming bias within the BBC. She discusses how years of complaints went ignored, revealing a newsroom culture that prioritizes speed over accuracy. Sela critiques specific misreporting incidents, including the Gaza hospital debacle, and highlights the underreporting of Israeli casualties. She calls for transparency and radical reforms to restore public trust, questioning whether the BBC can recover from its deep-rooted issues.

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INSIGHT

Organizational Refusal To Learn

The BBC displays a cultural refusal to listen that prevents learning from complaints and mistakes.
Its ineffective, slow complaints procedure lets problems recur rather than correcting them.

ANECDOTE

Repeated Gaza Reporting Failures

Hadar recounts BBC Gaza reporting errors like a correspondent retweeting a Syrian child as a Gazan and wrongly blaming Israel for a child's death.
Corrections arrived months later as footnotes with no explanation, leaving earlier readers misled.

ANECDOTE

Al-Ahli Hospital Misreporting

The Al-Ahli hospital episode showed BBC reporters confidently asserting an Israeli strike and later evading responsibility.
Jeremy Bowen shrugged and said he wasn't worried despite the claim being false and consequential.

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The BBC is facing its biggest crisis in decades — but the scandal isn’t just about two resignations. It’s about years of skewed reporting, buried corrections, and a newsroom culture that has normalised bias while persuading the public that it stands for impartial truth.

In this revealing conversation, Hadar Sela, co-editor of CAMERA UK and one of the most meticulous analysts of BBC coverage anywhere, joins Jonathan Sacerdoti to peel back the layers of structural failure inside the BBC: the habits, blind spots, and editorial decisions that have shaped public perception of Israel, terrorism, and the Middle East for over a decade.

What you’ll hear in this eye-opening discussion:

📺 Why years of complaints and warnings about BBC bias were ignored

🧩 How “mistakes” always seem to land in the same ideological direction

📰 The hidden power of the BBC’s archive as a distorted historical record

🚨 The Gaza hospital story: a case study in misreporting and zero accountability

⚖️ Why the “what we knew at the time” defence has become a shield against truth

🧾 How the BBC relies on activists, partisan NGOs, and compromised sources

💣 Why Palestinian terror attacks are almost never reported — and what that omission achieves

🧠 The newsroom culture that discourages dissent and buries internal criticism

📉 BBC Verify: why the fact-checking unit often amplifies misinformation instead of correcting it

🔍 How corrections arrive months or years late, quietly, and without transparency

🗂️ Why an external investigation — not internal reforms — may be the BBC’s only hope

🇮🇱 How skewed reporting has helped normalise public debate about Israel’s very right to exist

🔻 The human cost of selective storytelling: Israelis displaced, traumatised, or killed yet barely covered

📢 What an independent complaints system could look like — and why the current process is broken beyond repair

🎧 Listen to this episode if you want to understand not just what has gone wrong inside the BBC, but why it keeps happening — and why so many journalists, former staff, and media analysts are now calling for radical external oversight.

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👇 Comment below — Do you think the BBC can still be fixed from within, or is external scrutiny the only way forward?