A former executive at the BBC called the broadcaster "institutionally antisemitic" and called for an independent investigation into the reasons behind the network's flawed and biased reporting on the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.
Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC television, who worked at the BBC for eight years from 2007-2015, wrote in the Telegraph that "on a daily basis Britain’s Jews are being harmed through its unbalanced reporting of the Israel-Hamas war and the failure of its senior management to get to grips with it."
"This means that the time has now come for a long overdue independent inquiry into the corporation’s editorial and management failures in its reporting of Israel," he wrote.
According to Cohen, the BBC's refusal to call Hamas terrorists and its referral to the massacre of over 1,200 people on October 7 as a mere "cross-border attack" constituted a failure in the network's duty to present the facts to British citizens.
It’s hard to find the words to describe both how offensive and reductionist this is," he said. "It makes me wonder whether any senior member of BBC management could look the families of the October 7 massacres in the eyes and tell them that they believe this is an appropriate description for the slaughter of innocent civilians and the kidnapping of children."
He further noted that multiple BBC correspondents have been sharing Hamas propaganda and photographs from Gaza without providing any context such as Hamas' use of human shields and use of hospitals for military purposes.
"With these incidents piling up on a daily basis there is only one conclusion to draw," he said. "Either the BBC’s senior management is complicit in these egregious examples of bias, these regular breaches of its guidelines, or it lacks the ability to control the output of its own organisation."
In an interview with Jewish site site JC, Cohen added that in his opinion, "there’s institutional bias at play."