Bias at the BBC came back under the spotlight in 2025 after it emerged that Panorama had pretty blatantly doctored a speech by Donald Trump ahead of America’s 2024 elections, splicing together two parts of an address to supporters close to an hour apart to make it look as though he had directly incited them to attack the U.S. Capitol.
Despite some initial, feeble attempts to defend this as perfectly normal editing practice, there was widespread recognition even from the BBC’s supporters that this was, at minimum, a “mistake” — one which appears to have influenced the sudden resignations of Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. It has also left the BBC facing a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit (which, to be clear, has yet to be resolved).
But bias at the BBC, said to be written through “its very DNA” as long ago as 2011 by its late, longtime frontman Peter Sissons, seldom takes the form of such outright “fake news”. Instead, it shines through in what the public broadcaster doesn’t report and what it leaves out of its reports — and where it reports them.
Take the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the Egyptian extremist whose importation the Prime Minister was so “delighted” to announce on Boxing Day. The BBC’s initial, hagiographic coverage of his arrival was probably not intentionally misleading. True, it said nothing whatsoever about his documented history of bigoted and belligerent online tirades, which cost him an EU human rights prize in 2014, but this was likely because the reporters who threw together the report the day after Christmas didn’t bother to look him up, not because they were intentionally omitting details.
The public broadcaster’s behaviour after this point is much less defensible, however, as social media users quickly discovered that El-Fattah was quite possibly the Platonic ideal of an undesirable immigrant, with a very long and easily discoverable online history of pouring hatred on Jews, British people and white people more broadly.
“[Y]es, I consider killing any colonialists and specially zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them,” he wrote in one post. “I’m a racist, I don’t like white people,” he wrote in another. Elsewhere he suggested that “not unleashing a campaign of mass punitive violence against white people was [S]outh [A]frica’s biggest mistake” post-apartheid.
El-Fattah’s post history soon went viral. The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Foreign Secretary were all ratioed. Nigel Farage weighed in. Robert Jenrick weighed in. It was viral, and it was — undeniably — news, as evidenced by the fact that GB News, The Telegraph, and others started covering it. But not the BBC.
It is, frankly, impossible that they were not aware of the story long before they finally, grudgingly published their report on the morning of December 28th, “Starmer criticised for welcoming Egyptian activist” — as a second-string item shunted off to the website’s UK news sub-section, off the front page.
“Sir Keir Starmer has been criticised for welcoming the arrival of Egyptian pro-democracy activist” — one way to describe him, I suppose — “Alaa Abdel Fattah to the UK – after historical social media messages emerged showing the campaigner apparently calling for Zionists to be killed.” Note the use of “historical,” as though these posts were found inscribed on Egyptian papyri, scarcely worth mentioning, and “apparently,” as if his statements were not perfectly clear, to soften up the reader.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the public broadcaster is deciding that some things are not news because it doesn’t want them to be news
The entire report was a masterclass in omission. References are made to Robert Jenrick having “highlighted Abdel Fattah’s messages that endorsed the killing of Zionists and police,” but none of these messages are quoted. His “proud” anti-white racism and his disparagement of the British as “dogs and monkeys” was not even mentioned.
This is how you cover the news without really covering it, and it is how the BBC does bias best. We see it when fresh grooming gangs charges are laid, and the BBC buries its coverage in the nooks and crannies of its website’s regional news sub-sections, just as it buried much of its coverage of the murder of Rhiannon Skye Whyte by a hotel migrant.
We saw it in its coverage of the Calais “migrant children” sent to Britain in 2016, with the fact that the people showing up often appeared to be well into their twenties and even thirties downplayed as a mere “controversy in newspapers” more than halfway through reports — which naturally did not include any of the relevant photographs.
Sometimes, to borrow an expression from the left, the BBC’s omissions may be due to unconscious bias; covering wrongful Windrush deportations prominently, but not covering the Home Office losing a far larger number of migrants liable for deportations the same year at all, was probably the result of an institutional blindspot rather than a conspiracy.
But in some cases, El-Fattah’s among them, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the public broadcaster is deciding that some things are not news because it doesn’t want them to be news.
