Former head of BBC TV says Tim Davie needs to resign over news bias report
THE BBC’s Director General Tim Davie should resign over a whistleblower’s report detailing bias in its news output, according to the corporation’s former director of television.
Danny Cohen told GB News: “I think it’s a devastating report. I don’t think it can easily be dismissed. I think what’s so significant about it is it’s an insider’s account of what’s been going on in the BBC. It’s not external criticism.
“It’s the report of someone, an independent journalist, who’s been inside the BBC for three years and been part of the team looking at editorial and journalistic problems and failures. And what’s clear is that he reached such a point of despair at what he was seeing and the failure of management to deal with it, that he wrote this report that ended up in the hands of government.”
He added: “If there was one mis-edit on a Panorama program, obviously the Director General would not be across that. But that’s not what Mr Prescott is describing. When you see the report, you see the examples.
“He’s describing a systemic failure, both in its journalism and the management and oversight of that journalism, and that’s why it is a senior management issue. It’s not about an individual failure. It’s about a systemic problem of structural bias in the newsroom and the way that’s impacting how the BBC reports.”
DANNY COHEN GB News.jpeg
Asked if Tim Davie should resign, he said: “Yes, he should. And of course, in another age, the head of BBC News would have already had to resign in embarrassment.
“We’ve seen it before at the BBC. I think there’s a failure of governance going on at the BBC at the moment where things are serious as this, they just put up the walls and say we’re not taking it seriously, even when the evidence is so clear.
“I’ll just give you a couple of interesting anecdotes which say something about this. On BBC Arabic, which I’ve written on a number of times, there’s been the source of reporting of pro-Hamas propaganda. They’ve used journalists who’ve celebrated the October 7 attacks.
“Mr Prescott reveals that one of those people appeared 500 times on BBC Arabic. He also shows a systemic bias in the way it reported stories around Hamas. When this was raised with senior news executives at the BBC, one of the things they said was, ‘well, we’re nearly as popular as Al Jazeera’ as a defence.”
He added: “The failure to reform it is an absolute disgrace. And I tell you, as a Jewish person, knowing that the BBC is funding a service which has pumped out Hamas propaganda, terrorist propaganda, and has given platform hundreds of times to people who’ve said things like that the Palestinians should do to Jews what Hitler did, those are the kind of things some of their people have said, that those people have appeared on the service and there’s been no real changes, is deeply, deeply dismaying.”
