LONDON — British parliamentarian Ruth Deech had a bird’s-eye view of the BBC’s attitude towards Israel when she served on its governing body 20 years ago during the Second Intifada and the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Then, as now, since conflict erupted following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel, a furor roiled the UK’s public broadcaster over its coverage, which many see as unfairly biased against the Jewish state.

“It hasn’t changed at all,” Deech, a prominent academic who sits as an independent in the House of Lords, told The Times of Israel in an interview.

“There is a sort of ‘group think’ — an elite, well-educated, sophisticated, southern British mindset — which is very well meaning, adopts liberal causes, but is very easily influenced to believe that there is just one liberal cause and only one side to it,” she said.

“When I was a BBC governor, you walked through the studios, and there were piles and piles of Guardian newspapers and hardly anything else,” she said, referring to Britain’s leading left-wing publication.

That mindset, Deech believes, includes “an absolute obsession over Israel” prevalent within, but by no means confined to, the BBC.

Like all journalists, staff at the corporation dislike their reporting being challenged, but this is exacerbated at the BBC by what Deech terms “an inflated notion of their trustworthiness.”

“They believe in what they’re doing, and they think they must be right,” she said. They don’t want to be challenged. I used to say to them, ‘Yes, the public trusts you, but being trusted is not the same as being accurate.’”

Deech recalls that when she was a BBC governor — a member of a board of outside appointees entrusted with setting strategy and overseeing editorial independence — during the Second Lebanon War, she put together a dossier of 17 incidents that she had personally heard of or seen where the reporting was inaccurate or the photographs false. All but one complaint was rejected.

“That was alarming because I cut through the normal procedure,” said Deech. “I went straight to the top.” It remains the case, she added, that it is “more difficult to get a complaint accepted by the BBC than it is to put a camel through the eye of a needle.”

Surveillance camera footage from Netiv Haasara shows a large barrage of rockets being launched from northern Gaza, followed by a massive blast in the Strip, apparently caused by a failed projectile. pic.twitter.com/PdNCbks02r

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) October 17, 2023

Last year, Deech and Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, published a report examining the corporation’s reporting of........

© The Times of Israel