New BBC Chair Samir Shah said on Wednesday that he intends to review the corporation’s reporting guidelines on the Israel–Hamas war.
The BBC has come under fire for its refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists”, as well as for the blatant anti-Israel bias in its reporting.
Last month, the corporation published an apology after falsely claiming that IDF troops were targeting medical teams in battles in and around the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Before that, the BBC falsely accused Israel of being responsible for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, which the IDF proved was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket.
The network later acknowledged that “it was false to speculate” on the explosion.
“It seems to me there is enough in terms of criticism of the way the BBC has covered this war,” Shah said on Wednesday, as quoted by Dateline. “The BBC does a periodic review of its editorial guidelines and it seems to me that the issues that the current was has thrown up need to be absolutely part of that.”
“It is not an adequate enough response [for the BBC] to say ‘both sides are criticizing us and therefore we must be doing something right,’” he went on to say, calling this approach “a soundbite, but the ambition of a BBC journalist should be that neither side is criticizing us and [everyone] thinks we’re doing well.”
Shah said the BBC needs to “consider very clearly” its refusal to call Hamas “terrorists” rather than referring to the group as a “proscribed terrorist organization”, saying the latter phrase “feels a bit clunky to me, it’s not the natural speech of a reporter.”