In a confrontation with BBC news chief Richard Burgess, journalist Peter Oborne sets out six ways the state broadcaster has wilfully misled audiences on Israel’s destruction of Gaza
Jonathan Cook – jonathan-cook.net June 20, 2025
Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting.
Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour.
Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess. His comments, filmed by someone at the meeting, can be watched below.
Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) confronts Richard Burgess, the BBC’s Executive News Editor, about their coverage of the Gaza genocide and the data revealed by @cfmmuk at the Houses of Parliament.
Burgess’s response: “I’m not an expert on the Middle East”. pic.twitter.com/WpwjrW4T0q
— NewsCord (@newscord_org) June 18, 2025
Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:
- The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.
Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.
Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.
- The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.
Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.
The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.
- The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.
Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.
The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.
- By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.
- Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined.
New research shows Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Yugoslav Wars, the Afghanistan War and the Ukraine War COMBINED.
More: https://t.co/YJi8bdIm9Y pic.twitter.com/p8XJSZpj3a
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 1, 2025
The BBC has reported just 6 per cent of the more than 225 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, compared to 62 per cent of the far smaller number of journalists killed in Ukraine. This is once again vital context for understanding that Israel’s goals are genocidal. It hopes to exterminate the main witnesses to its crimes.
- Oborne adds a point of his own. He notes that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.
And yet extraordinarily, Shlaim has never been invited on by the BBC. He is only too ready to do interviews. He has done them for Al Jazeera, for example. But he isn’t invited on because, it seems, he is “the wrong sort of Jew”. His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.
Watch the video above to see how Burgess responds. His answer is a long-winded shrugging of the shoulders, a BBC executive’s way of acting clueless – an equivalent of Manuel, the dim-witted Spanish waiter in the classic comedy show Fawlty Towers, saying: “I know nothing.”
Other lowlights from Burgess include his responding to a pointed question from Declassified journalist Hamza Yusuf on why the BBC has not given attention to British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. “I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel,” Burgess answers.
So the British state broadcaster has decided that its duty is not to investigate the nature of British state assistance to Israel in Gaza, even though most experts agree what Israel is doing there amounts to genocide. Burgess thinks scrutiny of British state complicity would be “overplaying” British collusion, even though the BBC has not actually investigated the extent or nature of that collusion to have reached a conclusion. This is the very antithesis of what journalism is there to do: monitor the centres of power, not exonerate such power-centres before they have even been scrutinised.
Labour MP Andy McDonald responded to Burgess: “To underplay the role of the UK is an error.”
It is more than that. It is journalistic complicity in British and Israeli state war crimes.
Here are a few key statistical findings from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on BBC coverage of Gaza over the year following 7 October 2023:
- The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.
- The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.
- The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.
- Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage.
- The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”. During one major hostage exchange in which 90 Palestinians were swapped for three Israelis, 70% of BBC articles focused on those three Israelis.
- The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russia ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
- In coverage, Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered” – and the author of the violence was named, even though, as we have seen, the Hannibal directive clouded the picture in at least some of those cases.
As is only too evident watching Burgess respond, he is not there to learn from the state broadcaster’s glaring mistakes – because systematic BBC pro-Israel bias isn’t a mistake. It’s precisely what the BBC is there to do.
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Sky and GB news are just as guilty – if not more – and the evidence is in your face with every single news bulletin and analysis on anything that might throw a negative light on Israel should the true facts be known and these lying snakes cherry pick their guests to appear on their programmes making sure their personal backgrounds are fully Zio-compliant. Lies and cover ups are their first priority and a corrupt system allows it because an ignorant sheeple mass audience knows no different.
They get the word “genocide” to do a lot of work, which is not appropriate, because the Jews only brought this word in to describe their made-up experience of World War Two
send all the satanic nation-wreckers back to Belorussia, lithuania, poland, latvia etc for pogroming
The Only Solution!
UK Not JewK
In Chomsky’s book “Necessary Illusions”, an “unnamed”, ex presidential advisor said, “Be under no illusion, the role of government is to serve corporate power, and the ruling elite. The role of the media, is to control the ignorant and stupid masses”.
We are seeing this in action nowadays, more than ever before.
the Rothschild whores of lies should never get
employment but only as scavengers that everybody
recognizes them .
Yeah, like gates and fauci and biden and johnstein and all the rest. In any case, the bbc is a 100% gov orifice and protected by them. Any talk of ever doing anything against it is just misdirection. Just as all the jewspapers are still going, filled with endless lies and mind control, year after year. The human world is just a cage, designed to chew you up and kill you.
Well said, Peter Osbourne, a real journalist!
It would be very interesting to know who are the people who sit on the BBC’s editorial-standards committee/s, and how many of them are Jewish.
Given its “reportage” (cough! cough!)…
the BBC, rather than “British”, might as well be called the “B’nai-B’rith Broadcasting Corporation…
since its primary purpose appears to be spewing out a sewer of propaganda on behalf of the IZZY Statelet and its ZOGUK Sponsor..
such a sewer-pipe of shit, in fact, that Goebbels himself wouldve been green with envy!!
But, as they say, “every cloud has a silver lining”… and I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing that pencil-necked lickspittle faggot Richard Burgess twisting in the wind… while swinging from the end of a rope..
IsraHELL is a victim, hasn’t the propaganda since 1948 yet set in????
I couldn’t find the link Gabreal Jones recently gave regarding Ayatollah Khomeini’s antecedents. I think it has been removed. Nevertheless, here is another that the Truthseeker and its never ending deluge of syndicated articles from ex-CIA officials continue to ignore:
https://islamreigns.wordpress.com/tag/khomeinis-background-his-british-father/
The internet was far easier twenty years ago before we needed to hurdle the likes of Reddit and other “fact checkers”…
…with the rest of the BBC’s Izzy-Fluffers – like that smug-mug fat-fck beside him – lined-up to be “serviced” in those same gallows once Burgess’s legs stop twitching..
LOL..
The BBc is a spook nest, it always has been, it reiterates regime policy and packages it up nicely for muggle consumption…under a cloak of impartiality..
that’s it’s brief..
just like this nonsense here, we have one spooky hack running narrative on another spooky hacks operation..
..you see, crook waxing lyrical about Osbornes..lol evisceration of the ‘company’ in cof cof parliament..
which of course paints it as whitewash to begin with, a stage managed event a media easter egg.. is how the ‘establishment’ work on pirate rock, it’s controlled release, a mirage of things seeming to be done or even said..particularly when the bias is so fucking obvious..
Of course nothing will be done.. but the muggles will have had their spectacle.. and be ready for their nap..
The funny thing is…
What does a man expect the regime and occupation jewe hive to do?..
lol, arrest themselves..fine themselves..hang themselves..at one time an imbecile would have been thrown to the wolves..to satiate the clamourers baying for blood (all three if them)..
nowadays they are more than likely to tell you to get fucked and demand a wage increase and more pensioners imprisoned for license larcony and racism.. .
and probably get it..
@Softly:
“The jew cries in pain while he strikes you ”
(Proverb)
Iran lacks the balls Israel has to flatten its enemy. Sick of hearing they step back all the time. They had the chance to end the murderous genocidal state then stopped when Israel was in trouble. Fuck off losers, always after peace. You were supposed to have nouse.
Stop paying the loicense then. Are you afraid of the system pigs coming breaking down your door and drag you away down to the stoition?
Obourne! Obourne FFS!
at least get his name right…
did anyone notice my deliberate mistake!? what a wally….
did anyone notice my deliberate mistake!?
Israel: The World’s Most Psychopathic Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qr_K8E5f_E
The entire A-Z of serious crime is to found at the BBC. Its staff should be declared outlaw and hunted through the streets like rats.
The BBC has been involved in state crimes, and state lies for as long as I can remember.
Why all of a sudden, do you think they are going to be subject to some sort of justice?
The mind boggles. The UK is a Satanist Nazi tyrannical state, and while I outlined ideas to change it, I don’t believe anything will change, until there’s a bloody revolution, but it won’t happen, because the sheeple are beyond thicko.
Another comment not posted. Tut.
Pete’s on form tonight haha!
Bnai Brith Cabalists?
“These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in [Jewry’s] favour.” No shit. Same in the jew-jacked Jewnited States, where the “media” are shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip on all fours, with both ends wide open to serve Shlomo and the tribe from way down under.
Looking at that photo at the top of those mendacious miscreants, someone with a stout cricket bat should have went down the line swinging for the fences…then doubled back, ripped out their tongues, chopped off their hands, and shoved a bundle up each of their asses…
How refreshing the truth always is to listen to and it’s one thing there’s just too little of right now, but all that’s about to change soon. Wish there were more real journalists like him, but it is certainly a very dangerous job in this world to speak truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
it starts already from beginning not to call israhell
a terrorist system + calling only freedomfighters as
terrorists (same medialies with USA) . Mossad + CIA
are terrorist organisations !
they never mention Hanibal option like they keep
silence about Samson option .
@Carl Jones And readers in general
“The UK is a Satanist Nazi tyrannical state”
As always, you confuse Shlomo with Hitler.
Nevertheless, I will take advantage of your above-mentioned phrase to offer the readers of this blog some thoughts they may find interesting.
The following statements from the Bible should make us think that Nazis were not exempt of the satanic connection we know of all other governments to have, especially the Jews as per the same Bible.
In the tempting of Jesus episode, Satan shows him all the kingdoms of the world saying that all of them have been given to him.
In another place of the Bible it is said that Satan is the king of the world, corroborating the first statement above.
That should include Nazism then.
On another side, it is known that behind Nazism were secret societies, the same as with all the other governments.
For me, if it’s good for humanity, there is nothing to hide.
But secret societies go to great lengths to “explain and justify” their secrecy.
Could it be because of human sacrifice?
Additionally to Freemasonry, Judaic closed-doors and by invitation only meetings in the secret tunnels beneath synagogues, Satanic covens, in all of which are practiced human sacrifices in prescribed dates of the calendar, we should also put an eye on the secret societies tied to Nazism to investigate if they are also guilty of such a great sin ( I don’t know,).
In case positive, this would be food of thought for so many people who, being desperate because of the ever increasing power and control of the jew, look nostalgically at the past where certainly the Nazis did some good things.
Now comes an interesting question:
If absolutely all the world is under satanic rule, where does that leave us?
Is there any power to which we can run apart from Jesus, to whom even the most pitiable victims of Jews, Freemasons, satanists, and commies feel aversion because of so much successful propaganda?
Prior to the world wars many Americans of German ancestry had to change or anglicize their names because of the enormously hateful ambient created by lying and deceitful propaganda against Germany and Germans. Such is the power of propaganda, and now it is also used against Jesus, especially by Jews and satanists.
They want to “blot out forever his very name”.
Churches can’t counteract effectively that because they have been infiltrated and subverted from within , and therefore often are a source of evil themselves.
There are two kinds of satanists:
One, which we can call authentic satanists, who worship Satan and his demons, and even make contact and receive instructions.
Another, who don’t believe in the existence of Satan and demons (at least, so they say) and who say that all their parafernalia is mere symbolism of their rebellion and rejection of the world system “because of its evilness” . In the end, they pretend to combat evilness with evilness.
But Satan and his demons are very real. Satanic and demonic activity has been documented in film, and is well known since times immemorial.
There are two lords, and the same as one can be, and is, contacted, the other one can also be contacted.
These are the true alternatives humankind is facing.
Spiritual things that are behind the material happenings in the material world.
We have been incarnated here for a reason:
As humans, and in free will, we have to choose our master.
Even materialistic and unbelieving persons have to.
The end of our life in earth is our personal final judgment, of which we can not escape.
There is also a general final judgment that will fall on earth as soon as it has been found out that evil has extended and grown in power so much that a free will decision is made impossible.
Then, in the cleansing and reshaping of earth, all who chose to serve evil will be swallowed by earth. Subterranean bunkers and cities will be useless. Satan will be totally powerless to help or save his minions. He himself will be made prisoner and bound for some very long time. Then he will be freed for some time.
There are cycles in this, called redemption cycles, which end in judgment.
In every cycle evil increases so much that judgment becomes necessary. In a certain way, evil and Satan “triumph”, but in every redemption cycle more and more souls who are allowed to incarnate here are taken away from his power.
The actual cycle is soon to end, because of this satanic activity is increasing, this master of the evil people, this master of his “Army” knows that he has only a short time left.
So, dear readers, use your earthly incarnation to choose wisely.
Don’t let the minions of the army of evil seduce and deceive you.
Alone, you are no match for Satan and his wiles and deceptions, you will have to seek help in prayer, that is, contact the true master to whom “all power on earth, over the earth, and under the earth, has been given”, and before whom all knees will bend.
I hope that these musings are of help to at least some of you.
Of course, some will fall on me and try hard to disqualify what I have just written, but don’t mind them.
Do your own investigations and make your own conclusions.
Best regards