Georgia Gilholy: The BBC must release the Balen report or lose it’s license

Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.

 More than two decades ago, the BBC commissioned one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen, to prepare a report.

Its purpose was to investigate allegations that the national broadcaster’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict was biased against the Jewish State. Not only has Balen’s 20,000-word paper never been published, but the BBC shelled out over 300,000 pounds of public money on court cases to keep it that way.

It is not hard to imagine why.

On so many issues, from its marginalisation of the working classes, sidelining of gender critical feminists, to its obsession with celebrities, the BBC’s track record is egregious. Its maligning of Israel and Jews is hardly its only offence, although it is certainly among its most frequent.

Despite my frustration, for years I quietly backed the licence fee: the mandatory annual payment by British households that wish to legally watch or record any live TV, which is used to fund the Beeb’s work. After all, our public broadcaster has fostered talent in journalism and media for over a century. Its radio output in particular can still be surprisingly worthwhile. Factual programming, such as Radio 4’s In Our Time, offers important historical items the rigorous  and deserved attention that long ago disappeared as a mainstay of television. The World Service in particular was once regarded as a stalwart of transparent information amidst attacks on freedom of the press by the dictators, theocrats and warlords ruling over most of the world’s population.

Sadly, the BBC has now become something of a tinpot regime itself, and no gun-yielding insurgents ever forced it to do so. Any serious party platform must include scrapping the hypothecated tax that helps to fund it. Women, many of whom are struggling single mothers, are disproportionately affected by licence fee laws. Courts can issue fines of up to £1,000 for non-payment of the licence and the overwhelming bulk (76 per cent in 2020) of those prosecuted for TV licence evasion are women. The BBC wastes our money on its own cover-ups, it is comfortable with callously criminalise those its progressive dogmas claim to empathise with.

Of course, releasing the Balen Report must be a prerequisite for the BBC rehabilitating its reputation, but it is still an example of the corporation simply “marking its own homework”. What the BBC needs more is an independent inquiry, but there is no promise that this would force any real improvements. Regardless, none of us needs an outdated document to trust our recent memories. What has been flung out by Broadcasting House since the October 7th massacre has shocked even veteran whingers like myself.

Following the 2023 Hamas-led mass kidnapping, rape and slaughter in Southern Israel, including of the elderly and small children, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor John Simpson brazenly defended their refusal to label the group “terrorists”—despite UK law designating them so. He claimed that labelling this group, whose founding charter calls for the genocide of every living Jew, as terrorists, would amount to “taking sides” rather than reporting “the facts”. But, as Hadar Sela of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) explains, “BBC journalists have regularly breached… editorial guidelines when terror has struck closer to home.” Obviously the term “terrorism” has negative connotations, it is a description of a specific form of violence, and using the term does not denote whether or not one morally approves of it.

We also know well that, when Israel is involved, the BBC forgets all about the “facts” Simpson claims to revere. On 17 October 2023, like on so many days, the BBC’s instinct was to rush to demonise Israel. That evening the BBC sent a push notification to millions of app users with the headline “Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say”? The BBC site, which published the full article, is one of the most visited news sources in the world.

As usual, the “Palestinian officials” who were the sole source for this story were the Gaza Health Ministry, which, like any public institution in Gaza, is run by Hamas. Anyone with basic knowledge of Gaza knows that terror groups could be the culprits, which it was later concluded they were. They routinely misfire 30-40 per cent of their rockets and are known to store munitions and launch weapons from civilian areas. This episode was irresponsible and contributed to global anti-Jewish violence, but almost two years on and the BBC continue to ignore what really happened.

However, BBC coverage of Israel is not just about occasional catastrophic blunders, but a consistent, insidious stream of distortion. Just last month, it covered the release from French jail of the Lebanese Marxist Georges Abdallah. Abdallah founded a terror group that murdered diplomats, bombed cafes, and worked with Hezbollah. In 1987, he was convicted of aiding the assassination of a US and Israeli diplomat in France. Despite a CAMERA complaint, the BBC doubled down on their reference to him as a mere “pro-Palestinian convict.” Wherever the BBC’s allegiances lie, it is not with the cold, hard truth.

Now, CAMERA has revealed that Palestinian singer Rola Azar, who glorified terrorism and referred to Hamas’ kidnapping of the Bibas toddlers and their mother Shiri as “resistance”, was uncritically platformed by BBC Arabic. Their documentary even omitted lyrics in which she implied Jews must be ethnically cleansed from the Holy Land.

Nor does it seem the BBC’s problem with Jewish people is limited to those living in Israel. For weeks in 2021, the BBC reported that Jewish teenagers shouting “dirty Muslims” before they were attacked while lighting a menorah. They did not. As in so many episodes in modern Britain, the real victims were cast as the aggressors, while we were instructed to sympathise with their vicious attackers. In 2022, Ofcom stated that it had committed ‘significant editorial failings’ on the matter. Not one person is known to have lost their job over the matter, and evidently, nothing about the BBC changed.

With new polling suggesting that almost 60 per cent of British Jews hide their identity over fears of prejudice, it is clear Britain is creeping towards something ugly and unrecognisable, of which the BBC is both a symptom and an instigator. Perhaps the BBC’s distaste for Israel is down to the fact it is in some ways everything Britain used to be, which the BBC sought to undermine: a self-confident, armed democracy with a functional family culture and replacement birth rate. And, likely, because its very existence is an affront to the bloodthirsty Islamism Britain’s establishment has sometimes been desperate to accommodate.

As Harvard professor Ruth Wisse notes: ”Antisemitism is not about the Jews, but about those who organise politics against them. And any society governed by that ideology is doomed.”

We should not be mandated, via TV licence laws, to incentivise the BBC to continue this doomed pattern. If the BBC wants to continue spewing nonsense, it is high time we taxpayers were allowed to cut its apron strings.