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Former BBC Panorama producer says Gaza coverage shattered his faith in broadcaster
Phil Craig claims BBC reporting failures fuelled anger towards Jews and accuses a new generation of abandoning impartiality
A former senior BBC producer has accused the broadcaster of losing its impartiality over Gaza, warning that its reporting mistakes have helped fuel hostility towards Jewish communities.
Phil Craig, who worked on Panorama and other BBC programmes, said his decades-long trust in the corporation had collapsed over its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Speaking at the Battle of Ideas festival in Westminster, Craig suggested that a younger generation of journalists with more political views had weakened the BBC’s commitment to balanced reporting.
“I’m afraid, as I saw what played out in Gaza, my career-long faith in the BBC just ebbed away. In its fairness and objectivity,” he said.
Craig singled out the BBC’s reporting of the explosion of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October 2023 as one of its most serious failures.
During the initial coverage, a BBC correspondent suggested that the scale of the explosion pointed towards an Israeli air strike, before the cause had been established.
Western intelligence assessments subsequently pointed towards a Palestinian rocket as the likely cause. The BBC later apologised for the correspondent’s speculation.
Craig said the broadcaster’s errors during the conflict appeared to follow a troubling pattern.
“But all the mistakes in this particular war seem to be in the same direction,” he told the festival.
He suggested that the problem extended beyond individual reporting errors to the BBC’s wider editorial culture.
“I suspect the thing that caused all this is groupthink. It’s a new generation, perhaps, a new, more radical generation, young people, activists, people insufficiently policed, insufficiently guided, old principles not being enforced in the way they have been on us.”
Craig, who joined the BBC in 1982 and became a senior producer on Panorama and Public Eye, recalled the strict standards applied to his earlier work on the Middle East.
He said his production company had been held to “super high standards” of fairness and balance when making the 1998 documentary The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs for the BBC.
Speaking separately to The Telegraph, Craig said the hospital reporting had consequences far beyond the newsroom.
He recalled watching the coverage with “mounting alarm and dismay, and noted how it helped fan fires all around the world, including literal fires at synagogues”.
“Anyone who has ever worked for the corporation’s news operation knows its global influence, and in this case it was deployed in entirely the wrong way,” he said.
The BBC rejected suggestions that its reporting was driven by bias.
A spokesperson said: “The BBC is fully committed to reporting the Israel-Gaza war impartially, with no agenda and to the highest standards of journalism.”
The spokesperson added: “When mistakes are made, we are transparent and accountable in acknowledging them and making corrections.”
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