The BBC and President Trump

In June this year, President Trump ordered his Spirit stealth bombers to fly over Iran and drop bunker-busting bombs on the country’s nuclear facilities. The result saw decades of malevolence that had been aimed at the destruction of Israel and likely the West too, reduced to rubble. Today, following the admission of the BBC that their flagship current affairs programme Panorama misleadingly edited a report on Trump so as to present a biased and misleading description of the president, he is threatening a $1bn lawsuit against the biased broadcasting corporation.

In much the same way as the IDF shattered Iran’s air-defences, thus allowing Trump’s B2s a clear run over their targets, so too have Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, respectively the BBC’s Director General (DG) and CEO of BBC News resigned, an acknowledgment that their poor performance over recent years has rendered both of their positions untenable and equally softening the ground for Trump’s threatened assault through the courts. While Samir Shah, the BBC Chairman, may have offered a mealy-mouthed apology for the Panorama programme combined with a similarly lukewarm defence of his former DG, that the corporation is rotten to the core is clear to see, with Davie and Turness likely to be only the first two of its massive branches to come crashing to the ground.

The BBC may well have overreached themselves in their Panorama piece on Trump. But Britain’s Jews, together with those on the more conservative side of society’s recent culture wars, have long seen the once admired broadcaster discard all semblance of balanced objectivity, pursuing instead a biased line of reportage that has suited the liberal-agenda of its newsroom staffers.

Anyone that mounted a criticism of the BBC’s stance on Remain (re Brexit) and, more recently, the corporation’s position on gender issues and Palestine/Israel/Gaza, was nuanced (or sometimes even downright trashed) as a far-right shill, and frequently a racist. ‘Racist’ is of course a very strong and emotive description that used appropriately, serves its purpose in describing an individual as a knuckle-dragging, malevolent fool. When the word is weaponised however, simply to dehumanise one’s opponent in a debate, then its deployment is egregious and counter-productive to the working of an effective democracy.

Long before the past week’s damning revelations, Jews have been experiencing the backlashing bias of the BBC, with investigative journalists and lawyers such as David Collier and Trevor Asserson providing painstakingly researched analyses of the corporation’s antisemitic bias, with their sound campaigning work repeatedly falling on deaf ears.

This week’s news however may well see a change in the tide. Maybe Trump’s billion-dollar lawfare campaign may yet see him take the same wrecking ball to the BBC as he deployed against Iran’s atomic bomb ambitions?