Wolf in sheep’s clothing: the BBC’s Mishal Husain joins Bloomberg
Mishal Husain, one of the most nakedly partisan current-affairs presenters in British broadcasting, left the BBC in January after twenty-six years to join Bloomberg, where she now has her own show. This week she was interviewed about herself on the BBC’s The Media Show, and was welcomed back as a “treat” for listeners who had enjoyed her “calm, incisive voice” for years on the Today programme.
Husain, now fifty-two, had all the capacity and experience to have been a very effective broadcaster. She was educated at a private co-ed school in the South-East of England, then studied law at Cambridge and went on take a master’s degree in International and Comparative Law at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
When difficult issues came up, especially in the last two years, she had the intellectual wherewithal to handle them objectively, and not reflect cultural biases, either of her own or of the broadcasting culture that she shared with her colleagues.
That seems to have been asking too much. Her mother had been a producer for the Pakistan Television Corporation and was the daughter of the first Director-General of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, a body responsible for gathering, processing and analysing information from all corners of the globe that might affect Pakistan’s national security.
Her father, who died in 2016, was born in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab, and became a consultant urologist at a hospital in the East of England.
Before going to university, Husain spent three months as a reporter in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, working for The News, an English-language newspaper. While a student at Cambridge, she was given several stints of work experience by the BBC. At the age of 25, after two years at Bloomberg TV, she joined the BBC as a junior producer in the newsroom and for the News 24 channel, and then in the Economics and Business Unit. She was quickly offered a job in front of the camera and has been a news host ever since.
Husain’s background ought to be irrelevant: none of us can control our origins, but it was thought sufficiently pertinent for her interviewer on The Media Show, Katie Razzall (daughter of the life peer Baron Razzall), to ask: “You’ve spoken about your heritage and the importance of representation. Clearly one of the big news stories of the last few years has been the war in Gaza. How do you reflect now on how the BBC and other broadcasters have covered that war?”
Husain’s reply was that the media did not give as much attention, or the same quality of attention, to Palestinian suffering as to Israeli suffering—perhaps because reports on the 1,200 victims of the 7 October massacre have not been matched by reports on every one of the supposedly 200,000 dead and injured Gazans, and because the BBC has not tried to name and provide biographies for each of those dead and injured.
“I think one of the things I’ve learnt in the last two years, with some sadness,” said Husain, “is that across many parts of the British media, there has been an inability or an unwillingness to look at two sets of people with equal eyes, with an equal gaze—where the death of a Palestinian child in the occupied West Bank has the same value as the death of an Israeli child; or the elderly Palestinian, targeted in whatever way, that their life is as valuable, as noteworthy, able to be reported in the same way.”
It’s an outrageous slur, and very much part of the rhetorical armoury of pro-Palestinian protesters. Surely Husain did not mean that the BBC and other media outlets had an obligation to give equal time to every death and injury on each side, and treat them as having equal significance?
Apparently she did. “When I say ‘the same way’,” she continued, “not just ‘this person died’ or ‘this person was killed’ but a way that humanises them, and I think I’ve discovered that there are many editors and many publications and many parts of broadcasting where that equal lens has not been there—and that was a really sad revelation to me: I didn’t really think our media was like that, and I did discover that there was this inability or unwillingness to look at people with the same humanity.”
Was she including the BBC in that? The answer was obviously yes but she preferred not to say so. “Ugh, ugh, ugh, I mean I, as I said, I think there are many parts of the media, more broadly—and I do wonder in the fullness of time whether people who’ve made decisions across the British media might look back at some of the decisions they made and question them, and say that, ‘Yeah, we didn’t look at people with the same lens of humanity.’ It might not come till they’re retired but I do wonder if that moment will come.”
Husain shied away from explicitly citing bias in the organisation whose editorial culture she had helped to build: that would have meant accusing herself. Nor did she accept Razzall’s suggestion that the lesser crime of group-think or institutional blindspots might have been at play.
Instead, she took refuge in a quite different argument: that, as an organisation, the BBC approached its neutrality responsibly—not something that would have been obvious from her remarks about what she fancifully saw as the Corporation’s heartlessness towards Gazans—nor what she didn’t see as her own prejudices in the other direction.
“I think that bias is a very easy accusation to make and a very hard accusation for the BBC to fight—and I’ve seen what internal processes are like. I think it remains a deeply self-reflective organisation, which of course it has to be, but I think those robust processes need to be there. Ultimately … I celebrate the parts of the media which are self-reflective, which have high editorial standards, because plenty of others, including often the ones where the accusations are coming from, do not operate with that kind of rigour.”
This gap between Husain’s praise for the BBC’s managerial procedures and its actual performance raises the question of what Husain actually understands as bias. On the basis of her interview, one could infer that she only recognised one type of bias: the crude, emotional, murderous, chronic hatred of types of people (i.e. Jews) that one associates with the powerful in Europe over the millennia—rulers, the religious establishment, the Nazi Party—and which the Left always denies being capable of.
What she does not recognise as bias are the instincts of those who like to see themselves as the powerless, and who regard what motivates them—by contrast—as rational, reasoned, and evidence-based and therefore always and automatically unanswerable.
Key to this leftist self-exoneration is the notion of equality that Husain exemplifies. “You’ll be aware,” said Razzall, “that the BBC is accused of all sorts of bias in all sorts of ways, and one of the biases they’re accused of is actually being too pro-Palestinian.”
“I’m not calling for pro-anything,” Husain replied, as if she’d just been asked to endorse partisanship; “I’m just saying: How about looking at people with the same lens? How about seeing two sets of people—civilians, children, the elderly—with the same eyes? How about trying to write about them or describe them or humanise them in the same way?”
That’s not partisanship, is it? Well, actually, it is, when you say that issues don’t matter, arguments don’t matter, values don’t matter, behaviour doesn’t matter, all that matters is that every Palestinian gets as much airtime as every Israeli. In this toxic mindset, representative journalism—“we film this to make this point”—matters less than ticking names off a checklist. It’s the equivalent of writing off representative democracy, which is flawed but practical, in favour of direct democracy, which is idealistic but unworkable.
That’s bias, because it demands a level of performance that is unachievable, and then invites the claim of victimhood when it’s not achieved. That’s not the sort of bias Husain recognises in herself. “How do you reflect now on the fact that you, when you were here, were accused of bias when you were presenting the Today programme about Israel and Gaza?” Razzall asked.
“On the one occasion, an Israeli government spokesman said that to me—well, I think again it’s a really easy accusation to make, isn’t it, and you don’t have to back it up. At the time I was grateful that the NUJ [National Union of Journalists] put out a statement, at that moment, saying that it was an unfounded accusation. I think it reflected more on him than me.”
She’s probably right: the government spokesman in question was the ham-fisted David Mencer, who went on to embarrass himself, and Israel, and the entire Jewish world, when he picked a fight with a colleague of Husain’s, also on the Today programme, nine months later.
But any regular listener to Today will have been familiar with Husain’s politics, and her disfavouring of interviewees who tried to argue Israel’s case and weren’t sufficiently hostile to its interests. So it’s not true that she was only accused of bias on one occasion, as she misleadingly suggested to Razzall. At a low level, her partisanship was obvious whenever Gaza was in the spotlight. Only occasionally was it made public—for example when a Conservative MP reported the BBC to the UK’s regulatory authority for broadcasting in 2023, because Husain would not use the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas, something he saw as an effort to protect its reputation, and which she defended on the grounds that broadcast rules prevented her from doing so.
Was that the reason? Now that she works for Bloomberg, and is not bound by UK rules, will she be free to call Hamas a terrorist group? Of course not, which explodes the honesty of her using this defence to explain her previous hesitation. She was never going to expose Hamas or name it for what it is, because she is at core largely sympathetic to its cause.
Well, she’s Bloomberg’s property now—editor-at-large of Bloomberg Weekend, and host of The Mishal Husain Show, a global podcast released every Friday, containing one long interview with one famous figure—or, as Bloomberg puts it, “a single essential conversation for the weekend”.
The show launched last month and her first guests were the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, and the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage. It’s a big deal, in media circles. Its guest list will include “leaders, thinkers and cultural figures”, and after every programme, a text of the interview, with Husain’s notes and “added context”, will be published on Bloomberg.com and the Bloomberg Terminal, with the podcast available also on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and other podcast platforms, and on YouTube.
So now Husain can bring her rich and nuanced view of the world to a new audience. Is that good news? Compared with the BBC, which has a global reach of over 400 million, Bloomberg has only 625,000 paid online subscribers and an overall audience of just over 100 million. By Husain’s own box-ticking standards, that makes her journalism only a quarter as important as it used to be. For a change, I’m happy to endorse her view of things.
