BBC chief Tim Davie will make another visit to Parliament this week, where he will discuss the corporation’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The director-general will be questioned Wednesday by MPs on topics including how the broadcaster has been covering events in the ongoing war.
This comes as it is confirmed the BBC will no longer call Hamas “militants”, but instead characterise the Palestinian group as “a proscribed terrorist organisation by the UK government.”
The BBC has spent the past fortnight defending its decision not to use the term “terrorists” to describe Hamas, in line with the regulator Ofcom’s guidelines on maintaining impartiality. However, it has come under increasing pressure to ditch the term “militants, with a BBC spokeswoman confirming: “We have been finding this a less accurate description for our audiences as the situation evolves.”
The Times newspaper quotes an unnamed member of parliament saying:
“The BBC are losing people because they aren’t behaving in a way that meets the majority of viewers’ expectations of them. Not to describe Hamas’s actions as a terrorist attack was pretty pathetic and that has undermined so much of what has followed.”
The Times also reports on a meeting between David and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who expressed their “outrage” at how the BBC covered the al-Ahli hospital explosion, and a separate meeting between Jewish BBC staff and the corporation’s head of news Deborah Turness. An event with staff from the Palestinian and Arab community is expected to follow.
