The comeuppance now befalling the British Broadcasting Corporation over its deceptive editing of President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech is richly deserved. Yet the real scandal lies not only in this particular embarrassment but in what the leaked internal dossier illuminates about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza. The public broadcaster has been forced to issue corrections on stories about that conflict at the staggering rate of twice a week.

That figure — which comes out to 215 corrections and clarifications in the two years since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion — stems from a dossier on impartiality concerns compiled by the BBC’s former editorial standards advisor, Michael Prescott. He circulated the memo internally amid “despair” over executives’ inaction in the face of recurring problems. It was later leaked and published in the Telegraph. 

An entire section is devoted to the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza, and it underlines a central issue; the broadcaster’s readiness to publish Hamas propaganda. Mr. Prescott warned that the BBC gave “unjustifiable weight” to casualty figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, even though “concerns about its credibility were well known.” That helped animate the canard that 70 percent of those killed were women and children. 

The BBC’s reporting on mass graves at Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals offers another case study. The most probable explanation was that the graves were dug by Palestinians who buried individuals who had died or been killed prior to Israel’s ground incursion. Yet the BBC’s reports gave a “strong implication” that Israeli forces had buried thousands of bodies at the sites before withdrawing. Their source? The Hamas-run Gaza Civil Defense Agency.

The broadcaster’s Arabic language channel, BBC Arabic, proved especially problematic. The division, which is partly funded by the Foreign Office, “raced to air” allegations against Israel without adequate verification, with the memo crediting either carelessness or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.” The coverage as a whole, Mr. Prescott charged, was “designed to minimize Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor.”

Such findings are grave enough to warrant the Sunday resignations of the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie and chief executive officer Deborah Turness. Yet what appears to have moved the needle is the backlash over a misleading edit in a BBC documentary about Mr. Trump. The program, aired in October 2024, stitched together parts of Mr. Trump’s January 6 address in a way that made the president appear to call for violence.

Mr. Trump is now threatening to take legal action against the broadcaster unless it agrees to pull the documentary, issue an apology, and “appropriately compensate” him “for the harm caused” by Friday at 5 p.m. Should such demands go unmet, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have laid out their plans to sue the BBC for no less than $1 billion in damages. What’s stopping Israel from doing the same?