The BBC created the Trusted News Initiative, but can you trust the BBC? A leaked internal memo published in The Telegraph on November 6, 2025, details serious breaches of impartiality in the BBC coverage of current affairs. Sadly, it wasn’t news to me. As an old-school journalist employed by the BBC four decades ago, the drop in editorial standards from that time to the present was glaringly obvious.

The Leaked Memo

Former Journalist Michael Prescott was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board until June 2025. He sent a memo to the BBC Editorial Standards Board describing serious problems with the BBC’s coverage of four issues: the US election; racial diversity; biological sex and gender; and Israel and the Hamas war. At the time, Prescott’s concerns were brushed aside by the BBC. Many veteran journalists would add more topics to that list of extreme bias in the BBC’s reporting, including coverage of Brexit; the C19 pandemic and vaccine safety; climate change; the Ukraine war; and immigration.

Remembering the Old-Style BBC

When I was a BBC reporter back in the Stone Age, or rather the 1980s, I remember once getting hauled over the coals by my news editor for refusing to interview a man whose divisive, inflammatory views I believed had already received too much press coverage. “Who are you to decide what interviews the public should hear?” my boss declared, “And if you disagree with this man that much, find someone else to present the opposing point of view.” Those were the days of impartiality and of attempting to give airtime to both sides of an argument. Unlike recent times, the verbal weapons of “misinformation” or “disinformation” were never wielded by the media or politicians to censor coverage of views that opposed the mainstream or that contradicted what the government wanted the public to believe. I was genuinely proud to belong to an organization known worldwide for integrity and courageous reporting. Set up in 1922, the BBC is the oldest and largest global broadcaster, founded by a royal charter and mainly funded by fees that every household in Britain pays for owning a television or a BBC iPlayer streaming device. Additional income comes from sales of BBC programs and services internationally. The BBC World Service receives a direct grant from the British government.

BBC Creates Orwellian Trusted News Initiative

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded by the BBC in 1984, sorry, let me correct that, in 2019, claiming to root out “harmful disinformation,” especially as regards election and healthcare information. In reality, the initiative is a global censorship vehicle to promote media conformity to a single acceptable view on a number of important issues.

If only one view on an issue is allowed airtime, that’s not news, it’s propaganda.

Sadly, numerous powerful organizations around the world rushed to become TNI partners with the BBC, including the Associated Press, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Google/YouTube, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, The Washington Post and Twitter (prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the company in 2022).

Fake News Alert?

I have to admit that when I first heard Donald Trump complain about “fake news” back in 2017, it made me raise my eyebrows in disbelief. Yet we are now seeing some truth in his allegations. Prescott’s memo demonstrates that the president was the target of extremely biased and misleading reporting by the BBC. Furthermore, because of its stature and reputation as a global media organization, its reports would be picked up as gospel by the press around the world.

The BBC focused intensely on negative reporting of Trump. On its flagship current affairs documentary news show, Panorama, the network went so far as to fabricate a statement from Trump at his rally on January 6, 2021 so that he appears to say “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.” In reality, this clip was created by editing together two separate points in his speech that occurred close to an hour apart, yet this highly misleading piece of yellow journalism was picked up and rebroadcast as accurate reporting by new outlets around the world. The Panorama episode, entitled, “Trump a Second Chance?” aired on October 28, 2024, one week before the presidential election. According to Michael Prescott’s leaked memo this show was “neither balanced nor impartial – it seemed to be taking a distinctly anti-Trump stance.”

Has Hiring Diversity Led to Reduced Diversity of Views?

Since 2014, the BBC has pursued an aggressive policy of BAME (black and minority ethnic) hiring. Many highly knowledgeable and well-respected straight white male and to a lesser extent, white female, journalists, producers, and especially on-camera presenters and reporters were let go by the corporation. BAME and gender-fluid individuals would tend to be hired in their place. Apparently, a significant number of those hired were not only far less experienced than the people they replaced but also had a tendency to strongly promote their own views in their reports. White candidates applying for traineeships would be turned down. Thus, coverage of news in the Middle East by the BBC, especially on its Arabic service has become increasingly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, with Hamas fighters who killed children in Israel being described as heroes in some reports and leading to the son of a Hamas operative being able to masquerade as an objective BBC journalist to narrate a documentary about Palestine. Exaggerated Gaza death tolls, provided by Hamas operatives, have been accepted as factual by the BBC, with those numbers being picked up as such by news outlets around the world.

BBC World Service Becomes Tool for Hamas Propaganda

The BBC Arabic service has in effect become a propaganda mouthpiece for Hamas, portraying the terrorist organization exclusively in a positive light.

For many decades, the BBC World Service had been considered the gold standard of accurate reporting, broadcasting globally in numerous languages. In Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union, people would risk life and liberty to listen to BBC broadcasts to find out what was really happening, knowing that their own governments were lying to them. However, the leaked memo shows that the BBC Arabic service has become little more than a political mouthpiece promoting the interests of Hamas, broadcasting only stories that put the terrorist organization in a positive light and always painting Israel and Jews as the bad guys.

For example, to quote Prescott’s memo:

“BBC News’ English website covered the story of a Yazidi woman, Fawzia Sido, rescued by Israeli soldiers after a decade as a sex slave in Iraq, prior to her arrival in Gaza.

Kidnapped, drugged, raped and “sold off” for marriage to an ISIS fighter at the age of just 11, the story detailed her escape and rescue, with back up for her claims from the US State Department and the Iraqi authorities.

BBC Arabic ran the same story but with critical differences – starting with the headline: “Israel says ‘Yazidi prisoner returned to Iraq after ten years in Gaza,’ Hamas tells BBC ‘Israel narrative is fabricated’”. The bulk of BBC Arabic’s story is taken up by a 582-word-long statement by Hamas disputing the woman’s terrible story.”

BBC Promotes “Equity” while Cutting Job Security

I was very happy with my position as a staffer with the BBC in the 1980s, as the corporation treated us very well. Good benefits. Five weeks paid vacation. I often chose to host a holiday special on New Year’s Day, as I would be paid double my normal rate and get an extra day’s vacation for working on a public holiday. After I left to take up a post as a journalist advisor and trainer for China Radio International in Beijing, the BBC began a policy of getting rid of its permanent staff and instead would put people on 3-month renewable contracts with much reduced benefits.

In 2016, after decades away from the BBC, I visited Broadcasting House in London to be interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour show about infidelity. My comic self-help book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, had just been released. The place was a sea change from the BBC where I had worked. The historic building, with all its wood paneling, had been chopped up into various fiefdoms by adding new glass walls and having different entry cards required to enter each section. Yes, I could see plenty of brown faces in the programming departments. However, the secretary who showed me around the remodeled building told me that she was on a “zero-hour” contract where the BBC would not guarantee any minimum hours of employment. She was paid only for the hours actually worked, with no job security or benefits. The corporation also practiced “hot-desking”, where she was not even guaranteed the same desk to work at from one day to the next. All this contributed to a far less favorable working environment than I had seen back in the 1980s.

Interestingly, in July 2024, the BBC reported on the government enacting a new law to ban exploitative zero-hour contracts, without mentioning that the corporation had used these kinds of contracts for years.

Shrinking Opportunities for Support Workers

I asked that secretary if she ever was ever given the chance to do reporting or researching for the shows she worked for. She told me that she would never be allowed to do that. Just like the glass walls separated the different programming departments at Broadcasting House, a glass ceiling seemed to be preventing administrative workers from being involved in content creation. Clearly, the BBC I worked for forty years ago was far more of an egalitarian meritocracy than it is today. Some of the UK’s best loved TV personalities, such as Esther Rantzen, Dame Jenni Murray of Woman’s Hour, and Jeremy Clarkson, star of Top Gear and Clarkson’s Farm, began their careers as secretaries or technical operators for the BBC. Anyone who showed promise had a shot of moving out of the clerical or technical arena to become a researcher, reporter or presenter.

Female Rapists but No Pregnant Women Allowed

News reader Martine Croxall was heavily censured by the BBC for altering a script she was reading live on June 22, 2025, on the BBC News Channel, which referred to “pregnant people” earlier this year. The presenter changed her script to instead say “women.” The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) on November 6, 2025, after deliberating for five months over this heinous act, declared that it considered her facial expression as she said this gave the “strong impression of expressing a personal view on a controversial matter.” Having worked as a journalist advisor in Beijing for China Radio International, this incident reminded me that China during the Cultural Revolution castigated people for thought crimes. Is the BBC now doing the same for face crimes?

Indeed, the Prescott memo describes “censorship by the specialist LGBTQ desk within News” creating an extreme bias in favor of the transgender agenda and against biological women.

A November 15, 2025, Times article by Rosamund Unwin describes how women within the BBC had been raising objections for several years about this issue that had been ignored, including complaints about stories that referred to transgender sex offenders as women despite their being biologically male.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/bbc-transgender-reporting-6r6l23cmf

Prescott’s memo describes the BBC’s gushing coverage of Gisele Shaw, a transgender wrestler who felt “liberated” by coming out. This story, posted on March 15th, 2023, glossed over how the wrestler, who is a biological male, had repeatedly won trophies by competing in women’s competitions. This brings to mind a rather prescient parody from South Park, The Strong Woman Competition, that aired in 2019.

Sometimes the only real news commentary you find is on a comedy show!