BBC retracts claim of ‘other holocausts’ after complaint

The BBC on Monday corrected its failure to capitalize the word “Holocaust” in an article, after a journalist had initially defended the error by claiming “other holocausts” existed beyond the Jewish one.

The failure and the initial defense of it highlighted broader issues with the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Jews. In recent years, scandals around those issues have eroded the already thinning confidence that many British Jews and others have in the public broadcaster, which historically was widely considered a paragon of journalistic integrity.

The correction was of a Jan. 27 article that had used the lower case for the word throughout. A reader complained to the BBC about this, prompting an experienced BBC broadcast journalist to reply to the complainant that: “Historically, there have been other examples of holocausts elsewhere,” Jewish News of London reported.

The Jewish paper said it had agreed not to publish the broadcast journalist’s name.

Contacted by Jewish News, the BBC added a footnote to the online article and said that the initial email to a reader had been “sent in error,” Jewish News reported.

A BBC spokesperson told the paper: “This response was sent in error. All references to the Holocaust in this article should have been capitalised and we have now updated it accordingly and added a note of correction. We will be writing again to the original correspondent.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a prominent Jewish community watchdog group, condemned the BBC in connection with the exchange over the Holocaust.

“It is difficult to know where the monumental ignorance of the BBC news and complaints divisions ends and their wilful revision of history begins,” a spokesperson for the group wrote on X.

The correction notwithstanding, “this is yet further evidence of an institutionalised dismissal or even hatred of Jews that permeates the BBC’s increasingly agenda-driven reporting,” the spokesperson said.

The BBC “is peddling softcore Holocaust denial by trivialising the name of this horrific crime. Once again, we call for a suspension of the licence fee pending an independent investigation of the BBC‘s coverage of matters of Jewish interest,” the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s spokesperson wrote.

The previous Holocaust-related scandal involving the BBC happened last month, after it had failed on several occasions to mention the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims in its coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

The BBC apologized for the omission, in which it referred to the Nazis’ 6 million Jewish victims as merely “people.”

In December 2021, the BBC reported that a group of men who were seen harassing a busload of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street in London, celebrating Chanukah, had been provoked by an anti-Muslim slur. Independent reviews of the footage found no evidence that any such comment was made.

After Ofcom, the British government’s regulator for media, determined that the report involved “significant editorial failings,” the BBC said in a statement, “While Ofcom has found that our reporting was not in breach of the Broadcasting Code, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit ruled in January this year that more could have been done sooner to acknowledge the differing views” about what happened.

The media giant has a history of biased anti-Israel reporting.

In November, the BBC effectively allowed its employees to participate in a national day of action for Gaza, where Israel was fighting Hamas. “By saying nothing, the BBC is effectively abandoning its pretense of impartiality, allowing its Jewish employees to feel intimidated, and continuing its descent into becoming a battleground for political ideologies,” HonestReporting, a media watchdog, said of the BBC‘s silence.

In September, a report found that the BBC had violated its own editorial guidelines 1,553 times during the four-month period beginning Oct. 7, 2023, repeatedly downplaying Hamas terrorism and presenting Israel as an aggressor.

“The findings reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth,” the report said.

Some journalists used by the BBC to cover the current Israel-Hamas war previously showed sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its terrorism, the report said.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, excused Hamas’s terrorist acts, and Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, downplayed the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, it said.

The report singled out the public broadcaster’s BBC Arabic channel, calling it one of the most biased of all international media in its coverage of the Gaza war.

It noted 11 cases in which BBC Arabic featured reporters who had previously made public statements in support of terrorism and specifically Hamas, without letting viewers know.

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