White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the BBC for not doing its due diligence in its coverage of Hamas during a press briefing to the media on Tuesday.
When asked to respond to reports that Israeli forces are firing on Palestinians trying to get aid from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Leavitt said "the Trump administration is aware of those reports and we are currently looking into the veracity of them because, unlike some in the media, we don't take the word of Hamas with total truth, we like to look into it when they speak."
This runs counter to the procedure of the BBC, she suggested, "who had multiple headlines [such as] "Israeli tank kills 26 Israeli tank kills 21," "Israeli gunfire kills 31," "Red Cross says 21 people were killed in an aid incident." And then they had to correct and take down their entire story saying "We reviewed the footage and couldn't find any evidence of anything.""
Leavitt then emphasized that her administration is "going to look into reports before we confirm them from this podium or before we take action."
She suggested that journalists "who actually care about truth do the same in order to reduce the amount of misinformation that's going around the globe."
In response to Leavitt's accusations, the British national broadcaster released a statement saying "The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong. We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism."
"Our news stories and headlines about Sunday's aid distribution centre incident were updated throughout the day with the latest fatality figures as they came in from various sources. These were always clearly attributed, from the first figure of 15 from medics, through the 31 killed from the Hamas-run health ministry to the final Red Cross statement of ‘at least 21’ at their field hospital. This is totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story."
The BBC added that, separately, its Verify branch reported on Monday that a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre as it claimed to show.
"This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting," it continued. "Conflating these two stories is simply misleading."
The BBC ended by asking the White House to aid international journalists in their plea to enter Gaza, which they are currently unable to do.
Criticism of the BBC since start of war
The BBC has faced extensive criticism for its coverage of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. One of the prominent criticisms has been of its decision to brand Hamas as militants and not terrorists, and of its avoidance of referring to Hamas as a terror organization.
Significant public attention was given to the issue when British lawyer Trevor Asserson released a scathing report in September 2024 showing that the BBC breached its editorial guidelines for news coverage more than 1,500 times since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.
The research found that there was a “deeply worrying pattern of bias against Israel” and that Israel was associated with genocide 14 times more than the Hamas terror group was throughout the analyzed BBC coverage.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) found that of 145 online news articles between January 1 and April 30 this year which mentioned Hamas, only 8% explicitly described it as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
30 articles (20.6 per cent) referred to Hamas as either an “armed group” or “militant group”.
Last month, the BBC’s Today programme parroted a statement by UN aid chief Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza in 48 hours without aid. The BBC later had to retract the claim, and issued a correction, when it emerged that the 14,000 estimate was based on an IPC report of the number of children who could suffer from "severe malnutrition" over the next year.
In another example of refusal to brand Hamas a terrorist group, Yariv Mozer, the director of We Will Dance Again, a documentary film about the Nova festival, said that he had to agree with the BBC to not describe Hamas as a terrorist organization if he wanted it to air.
“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” Mozer said.
In February this year, the BBC was made to apologize after its news anchor Nicky Schiller referred to the three Israeli hostages who were released that day as "prisoners."
