by Danny Cohen, Telegraph
One might have thought the Corporation would learn from its mistakes in Gaza. But Tehran’s clerics are playing it just like Hamas
Last week I wrote about the failure of Westminster politicians to take the recent massacre of protestors in Iran as seriously as they have the Gaza war.
Now it looks as if the BBC is falling into the same trap.
A recent report from Iran broadcast in prime-time by BBC News is simply staggering in this regard. Filed by the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet, it was, on its face, a simple piece of foreign reporting: scenes of crowds, interviews with passers-by, the temperature of a capital city. But its central effect – its tone, its emphases, its glaring omissions – was not to illuminate Iran’s reality. It was to distort it.
The most telling line came early in the report and set the mood: “It’s a public holiday today and in Tehran it feels like a family festival”. There are times when that kind of phrase is harmless colour. Iran in 2026 is not one of those times.
This is a state that has responded to protests with large-scale killing; a state that does not merely govern but punishes dissent in the most brutal way possible. Despite that backdrop, the BBC’s report from the streets of Tehran did not make a single reference to the mass murder of thousands of protestors just weeks ago or the fact that thousands more have been arrested, their fates still uncertain. How can this meet even the most basic of journalistic standards we should expect from the BBC?
What was absent from this BBC report mattered as much as what was present. There was no one critical of the government in the piece. Not one. No dissident voice. No bereaved family member. No former prisoner. No student who has watched friends disappear. Instead, we were given the kind of “vox pops” you get when a regime is comfortable with the answers.
And that leads to the question that should have been asked on air, not muttered afterwards on social media. Were those interviews conducted under conditions of duress?