White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the BBC for not doing its due diligence in its coverage of Hamas.
When asked during a press briefing to the media on Tuesday about reports that Israeli forces were 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,” she added, “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 is absolute gold. The White House @PressSec Karoline Leavitt eloquently tears into the BBC and embarrasses them for reporting Hamas lies as truth. It’s just as good after you’ve watched it the tenth time. pic.twitter.com/NDUfjlJASf
— Chris Rose (@ArchRose90) June 3, 2025
According to Leavitt, this is in juxtaposition to the BBC, who ran 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” – before presumably confirming the facts, since it later had to correct a story or take it down entirely, saying, “We reviewed the footage and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.”
Leavitt then said her administration was “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 center 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 its field hospital. This is totally standard practice on any fast-moving news story,” it said.
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 center as it claimed to be.
“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 broadcasting agency also requested that the White House assist international journalists in their appeal 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 ones has been its decision to brand Hamas as “militants” and not “terrorists,” and 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 that mentioned Hamas, only 8% explicitly described it as a terrorist organization in the UK.
Thirty articles (20.6%) referred to Hamas as either an “armed group” or a “militant group.”
Last month, the BBC’s Today program parroted a statement by UN aid chief Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza in 48 hours without aid.
It later had to retract the claim and issue a correction when it became clear that the 14,000 estimate was based on an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report of the number of children who might 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 music festival, said that he had to agree to the BBC’s terms not to 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 would 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.”