The BBC is in deep crisis after the resignations of Director General Tim Davey and News Managing Director Deborah Ternes, following the revelation that a Panorama documentary edited a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump […] The crisis intensified after former consultant Michael Prescott wrote to the BBC board, denouncing “systemic problems of bias” in its coverage of issues such as the war in Gaza and gender issues. The House of Commons had asked the BBC to respond to Prescott’s accusations by Monday […] (in.gr, 2025)
[…] In recent years the BBC has struggled to contain multiple scandals. In 2023, Gary Lineker, at the time its most highly paid sports presenter, was suspended for criticising the government’s immigration policy. That briefly led to many sports staff walking off the job in solidarity. It was condemned for showing punk-rap duo Bob Vylan chanting against the Israeli military at this summer’s Glastonbury music festival, and it pulled a documentary about Gaza earlier this year because it featured the son of a deputy minister in the Hamas-run government. In the Panorama documentary broadcast last year, Trump was shown telling his supporters that “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” and that they would “fight like hell,” a comment he made in a different part of his speech […] (Reuters, 2025)
[…] The case of “little Maria” in Evros seems to be one of the issues that cost the position of Stefan Klusmann, Editor-in-Chief of “Spiegel,” who was dismissed today. As reported by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ), it holds him responsible for the “failure with the story of the girl from Syria, who allegedly died on the Greek-Turkish border, who in all likelihood did not exist”[…] (iefimerida, 2023)
[…] NZZ: “Maria of Evros” turned out to be “the biggest fake news case” for “Spiegel” […] (Kathimerini, 2023)
In recent years, international news networks have been at the center of criticism regarding the way they cover specific topics, part of which, due to its globalized nature, also touches on Greek current affairs. In particular, the criticism leveled at them is based on whether the approach they adopt respects basic principles of journalistic ethics, with the most prominent ones being objectivity and impartiality, cross-checking the news before publishing it and, of course, verifying that it corresponds to reality and is not simply a deliberate fabrication or “fake news,” as “yellow journalism” is now commonly called in the press.
In the past, Der Spiegel’s coverage of the case of “little Maria,” a minor child of irregular migrants who supposedly lost her life after being bitten by a scorpion on a river island in the Evros River within the Greek border, had initially provoked a storm of reactions from civil society organizations and political parties regarding the way in which the Greek authorities handled this alleged incident. The avalanche of complaints about a gross violation of fundamental rights took the form of an official report to Brussels calling for exemplary punishment of the country, conviction in the European courts, “freezing” of EU funds and pan-European shame of the Greek State.
However, as the threads of the case unraveled and the pieces of the puzzle of events continued to remain disconnected from each other, it appeared that “something rotten existed in the State of Denmark” and, ultimately, it was not the body of the unfortunate child which some were quick to ‘desecrate’ before it had even been confirmed to exist. Conflicting testimonies from the parents as well as “tactical maneuvers” of the main witness definitively led to the collapse of the case and the disorderly retreat of those who attempted to use their favorite fan in order to throw plenty of mud, tarnishing the institutions and services of the Hellenic Republic.
The apology never reached the ears of the Thrace border guards and Der Spiegel simply made sure to point out that it was removing the controversial report as “due to the state of the sources, it should have clearly formulated the reports about the place where the refugees were and especially about the death of the girl more carefully. Even if definitive proof is absent, there are indications that some of the refugees could have fabricated the child’s death in their despair. They probably thought that this way they would finally be saved” (CNN, 2022).
Conflicting narratives and the politics of migration reporting
The moral lesson was that some people, in order to achieve their goal at that time, namely the promotion of a specific political agenda for the management of illegal migration, were willing, with the cooperation of “selective” media, to exert influence on public opinion by influencing its sentiment with fabricated, as it turned out, news.
Four (4) years later, at the recent summit, the country’s Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, while leaving the conference room and making his statements on the crisis in the Middle East, was asked by a press representative regarding the recent BBC report, according to which the Greek authorities have recruited migrants to carry out illegal pushbacks of migrants at the Greek-Turkish border, after first abusing them and depriving them of their personal belongings.
In other words, based on the allegations of the above report, the Greek armed forces are abdicating their constitutional responsibility for border protection and are entrusting third-country nationals to commit crimes under the Common Criminal Code as well as violations of international law. Since that moment, various “well-wishers” who have turned the relevant publication into a “thesfat” have set up a merry-go-round of its reproduction, similar to that of “little Maria,” with the verdict and condemnation of the Greek State almost already received.
Conditions that resemble the courts of totalitarian regimes of other eras that, based on rumors, decided on the physical and moral extermination of their political opponents. Personally, I will not even dwell on the part of the direct allegation about looting and abuse of defenseless citizens, which is directed against the Services.
Although these Services have rescued more than 1.5 million souls and have granted international protection to slightly less than 200,000 displaced people in the last decade, it is not my responsibility to assess its validity. There are competent Authorities and an independent Judiciary to do the right thing and investigate in depth, as happened in the case of the Pylos shipwreck, for which criminal prosecution has been brought by the Prosecutor of the Piraeus Maritime Court against 17 members of the Coast Guard (without this, of course, implying guilt, since the exercise of criminal prosecution does not imply conviction and the presumption of innocence applies until the issuance of an irrevocable court decision).
Information overload and the crisis of source credibility
I will dwell, however, on the characteristic ease with which some people uncritically adopt relevant reports without having learned from the failures, mistakes and reversals of the past. Whether out of intent and bias, or naivety, or pure ideological roots of extreme humanism, the unabashed acceptance of the publication of a news network that has been struggling in recent years to find its existential identity, vacillating between the glamour of the glorious past and the contemporary defense of the novelties of woke culture, raises reasonable questions about the ultimate goals.
If their intention, through the undermining of the Institutions, is to generally target the country’s migration policy — that is, a policy of border protection, active deterrence and granting asylum to those who truly need international protection — then the entire effort is in vain.
The narrative of mass and uncontrolled migration has collapsed long ago, not because the majority of European citizens are racist or xenophobic, as some so frivolously and oversimplifiedly claim. Nor because Europeans refuse blindly to accept the advantages of migration and its beneficial contribution to critical sectors of the economy. But because they do refuse to consent to and they oppose the acceptance of the regularization of a migration that, in its current form, tends to develop into the third largest source of illicit enrichment worldwide after the arms and drug trade and into a means of hybrid instrumentalization on the part of regimes that attempt to achieve geopolitical goals by exploiting human suffering.
In conclusion, what is required in today’s era of information abundance is the critical analysis of information, the emphasis on the evaluation of sources, the avoidance of logical leaps and the refusal to adopt quick and easy-to-digest conclusions that, with the coating of “specialized” knowledge or “exclusive information,” serve specific purposes.
The cautious attitude towards modern media and skepticism regarding the powers of manipulation that they possess must function as the basic principles in the light of which readers will manage information in all fields of social life. And migration can in no case be an exception.
Disclaimer
This article expresses the author’s personal views and does not reflect the official position of the Greek State, the Public Administration, or the EUAA.
* Marios Kaleas is the General Director of the Greek Asylum Service and Chairperson of the Management Board of the European Agency for Asylum (EUAA).