Have you noticed what happened to two men who won a game show and gave the money to refugees?

On Friday 30 October, Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian Croft won The Celebrity Traitors on BBC One. Each gave his £41,500 share of the prize to a refugee charity: Ranganathan to the Refugee Council, Croft to Choose Love.

What followed was a manufactured outrage. It was built by a handful of commentators and newspapers, and each stage was nastier than the last.

• Four minutes. The official Traitors account announced the winners at 21:16. The first attack on the charities was posted at 21:20.
• Seventy minutes. By 22:26 the Daily Express had a headline about a "huge BBC bias backlash". Its evidence was three anonymous posts and one TalkTV presenter.
• One day. By the next night the Daily Mail had changed the subject from refugees to Israel.
• Five days. By 4 November the Telegraph had changed it again, to antisemitism. Its own article says an independent investigation by a KC did not uphold the allegation.
• Twelve days. On 11 November the BBC, which had defended the winners a week earlier, published a response saying the complaints had been "shared with the relevant parties".

That is a smear campaign against two men who gave money to refugees. The BBC knew it, said so, and then lost its nerve.

The outrage did not start with viewers. The BBC's own complaints report shows that in the two days after the final, a programme watched by 11.6 million people drew no more than 100 complaints. The outrage started with commentators and newspapers, and the BBC gave way to them.

What the winners did

Celebrity contestants on The Traitors do not keep the prize. They play for a charity they have chosen.

Ranganathan became a patron of the Refugee Council in September. Croft volunteered for Choose Love when he was 15 and 16 and is now an ambassador for it. This is what Croft said on the programme:

That is the whole of the offence. Two men gave money to people who have been forced out of their homes.

What the press did in the first hour

The official Traitors account posted the result at 21:16. At 21:20 the journalist Charlotte Gill posted this on X:

At 21:43 the TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer followed:

At 22:26 the Daily Express published "Celebrity Traitors sparks huge BBC bias backlash over winning charities - 'show ruined'". The "huge backlash" in the article is Hartley-Brewer and three posts from people the Express does not name. One of them:

The final drew a peak audience of 11.6 million. The Express turned four posts into a "huge backlash" in just over an hour, and the Daily Star, Metro and GB News repeated it the next day.

What they said about refugees

The complaint that weekend was simple. The money went to refugees, and refugees are not British.

Read the three quotations below and look for anyone who says the Refugee Council or Choose Love wasted money, broke a rule or misled a donor. Nobody does. They object to who the money helps.

GB News headlined its report "'woke' fury" and "Nothing for Britons?!", and quoted Steven Barrett calling a donation to refugees "the invasion of our country". The Express put "betrayal" in a headline and printed an anonymous post calling the donation "traitorous to this country".

GB News ran seven articles on the row in two weeks, more than any other outlet in our archive. It quoted its own presenter, Alex Armstrong, as one of the critics.

Notice "our licence fee money". The celebrities play for charity, so the prize was always going to a charity. Hartley-Brewer did not object to the BBC giving a prize to charity. She objected to "a charity for refugees and a charity for 'queer' refugees".

That is the manufactured part. Two donations to people forced out of their homes are not a scandal, so a handful of commentators supplied the anger themselves, and the Express, GB News, the Daily Star and Metro reported that anger as a public backlash.

How the Mail turned it into a story about Israel

"They gave it to refugees" is a weak scandal. So at 23:33 on Saturday 31 October the Daily Mail found a better one. Its headline: "Refugee charity set to benefit from The Celebrity Traitors' prize money has accused Israel of 'genocide'".

The Mail's evidence was that Choose Love's website says Palestinians "are still experiencing a genocide", and that the charity organised an open letter asking the Government to stop arms sales to Israel. The Mail then quoted the Conservative MP Jack Rankin:

Calling Israel's genocide in Gaza a genocide is the conclusion of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, which reported in September 2025 that "the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip". The Mail presented a refugee charity agreeing with the UN as an "extremist agenda".

GB News repeated the Mail's story the next afternoon with the headline "BBC fury as Celebrity Traitors winning refugee charity accuses Israel of 'genocide': 'Supposed to be impartial!'". On 5 November the Sun's Ally Ross column put the whole thing in one headline: "Of many crimes in Celebrity Traitors, biggest was our licence fee cash going to anti-Israeli charity for queer refugees".

How the Telegraph turned it into antisemitism

On 4 November the Telegraph published a 1,400 word article by Nicole Lampert. It first ran under the headline "Celebrity Traitors gave licence fee cash to charity accused of being 'hostile environment for Jews'". That is still the title of the page. The headline readers see was later changed to "Celebrity Traitors gave licence-fee cash to charity at centre of anti-Semitism row". The page was last modified on 6 November and carries no note saying the headline was changed.

The words "hostile environment for Jews" do not appear anywhere in the article. Nobody quoted in it says them.

Here is the paragraph the whole article rests on:

A KC investigated the allegation and did not uphold it. The Telegraph gave that half a sentence, put the allegation in the headline anyway, and carried on for another 1,300 words.

The "row" is one the Telegraph made itself. I could find no report of it anywhere before this article.

Notice what the staff are said to have been uncomfortable with: "the pro-Palestinian sentiments expressed by the charity". Later the Telegraph, in its own words and not in a quotation, says the office became "a hostile place for anyone who did not have a visceral hatred of Israel". That sentence is about Israel. The headline turned it into "Jews".

These are the things the article lists as evidence:

• The charity calls Israel's genocide in Gaza a genocide.
• It asked the Government to stop military cooperation with Israel.
• Its deputy chief executive posted that it is "dangerous to confuse anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism".
• She reposted a Malcolm X quotation about "the Palestinian struggle".
• A former worker posted that Israel is "a coloniser" and Palestine "colonised".
• It has funded Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Not one of these is about Jewish people. They are about Israel.

A newspaper that cannot differentiate between Jewish people and the Israeli state only benefits the Israeli state, by conflating the two and misrepresenting real antisemitism.

The Telegraph also made a claim of its own, with no source:

That is misinformation. The report says the opposite of what the Telegraph says it "admitted".

NewsCord's Watchdog reading of the article scores it 9.7 out of 10 and sets out every finding. The full reading is here.

Who carried the Telegraph's story further

The KC's finding was in the Telegraph's fourth paragraph. Each outlet that picked the story up made it worse.

• The Daily Sceptic, 5 November, reprinted the opening of the Telegraph article under "Celebrity Traitors Gives BBC Licence-Fee Cash to Charity Accused of Antisemitism". A reader's comment underneath: "There's a consistent theme with these globalist so called 'charities' and quangos that are funded by the likes of Soros and Vodaphone".
• The Campaign Against Antisemitism, 6 November, posted that the charity was "described as 'hostile to Jews'" and was "an extremely troubling choice of recipient for BBC licence fee funds". Its post does not mention that a KC investigated and did not uphold the allegation. It ends by asking people to sign its petition to suspend the licence fee.
• The Algemeiner, 6 November, went with "Charity Receiving Prize Money From 'Celebrity Traitors' Win Linked to Hamas, Accused of Antisemitism".

In one week a donation to queer refugees became "linked to Hamas".

What it did to the people who gave the money

Ranganathan and Croft talked about it on Croft's podcast on 8 November. Ranganathan described a message he had been sent, as transcribed by the Daily Mail:

On his own podcast he told Alan Carr that people had come to his workplace: "It's hell. They turned up at Radio 2… insane."

Ranganathan also explained why he supports the Refugee Council: "I had got involved with Refugee Council because I got so fed up of the rhetoric against refugees and how these people are being demonised." And he named what the times and headlines above show: "The voices that are angry about it have been amplified because that's the fun angle, right?"

Croft, who is 24, said this:

What the BBC did

On 4 November the BBC defended the winners. Seven days later it dropped them.

The first statement defends two people who gave money to charity. The second defends nobody. It does not say the charities are legitimate. It does not say the winners were entitled to choose them. It tells the people who objected to refugees getting money that their objection has been passed on, and it does not say to whom.

The BBC did not give way to its viewers. It publishes a fortnightly list of every programme that draws more than 100 complaints. Its report for 19 October to 1 November, which covers the final and the two days after it, does not list The Celebrity Traitors. In the two days when the outrage began, 11.6 million people watched and no more than 100 complained. The BBC has not said how many complained after that.

What came between the BBC's two statements was the press: the Telegraph's article on 4 November, the Sun's column on 5 November, and the Campaign Against Antisemitism's call on 6 November to suspend the licence fee.

That is spineless. The BBC knew the charities were legitimate, because it had said so a week earlier. It knew the winners had done nothing wrong. It watched newspapers smear the two winners of its own programme for giving money to refugees, and it chose to reassure the people doing the smearing.

Every outlet that had built the story then reported the BBC's reply as proof of it. On 12 and 13 November the Express, the Mail, the Daily Star, the Mirror, the Independent, HuffPost and GB News all ran "BBC confirms complaints" or "BBC responds". The BBC handed the campaign its last headline.

The count: who wrote what

NewsCord's archive holds 36 articles about this row, published between 30 October and 13 November. What the figures show:

• 12 of the 36 have a headline that carries the backlash: fury, outrage, betrayal, genocide, antisemitism. The Daily Express wrote four of them and GB News three.
• 17 have a headline about someone replying: Richard Osman, Sadiq Khan, Richard Bacon, and then the winners themselves. Each reply was reported as another round of the "row".
• 7 report the BBC's complaints response.
• GB News published the most: seven articles.
• The Guardian, BBC News, ITV News and the Evening Standard reported the final and published no article about the row.

That is how a manufactured row keeps going. Twelve headlines made the accusation. Seventeen reported somebody answering it, and the press wrote up each answer as another round of the "row". Seven more reported the BBC's reply. The newspapers that started the outrage then reported their own noise as news.

Two men won a game show and gave £83,000 to refugees. The Express called it a betrayal. The Mail printed an MP calling a refugee charity extremist. The Sun called it anti-Israeli, the Telegraph tied it to antisemitism and the Algemeiner linked it to Hamas. The BBC knew better, and told the people saying so that their feedback had been passed on.