JERUSALEM – A new report into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war revealed Britain’s flagship news service broke its own reporting guidelines on more than 1,500 occasions since Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught.
The research revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analyzed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media, according to the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson – a long-term BBC critic – led the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyze a breakdown of certain terms – including “genocide” – over the first four months of the Israel-Hamas war, which produced alarming statistics.
Asserson’s team included some 20 researchers and 20 data scientists who, using artificial intelligence, trawled through some nine million words of coverage across several languages and various platforms. The Spectator will release the report – which runs to some 100 pages – on Monday.
Indeed, the analysis showed Israel was linked to the term “genocide” more than 14 times the number Hamas was, despite the fact the Gazan terrorists entered southern Israel on Oct. 7 with the intention – by its own admission – of slaughtering as many Jews as they could get their hands on.
On the face of it, this alone appears an extraordinary indictment of BBC reporting, which seems to be working to project Hamas propaganda pic.twitter.com/GFc1WofKOi
— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) September 8, 2024
Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons lamented the bare statistics, which he said “appears to be an extraordinary indictment of BBC reporting, which seems to be working to project Hamas propaganda.”
The report found that in BBC coverage, Israel was associated with war crimes, genocide, and international law violations far more often than Hamas was. It also claimed that the BBC downplayed Hamas terrorism, and asserted the BBC’s Arabic service was among the most biased global media outlets in covering the Israel-Hamas conflict.
While its charter claims it strives for objectivity and balance, this more usually relates to the U.K.’s political scene where it is felt it’d be more problematic if there was an obvious editorial stance. However, over the years its staff has shown a clear bias for Democrats over and above Republican politicians – especially former President Donald Trump – and it has frequently been accused of anti-Israel bias too.
The BBC seems to wear as a badge of pride, instances of pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian voices claiming the corporation favors Israel, which it says is proof of its balanced reporting. However, this damning new report shows how far the broadcaster has fallen from its lofty ideals.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, the BBC was widely criticized for failing to call Hamas “terrorists” and to add insult to injury, it only mentioned the fact the Gazan Islamist group is a proscribed or banned terrorist group on some 400 out of almost 12,500 mentions.
A BBC spokesman said the network had “serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyze impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. It was not yet clear why a reliance on AI to quickly assess patterns of reporting and use of phrases or words should be seen as inherently prejudicial.
“We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context. We are required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this,” the spokesman added, while pledging to study the report and respond directly to its authors.
The BBC’s senior Middle Eastern correspondent Jeremy Bowen is presumably one of those “knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents,” yet his reporting is often tinged with ill-concealed contempt for the Jewish state, a remnant of the PTSD he suffered following the death of a Lebanese friend after the IDF exploded his car with an artillery shell – an event he witnessed – on the last day of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. He has compared Israel with Putin’s Russia.
However, attention was not solely focused on Bowen, but rather its employment of freelance journalists who have parroted sick expressions of Jew hatred on X among other platforms.
According to the Times of Israel, the report cited Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, a Lebanon-based reporter who has contributed to broadcasts for BBC Arabic, who has called for the “death to Israel” and has tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.”
It also cited Marie-Jose Al Azzi, another Lebanon-based contributor who described terrorists killed on Oct. 7 as “the first of the martyrs of the operation.”
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