The BBC’s Biased Coverage of Israel

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At Jihad Watch we have long criticized the BBC for its biased coverage of Israel. We’ve discussed BBC Arabic staff who praised Hamas and mocked their Israeli victims here, and how the BBC provides a platform for supporters of jihad terror here, and has kept on staff those who retweeted praise of the October 7 attacks here. We’ve also taken to task at Jihad Watch individual BBC reporters and editors, including John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, and Yolande Knell, and offered examples of their hair-raising anti-Israel animus.

Now a report, based on research that included the use of AI to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data covering four months of BBC coverage of the Gaza war, has just been issued, which concludes that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war. It’s a damning report, which one hopes will be looked at carefully not just by BBC executives, but by members of parliament who oversee the BBC’s management. The BBC needs to correct, in the interests of truth, its dismal coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. Ideally, heads should roll. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this report can be found here: “The BBC breached editorial guidelines over 1,500 times in Israel-Hamas conflict, report claims,” by Kristine Parks, Fox News, September 8, 2024:

A new report found the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) guilty of violating its own editorial guidelines over a thousand times in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

According to The Telegraph, the report analyzed four months of BBC output on television, radio, online, podcasts and on social media during the height of the conflict and found a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel.

British lawyer Trevor Asserson and a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words from the news outlet, starting the day of the October 7, 2023, terror attack.

The researchers allegedly identified 1,553 instances where the BBC violated its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.

The report accuses the BBC of downplaying Hamas terrorism and painting Israel as the aggressor in dozens of instances.

Israel was associated with “war crimes” four times more frequently than Hamas (127 vs. 30); genocide 14 times more often (283 vs. 19), and breaching international law six times more often than Hamas (167 vs. 27).

BBC reporters who had shown hostility toward Israel on social media were also featured in the network’s war coverage, the report claimed.

Researchers reportedly found 11 instances on the BBC’s Arabic channel, where it featured reporters who had previously made public statements in support of terrorism and Hamas.

“The findings reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth,” the report said, according to the Telegraph.

A spokesperson for the BBC questioned the report’s methodology and said they would “carefully consider” the report’s findings after reviewing it, in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“We have 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. 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, despite the highly complex, challenging and polarizing nature of the conflict,” the spokesperson said.

The Asserson Report is just out, yet the BBC has apparently already concluded that there are “serious questions” about its methodology. What is it, pray tell, that led the BBC to reach such a hasty conclusion within hours of the report being released?

The BBC is a public corporation, supported by the license fees that are mandatory for all people in the U.K. who watch television, even if they never watch the BBC. The mandatory license fee is now over 160 pounds per year; the assumption has always been that the BBC could be counted on for unbiased coverage, and so deserved this support. But the evidence of systematic anti-Israel bias, on the part of so many of its reporters, as revealed in the Asserson Report, fatally vitiates that assumption, and is one more reason why the government, if the BBC refuses to acknowledge the evidence of its anti-Israel bias and to discharge those responsible, should stop paying for its news operation.

The Telegraph notes that Asserson “described how his research into BBC bias during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s contributed to the corporation’s decision to launch an internal inquiry into its coverage in 2004, which became known as the Balen Inquiry. But despite calls for its findings to be made public, a report was never published, with the BBC going to court to keep the findings secret.” Why did the BBC try so hard — and succeed — in preventing the Balen Report from being made public? What was it trying to hide? Here’s what: the same overwhelming evidence of anti-Israel bias for which the just-released report by Asserson and his team provides further confirmation.

The people of Great Britain are forced to support the BBC through the mandatory license fee. The British government should carefully consider this exhaustive, and horrifying report, on the poisoning of minds against Israel — the BBC has 500 million listeners — and if the BBC does not itself clean house, beginning with the firing of the worst anti-Israel offenders at both the BBC and BBC Arabic, then the government should do the job for them.