BBC violated own guidelines 1,500 times in first four months of Israel-Hamas war – report

The Telegraph examined 9 million words in news stories in print, on radio, TV and online shows, as well as social media.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An exhaustive examination of BBC’s coverage of the first four months of the Israel-Hamas war revealed that the media giant violated its own editorial guidelines over 1,500 times to reveal bias against the Jewish state, The Telegraph reported Saturday.

The research, conducted by a team led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, covered a whopping nine million words written or uttered in news articles and shows, in print, on TV, radio and online, as well as social media.

Asserson’s team of some 40 lawyers and data gurus used artificial intelligence to find “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 noted.

They found that Israel was linked to the term “war crimes” four times more than Hamas, and to “genocide” 14 times more than the terrorist organization that has the destruction of Israel as a prime clause in its charter.

They were also was only called “terrorists” 409 times out of 12,459 references, a mere 3.2% of the time.

This, even though BBC Director-General Tim Davie supposedly agreed in mid-December to stop describing Hamas as a “militant group” and refer to it instead as “a terrorist organization proscribed by the U.K. government.”

The report found that BBC Arabic was especially problematic, with several journalists praising Hamas terror outright or playing it down, while personally showing anti-Israel views in their personal social media accounts.  In general, BBC Arabic was found to be the most anti-Israel channel in all global media.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, and Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent, were called out especially by the report, as those who were “downplaying the October 7 massacre or excusing the terror group.” Only one of 33 of their podcasts between October and December 2023 was considered pro-Israel.

“The BBC’s responsibility as a public service broadcaster is to deliver news without bias,” said Asserson, who has been scrutinizing the BBC’s coverage of Israel for over two decades.

“Our analysis reveals a significant deviation from this standard, especially in its reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict, where the broadcaster showed a clear partiality towards one side,” he added. “This bias was even more pronounced in the BBC’s Arabic content.”

“Such conduct not only breaches the BBC’s Royal Charter but also calls into question its suitability for continued public funding.”

The BBC reacted to the report by saying it would “carefully consider” its discoveries, although it has said before that it would investigate itself, to seemingly no avail.

It also simultaneously accused the report’s authors of faulty methodology in using artificial intelligence, saying, “We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context.”

It also defended its journalists, saying, ‘We strongly reject the claims that our reporters ‘celebrated acts of terror’ and we strongly reject the attack on individual members of BBC staff, all of whom are working to the same editorial guidelines.’

Two Jewish groups, Campaign Against Antisemitism and the National Jewish Assembly, have called for an independent review of the BBC’s war coverage.

In February, Britain’s former attorney-general, Sir Michael Ellis, had castigated the BBC in Parliament during a debate on the subject of its anti-Israel bias, saying that is reporting “fueled the appalling rise of anti-Semitism” in the country and “harmed diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the violence.”

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