BBC breached own guidelines 1,500 times in early Gaza war coverage, report claims
Using AI to analyze 9 million words of coverage from first four months of war, researchers find Israel was associated with war crimes, genocide far more often than Hamas was
The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines 1,533 times in its early coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a new report detailed by The Telegraph.
Researchers led by British-Israeli lawyer and longtime BBC critic Trevor Asserson used artificial intelligence to analyze the first four months of coverage by the network, beginning with the Hamas terror group’s attack on Israel on October 7 that started the war, and found “a deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel.
The researchers, a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, used artificial intelligence to analyze some nine million words of coverage, across several languages and platforms. Their report runs about a hundred pages and will be released to the public on Monday, according to The Spectator.
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 that the BBC’s Arabic service was among the most biased global media outlets in covering the Israel-Hamas conflict.
A BBC spokesman said the network had “serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse 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,” the spokesman added, while pledging to study the report and respond directly to its authors.
The report found that, though the BBC said in October that it would describe Hamas “where possible” as a “proscribed terrorist organization,” Hamas’s designation as a listed terror group was only noted 3.2 percent of the time.
It was not immediately clear whether that statistic counted each mention individually, or whether it was considering only the group’s first mention in a given report.
Apart from the data science component, researchers alleged that a number of freelance journalists employed by the BBC had a history of openly expressing support for Hamas, without disclosing that affinity to viewers.
It 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 October 7 as “the first of the martyrs of the operation.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry shared the Telegraph article to X on Sunday, and the report was hailed by Jewish community groups and Israel-related media watchdogs who said it provided evidence for what they’d long already known about the BBC.
From @Telegraph :
“The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found…”
“The report’s analysis of BBC coverage found that Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas… pic.twitter.com/iL10mP0ySo
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) September 8, 2024
“This report vindicates with empirical data what we have said – and the Jewish community has known – for a long time,” said Gideon Falter, leader of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, who called for “a transparent and unconstrained public inquiry” into the matter.
Laurence Julius, vice-chairman of the UK’s National Jewish Assembly, said the publicly funded broadcaster “has failed abjectly and this is nurturing an anti Israel and antisemitic narrative across its network. It has to change.”
Some British lawmakers also responded to the report. Sir Oliver Dowden, shadow deputy prime minister, said that “serious questions should be asked,” while Conservative MP Greg Smith called on government authorities to “use every tool they have in their arsenal to bring about greater compliance with the rules around neutrality and fair coverage in the BBC charter.”
Asserson, the British-Israeli lawyer at the helm of the report, has produced several reports in the past alleging anti-Israel bias at the BBC.
In 2000, Asserson founded BBCWatch, a nonprofit with the explicit mission of monitoring the network’s coverage of the Middle East, publishing six studies over the next six years. He released another report in 2008 accusing BBC Arabic of bias in its coverage two years earlier of the Second Lebanon War.
He is now launching a new organization, according to the Telegraph, called Campaign for Media Standards, to monitor bias in British media.
