From the Liveblog of
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Law firm report: BBC breached editorial guidelines 1,500 times with Israel-Hamas war coverage
A report has found that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines on some 1,500 occasions with its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas.
According to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, the research project led by UK lawyer Trevor Asserson and his firm found that Israel was associated with “genocide” over 14 times more than the Hamas terror group in the British national broadcaster’s coverage of the war.
The report also says the broadcaster downplayed Hamas’s terrorism.
A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists were involved in the research using AI to analyze some nine million words of BBC content, the newspaper reports.
“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 says.
The report also singles out a number of individual reporters for criticism, as well as BBC Arabic.
In response, the BBC said that while it would carefully consider the report’s findings, there were “serious questions” about the methodology, the Sunday Telegraph reports.
