The Daily Populous Monday September 9th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by Silly-avocatoe

The BBC has strongly denied an accusation that it has breached its own guidelines more than 1,500 times in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Claims of “worrying” anti-Israel bias had been made in a report led by lawyer Trevor Asserson.

The report alleged that some BBC correspondents had excused and downplayed Hamas’ activities, while contributors used by the corporation were sympathetic to the group.

Mr Asserson’s team analysed coverage of the four-month aftermath after the 7 October massacre, which saw Hamas kill around 1,200 Israelis and take 250 hostages.

Researchers found that Israel was associated with the term “war crimes” four more times and “genocide” over 14 times more than Hamas in BBC coverage. The report concluded that there were 1,553 breaches of editorial guidelines.

“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.

A spokesperson for the BBC said the corporation would “carefully consider” the research but denied claims of bias, and questioned the researchers’ methodology.

The research, which involved lawyers and data scientists, used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to look at nine million words of the broadcaster’s output.

A BBC spokesman said: “We have 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.”

The broadcaster also said it believed its correspondents were achieving impartiality “despite the highly complex, challenging and polarising nature of the conflict”.

The spokesman added: “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.”

Mr Asserson said the BBC had “showed a clear partiality towards one side”, adding that it was “even more pronounced in the BBC’s Arabic content”.

The full report is set to published on Monday with the Campaign for Media Standards. The bulk of the research was carried out pro-bono by Mr Asserson’s law firm, Asserson Law Offices, which has offices in the UK, US and Israel.

The National Jewish Assembly and the Campaign Against Antisemitism said there should be an independent review into the broadcaster’s coverage of the conflict.

Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said “the BBC’s ideological bias is now shamefully clear”.

Recent research of BBC coverage by academics Mike Berry of Cardiff University and Greg Philo of Glasgow University suggested that Israeli arguments were given more prominence that Palestinian ones.

Their study of four weeks of BBC One coverage in the first four weeks since the 7 October massacre found that “murder” or words associated with murder were used 52 times by the broadcaster’s journalists to refer to Israeli deaths, but such words were not used at all in relation to Palestinian deaths.

BBC News issued an apology in October after one presenter described pro-Palestine protesters showing their “backing for Hamas”.

Sensitive-Cat-6069 on September 9th, 2024 at 11:41 UTC »

All you need to remember is the BBC coverage of the Al-Ahli hospital incident.

Jon Donnison commented live on air that the hospital was impacted by an Israeli airstrike with zero evidence. BBC later admitted it was a “speculation” on his behalf.

Then to double down, BBC editor Jeremy Bowen continued reporting that the hospital was “flattened” by Israel. After that was confirmed to be false, he commented “it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening. And to answer your question, no, I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think, I think I was measured throughout.”

What editorial guidelines are we talking about???? These people are not even hiding their bias.

macross1984 on September 9th, 2024 at 07:04 UTC »

From the article: A spokesperson for the BBC said the corporation would “carefully consider” the research but denied claims of bias, and questioned the researchers’ methodology.

Well then, I expect BBC to provide convincing rebuttal (with proof) that will convince others to believe that BBC is not biased.

ksamim on September 9th, 2024 at 06:55 UTC »

Eager to see the full report Monday. They already are rejecting the methodology of using term frequency and LLM post processing but those were likely used just to find the examples. Let’s see them defend the full deep dive.