BBC’s Israel-Hamas Coverage Breached Own Editorial Guidelines Over 1,500 Times According to New Report
A new report compiled by a team of lawyers and data scientists has concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war shows “widespread anti-Israel bias” and has breached its own editorial guidelines multiple times.
The report analyzed the BBC’s English and Arabic-language coverage from the first four months of the conflict, which began on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists stormed across the border into Israel, murdering thousands of people and taking hundreds more hostage.
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Output was analyzed across all platforms including television, radio, podcast and the BBC’s websites.
In a random sample of 253 interviews conducted by the BBC’s Arabic service, the report also found that over a quarter “were connected to Hamas or another terrorist group or had posted extreme antisemitic views online.” However these facts were not disclosed to the audience alongside the interviews.
British lawyer Trevor Asserson, who led the AI-driven review, said: “The BBC’s responsibility as a broadcaster is to deliver news without bias. Our analysis reveals a significant deviation from this standard in its reporting on the Israel- Hamas conflict, where the broadcaster showed a clear partiality towards one side. This bias was even more pronounced in the BBC Arabic’s content. Such conduct not only breaches the BBC’s Royal Charter but also calls into question its suitability for continued public funding.”
The report comes in the wake of increasing disquiet about the corporation’s coverage of the Middle East conflict, in particular its refusal to call Hamas a terrorist group. The broadcaster has also issued a number of apologies for statements made on air regarding the conflict, including one in which a news anchor suggested the Israeli armed forces were “targeting” medical staff in Gaza in a report about the IDF assisting patients and staff at Al Shifa hospital.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the BBC told Variety: “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.”
“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 polarising nature of the conflict. However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.”
Read the full report here.
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