It’s hard to tell which mainstream media outlet is the most biased against Israel when covering the war, but if I had to choose it would be two British sites: the Guardian and the BBC. Now, an article in the Torygraph (shown below) reports on a new analysis of the Beeb’s behavior in just the four months following the Hamas massacre of October 7. The report concludes that the outlet violated its own guidelines for impartiality over 1,500 times in just those four months. The Torygraph report is echoed in another report in the Times of Israel, which you can read for free pieces by clicking on the second headline below. But it’s sufficient to read the first piece, as it’s longer and more comprehensive.
You can read the Torygraph piece by clicking below, but if it’s paywalled, you can find it archived here. The whole report on the BBC, called “The Asserson Report,” is here, and if you want to judge its veracity, go have a look, though the pdf is 200 pages long.
The breaches of impartiality, which show a pattern of excoriating Israel and downplaying Hamas’s terrorism, involve not only biased reporting (see bar graph below) but also the use of biased reporters and material on the BBC’s Arabic channel. The main analysis involves reporting analyzed by AI for the use of certain words, like “genocide,” but it goes beyond that.
An except:
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 revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media.
The research, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, also found that Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict.
On Saturday, Danny Cohen, a former BBC executive, warned that there was now an “institutional crisis” at the national broadcaster and called for an independent inquiry into its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
. . . .The Asserson report analysed the BBC’s coverage during a four-month period beginning Oct 7, 2023 – the day Hamas carried out a brutal massacre in southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 251 into Gaza as hostages.
A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists contributed to the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyse nine million words of BBC output.
Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.“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.
It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.It claimed that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.
The report claims that a number of BBC reporters have shown extreme hostility to Israel, including BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, who is said to have called for “death to Israel” and defended a journalist who tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.”
. . . the report’s analysis of BBC coverage found that Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas (127 versus 30), with genocide 14 times more (283 versus 19) and with breaching international law six times more (167 versus 27).
Here’s a figure showing the disproportionality in the BBC’s coverage of Israel vs. Hamas. Given that Hamas has explicitly endorsed genocide and commits far more war crimes and violations of international law than does Israel, the longer blue bars are a palpable indication of bias in reporting:
The Torygraph article goes on in this vein, and of course reports that Jewish groups are extremely concerned, as are some politicians—even former Labour party members (e.g., Lord Austin of Dudley, now an independent) and Tories like Julia Lopez, the shadow culture secretary, and Sir Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy prime minister.
One matter of concern is the Beeb’s dogged reluctance to label Hamas as a “terrorist group”. The Times of Israel says this:
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.
The BBC, of course, disses the Asserson report:
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.
Well, the bar graph above clearly shows there’s something worth investigating, and if you’ve actually read the BBC on the war, as I have, you’ll see that yes, they’re clearly biased against Israel. For example, the BBC was one of the first to jump the gun when a misfired Islamic Jihad missile hit the parking lot of Al-Ahli hospital, blaming the “hit” on Israel. The reporting journalist, international editor Jeremy Bowen, wouldn’t apologize (though I think the BBC did).
The BBC also had to apologize when Israel sent Arabic-speaking doctors and others into Al-Shifa hospital to help evacuate the patients. That was a gesture of humanity, but the Beeb (and Reuters) said, wrongly, that the IDF was targeting Arabic speakers and medical personnel in the hospital. These are two cases I remember, but I’m sure the report gives more. At any rate, read the report if you’re concerned. The BBC apparently repeatedly jumped the gun, and in a way that falsely accused Israel.
A bit more:
The report identifies 11 cases where it claims BBC Arabic’s coverage of the war has featured reporters who have previously made public statements in support of terrorism and specifically Hamas, without viewers being informed of this.
The report accuses Mr Bowen, one of the BBC’s most respected journalists, of bias against Israel, in breach of the corporation’s editorial guidelines.
Mr Bowen, who is taking part in a BBC Masterclass on “reporting war impartially” next week, is accused in the report of “excusing Hamas terrorist activities” and of “stressing the callousness of Israelis”.
These are not just words, but incidents. The article concludes with more incidents involving both Bowen and Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, who’s accused of downplaying the October 7 massacre
Well, the results are no surprise to me, but the fact that a 200-page report on bias in a major media outlet was even created is surprising. I haven’t looked at whether the Beeb itself has reported it, but they should. It’s news, Jake.
The Times of Israel report (click headline below) largely echoes the Torygraph, but there are a few items quoted in the report that the ToI mentions (one is above) but the British paper doesn’t.
“Sir Hitler, rise” indeed!
I wonder what a study of the New York Times or Washington Post would show. . .
What about NPR? I have heard on the BBC that the Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas. They admit this. NPR has never mentioned that. It only refers to the Gaza Health Ministry, and it only reports the total deaths reported by them. Never mentions that this includes combatant deaths. I listed to Morning Edition every single day and to Weekend Edition on Saturday and Sunday, and on this metric, they are worse than the BBC.
Yes, I think NPR is pretty bad in this way, though I was thinking mostly of “newspaper” sites.
I do hope this inspires a group to analyze NYT and WaPo. I have a list of topics including the war in Gaza and the presidential election that have been covered with bias that can be analyzed.
It is terrible for democracy when citizens can’t trust the press. I am disturbed by my (well earned) lack of faith in the paper of record, and seek unbiased sources.
One can expect bias from simply observing which the conflict is called: “Israel-Gaza” or “Israel-Hamas”. My sense is that wapo consistently does the former …. To my continuing and extreme disappointment. Israel’s fight is with Hamas damnit!
As someone who listens to the BBC World News podcast daily, I don’t need a study to tell me this. I’ve been skipping past their coverage of the Gaza war because it’s so biased, so blatantly one-sided on its face, that it no longer contains useful information. Alas, because American news programs are now all single topic opinion shows all opining on the same topic, there are very few options for getting news about things beyond our border, beyond Trump.
Something I’ve noticed in coverage of the war from nearly all sources is that the fact that the war was not only started by Hamas, but is continued wantonly by Hamas despite the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian lives lost. The deaths would stop if Hamas surrendered and released the hostages. This is rarely mentioned.
I have been noticing this for months, even getting to the point where I would have to take a deep breath before checking out the headlines on the BBC web site. It can be subtle, but the antisemitism is there if you visit the web site regularly. I was glad to read this piece, but doubt that it will change things, as the bias most likely pervades the entire BBC culture. It’s not as bad as Al Jazeera, which I also at least glance at, but it’s bad. Headlines that consistently demonize Israel while showing pictures of crying Gazan children tell you something about the mindset of the people at the BBC.
Today’s BBC article on the IDF’s operation to eliminate terrorists operating in a Gazan school is typical: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyn400rm68o. The headline reads: “UN says Israeli strike on Gaza school killed six of its staff.” The picture shows a collapsed building and the article decries the Israeli destruction of the school. The Times of Israel tells us that the IDF killed nine terrorists: https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-slams-israel-after-strike-on-gaza-school-said-to-kill-18-including-un-workers/. Whom does one believe? Are they even covering the same event?
There must have been some pressure applied at some point for a degree of balance because I remember about late November (I think) the BBC television news presenters started saying saying “Hamas, which the UK government describes as a terrorist group,…”. However, I’ve noted that in the last four or five months that designation has disappeared.
There were times in late October and November when the destruction in Gaza was shown on the BBC evening news with such fascinated intensity it struck me as approaching disaster porn. With no balancing explanation as to why this was happening, of course. Distasteful in the extreme.
As someone who spent his working life in BBC studios I am deeply ashamed of its coverage of the Israel Hamas war. Day after day I listened to the BBC get things shockingly backwards at every opportunity. It was clear from the start who the terrorists, murderers and killers were, and why they had to be suppressed, but all I seemed to hear about was the plight and deaths of ‘innocent’ Gazans, along with Hamas their champions. Still I have only to open my mouth in the pub without being howled down. Thank you for the coverage I found on this site.
I saw a brief clip of Jeremy Bowen talking about the Israel Hamas war and I was shocked at how one sided it was.
I can only speculate that the BBC community are unable to see themselves as others see them – so they deny their bias because it can’t possibly be true of people as knowledgeable and passionate as themselves.
For years I relied on BBC for much of my news precisely because they are outside the influence (mostly) of US politics. I just want to know what’s going on in the world, I don’t need to know how it fits into any partisan worldview. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed an erosion of impartiality that accelerated with the Hamas war. Putting Hamas statistics right in headlines without qualification was annoying but most striking to me was the choice of photos that accompanied news stories. Gazans were almost always shown as wailing women or children cowering in rubble while photos of Israelis (even when the story was about an event within Israel) were of soldiers or police looking menacing. This did not strike me as a coincidence so I’ve stopped visiting the BBC news site. I wonder if an analysis of imagery bias has been conducted.
A study of imagery bias would be fascinating, and I would predict, telling. The wailing mothers and bloody babies are so predictable that I sometimes wonder if the images are from the current conflict or if they are stock. Israel, of course, is shown as all powerful, ruthless, self-serving, deceptive, and a force for evil. It’s the same antisemitic playbook.
Often they get dinged for blatantly stolen footage (usually from Syria) as “Israeli atrocities”.
Some of the pro-Israel tweeters call them on it. Elderof Zion does.
Pallywood – Palestine Hollywood.
D.A.
NYC
Now, if I hear a (particularly woman’s) British accent reporting on the M.E., I just cut it and move on to news I can actually trust.
D.A.
NYC
The BBC is indeed horribly biased on Israel vs Hamas. It’s also horribly biased on other woke issues, including anything related to the merits of “diversity”, anything about the benefits/drawbacks of mass immigration, and anything related to trans issues. Further, it scrupulously obeys the commandment: “Thou shalt not criticise Islam”.
Not having looked at them, do the BBC editorial guidelines (or those at NYT, WaPo, NPR, CBC) include decisions by editors not to cover or present some stories and events? This bias seems considerable to me, alongside the kind of biased choices of language or POV or photographs of sympathetic individuals. I try to remind my young adult children to be aware of what news outlets are choosing to present, and what is missing from their coverage. It’s hard work to stay aware of what’s missing.
I’m no expert on these tools but by their ads it seems like GroundNews might be a good lesson for kids trying to learn about bias.
It is advertised on many of the better political-international youtubes and if I didn’t have the critical skills myself to sniff out bias – like I was a new student or just not yet educated/young, I’d recommend them I think.
———————————————————
Pinker once said he suggested at a staff meeting to introduce bias analysis and the other tools of rationality (in his book of the same name), base rates, exponentiality, etc. to freshmen. That kind of thing. And the faculty laughed him outta town. Apparently teaching that America and men are evil is more important than actually educating people, even at Harvard.
D.A.
NYC
An interesting site: I hadn’t heard of Ground News before.
The link to the Times of Israel article doesn’t work.
ToI general website is at
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
I will fix it.
The Guardian, BBC, WaPo, and NYT are ‘woke’. What do you expect from ‘woke’ people. Impartiality? No. Truth? No. Bigoted opinion masquerading as facts. Definitely.
Back in 2006, Judith Butler stated
““Similarly, I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.””
If Judith Butler stated it, it must be true. Right?
We tend to notice most the biased coverage of people and events about which we are closely familiar. Just imagine all the biased coverage that we accept as accurate when we have much less of a personal connection or knowledge.
Does anyone have a sense for the causes of this bias at BBC and in our institutions more broadly? Many of the old-fashioned Jew haters knew they were Jew haters; most were proud of it. I imagine there is some of that at BBC, but I suspect most of them see themselves as “the good people.” Is their anti-Israel bias disconnected from that constellation of views that we call “woke”? Or is it somehow part of that parcel?
Again, I draw our attention to the fact that institutions can DECAY. Witness the once great Pan Am, Time magazine, etc. Their gradual decline is s/t we often don’t notice.
You can argue, convincingly, that the BBC — at one time before this century – was excellent.
So was pre-woke PBS.
No more.
So we must find better alternatives – few are in the MSM.
I’m not sure if the Guardian has ever been a more than a garbage samizat for high neurosis alcoholic upper-middle class British women. Like most of its writers.
PLUS… systemically… coverage of Israel is terrible broadly. This is part due to the leftists tinge of the MSM and maybe even more the fact that universities are WILDLY funded by gulf oil money.
I did graduate study at Georgetown U. in the early 90s – it is why I came to America actually. Even THEN (and G.U. was one of the first) they took lots of money from Qatar (this before Qatar was “big” even). Even then I didn’t even try to study Israel there, just Algeria and Iran (my thesis and interesting in themselves).
And this is the background for various coverage to the Palestinian terrorism problem. And why coverage lends towards simping for Islamic terrorism.
So I write back, with my column!
Syndicated variously but most articles here first, despite its modest size:
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
THERE you’ll read about the Middle East and follow the links to my sources.
D.A.
NYC
“I’m not sure if the Guardian has ever been a more than a garbage samizat for high neurosis alcoholic upper-middle class British women. Like most of its writers.”
You are Lobby Ludd … sorry, I mean, you are JD Vance and I claim my prize.
I used to comment on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ and you could have a good debate about matters. However after ‘the Remainers’ lost the BREXIT referendum something at the Guardian broke – the comment section became dominated by bitter Remainiacs and Woke supporters, with contrary comments often being moderated out of existence.
I cancelled my registration. You can’t make any contribution when the game is fixed, no matter what you say.
I trust the Beeb on a lot of issues, but their coverage of Israel-Gaza has left me rather shaken.
The (London) Times has an interesting article today by a former senior UK Army officer about the careful IDF approach to operations in Gaza, which bears out the account that our host has consistently given us: https://www.thetimes.com/article/e2125279-cc23-4b9e-aeb8-f02191f27c88 Hope the link works.
Steve – a good perspective is from Andrew Fox, ex British Army who has a very sensible X feed and a substack which shed some reality on the situation on the ground out there. https://mrandrewfox.substack.com/
Many thanks!
The Murray Gell-Man amnesia effect would suggest then, that you look more closely at the topics where you do trust them: they are likely to be just as wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
The longer blue bars might be accurate.
Please consider your own bias for a moment.
The longer blue bars ARE accurate, I presume, in terms of mentions. On the other hand, I think you’re saying that Israel does commit more war crimes, genocide, and human rights violations than does Israel. Only someone deeply ignorant of history could say that, and I’d ask you to consider your own bias. Do I have to instruct you that every missile fired by Hamas or Islamic Jihad into Israel is a war crime? That Hamas has VOWED to practice genocide on the Jews? That Hamas started the war with a monstrous human rights violation and that the IDF is taking every possible care to avoid killing civilians, while Hamas WANTS to kill Israeli civilians (do you remember that it just killed six hostages)? Do you not know that hostage-taking is a war crime?
Thanks for your claim that I’m biased, but it’s the BBC who’s biased, and you seem to have bought into it.
For matters pertaining the the war in Gaza, the only source I pay any attention to any more is Dan Senor. His “Call me back” podcast that I learned about here at WEIT is superb. I didn’t used to listen to podcasts (other than Sam Harris’ Making Sense), but most media outlets have so deteriorated that I don’t waste my time with them. Episode #262 (Call me back) is fascinating in its discussion of Netanyahu in light of the recent hostage murders and the public’s reaction to it.