Category: journalists behaving badly

The NYT still slants its news against Israel

January 26, 2025 • 9:30 am

While perusing the Bad Gray Lady this morning, I saw two headlines that, in light of what I knew about events in Gaza and Lebanon, looked dubious. Sure enough, the headlines and the news below them gave a distorted view of the situation. Here’s the first one (click to read, or find article archived here):

Note first the order of events: Israel blacks Gazans from north while accusing Hamas of a cease-fire breach.  The order of events should have been reversed, with the headline saying “Israel accuses Hamas of Cease-Fire Breach, blocks Gazans from North.” That may seem a trivial difference , but I’ve seen too many headlines with Israel identified first as the perp, with the stated reasons for their actions given second.

But the lack of explanation for what’s happening is much more important. The real situation is that Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in which all civilian hostages were to be released first, and, yesterday at noon Israeli time, Hamas was also to provide Israel with a complete list of the hostages they had or knew about, specifying whether they were living or dead.  Hamas did neither; they are still not releasing one civilian woman (she was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but Hamas is a partner organization and could easily have arranged for the woman’s release). The four women released yesterday were in the IDF. The NYT notes this further down:

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.

And here’s another violation described by the Jerusalem Post:

Hamas has not yet provided Israel with the list revealing the status of the hostages held in Gaza captivity, which it was obligated to provide by Saturday under the ceasefire agreement.

According to a Walla report citing Israeli officials, the list was expected to include details on how many of the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity are still alive and how many are deceased.

An Israeli official reportedly said that failure to provide the list by the end of the day would be another violation of the agreement by Hamas.

Hamas could not explain either of these violations of the agreement. It’s clear that they are toying with Israel and playing psychological games that of course are deeply injurious to the hostages’ friends and families. This is why Israel did not withdraw from northern Gaza or allow residents to return home. (Note that Israel still has not fired on bullet.) The “blocking” is Israel’s nonviolent response to the actions of Hamas, the party that first violated the cease-fire.

I don’t think this bodes well for a continuing peace in the region, which, at any rate, I don’t think will be permanent so long as Hamas runs Gaza.

Here is the second headline about doings further north. Click to read, or find it archived here:

And an excerpt (bolding is mine)

At least 15 people were killed and more than 80 injured by Israeli forces on Sunday in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, as the 60-day deadline for both Hezbollah and Israel to withdraw from the south expired and thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading south back to their homes.

The agreement, which was signed in November and halted the deadliest war in decades between the two sides, stipulated that both Hezbollah and Israel withdraw, while the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed in force to secure the area. Negotiators had hoped the cease-fire deal would become permanent, returning a measure of calm to a turbulent region.

But as the deadline passed on Sunday, a very different scenario was taking shape.

Israeli forces remained in parts of southern Lebanon in violation of the cease-fire agreement, stoking fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli officials warned Lebanese not to return to their homes in many towns and villages in the south.

“In the near future, we will continue to inform you about the places to which you can return,” Avichai Adraee, the Arabic spokesman of the Israeli military, posted on social media on Sunday morning. “Until further notice, all previously published instructions remain in effect.”

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that those killed and injured on Sunday morning had been trying to enter their villages along the border when they were attacked by Israeli forces. Residents of some southern towns had called for their neighbors to gather early Sunday morning and head to their homes in a convoy, despite the warnings from Israel. The Lebanese military said it was accompanying civilians returning to several border towns to try to ensure their safety. The military said in a statement that a Lebanese soldier was among those killed by Israeli fire.

What is not explained: What Israel and Lebanon agreed to was that Israel would occupy the region between their northern border with Lebanon and the Litani River, and then would withdraw back into Israel after the Lebanese Army (note: there is one, and it’s not Hezbollah), in concert with the UN army forces of UNIFIL, would destroy all of Hezbollah’s weapons and facilities between the border with Israel and the Litani River. Until then, villages in that area would be evacuated (Israeli villages south of the border with Lebanon have also been evacuated, displacing 80,000 people).

Of course UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army have done little or nothing, and Hezbollah, despite the agreement, will not withdraw north of the Litani River; armed Hezbollah fighters remain in the forbidden region while UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army does bupkes.  The Israelis fired on a group of people marching back to their homes in violation of the agreement, accompanied by armed people; this was perceived as a threat [see below].

At any rate the bolded text above implies that Israel was violating the cease-fire agreement while Lebanon adhered to it. That is a falsehood. Lebanon first violated the cease-fire agreement big-time, and in response Israel did not withdraw.

From the Times of Israel:

The Lebanese health ministry said 15 people had been killed, including a Lebanese soldier, and some 83 had been wounded by IDF fire in southern Lebanon since the morning.

The crowds appeared to be largely made up of Hezbollah supporters. Hezbollah’s al-Manar television, broadcasting from several locations in the south, showed footage of residents moving toward villages in defiance of Israeli orders, some holding the terror group’s flag and images of Hezbollah fighters killed in the war, as well as slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

An Israeli military official told reporters that hundreds of Lebanese, among them Hezbollah operatives, tried to reach villages in southern Lebanon while carrying out “provocations.”

The official said the military had prepared for civilians attempting to reach the border villages at the end of the 60-day truce, despite its warnings.

The IDF said it opened fire on suspects who approached troops still deployed in southern Lebanon and who posed an “imminent threat.” Troops also detained several suspects, according to the military.

Here, from Wikimedia, is a map showing the Litani River and the area south of it before one gets to the Israeli border (dark grey line). That is the region that was subject to the truce agreement.

******

In both cases above, Gaza and then Lebanon violated a cease-fire agreement with Israel, and Israel did not violate that agreement–until the terrorists (and the UN and Lebanon) violated the agreement.  Yet somehow the NYT makes Israel look responsible here rather than terrorists violating a cease-fire agreement. Such is mainstream journalism. In Gaza, for instance, if Hamas would just let the Israelis go as agreed, the cease-fire would be obeyed by Israel, which already has released the hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails per the agreement.

The Nation endorses Kamala Harris, but its interns object: “We cannot vote our way out of this genocide”

November 1, 2024 • 10:30 am

Well, I’ll be. The group of interns at the left-wing The Nation have objected to the magazine’s recent endorsement of Kamala Harris and published their gripes. Now why would that happen? We all know that many editors and reporters at the Washington Post objected to the paper’s failure to endorse Kamala Harris, but this kind of reversal is unexpected.  Well, sort of—unless you know how “progressive” young Leftists are beginning to change journalism.

So why the beefing? It’s Israel, Jake!

Here, from the “activism” section of the magazine (!), is the long gripe by The Nation‘s interns (click to read for free):

An excerpt giving the tenor of their rage:

We, The Nation’s current interns, find this endorsement unearned and disappointing. We have a different interpretation of the magazine’s abolitionist legacy, one that says a publication committed to justice must refrain from endorsing a person signing off on genocide. We do not support Donald Trump, but to champion Harris at this moment is to ignore the atrocities that are being carried out with weapons supplied by the Biden-Harris administration.

The Nation’s endorsement notes that on foreign policy the “positive case [for Harris] is harder to make,” adding that “she has failed so far to offer anything more substantive to the millions of Americans…desperate for an end to America’s unconditional support for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.” Yet it goes on to endorse her anyway—implying that domestic concerns are somehow more important. We disagree. On the grounds of Gaza alone, Harris should not have received The Nation’s endorsement.

In the 12 weeks since she effectively became the Democratic nominee, Harris has failed to differentiate her policies from Joe Biden’s blank-check support for genocide. Instead, she repeats the same bland pronouncements about the need for a ceasefire and uses the same passive-voice support for the idea of Palestinian “freedom and self-determination.” Again and again, she has been asked by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voters, along with a broad coalition of Democrats of conscience, to offer an alternative, and again and again she has refused. She would not even allow a pre-vetted Palestinian supporter of hers to speak at theDemocratic National Convention.

We have watched this abdication of moral responsibility by the Democratic nominee with a growing sense of dismay. As young journalists, we think of our colleagues in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 175 journalists in Gaza since last October—and right now, with US support and the Western media’s indifference, Israel is effectively issuing hit lists of reporters in Gaza. During the last year, The Nation has published dispatches from Palestinian journalists, from 14-year-old Lujayn to the journalist Mohammed Mhawish, both of whom have survived air strikes, most likely from US-made weapons. We cannot advocate for a person who is complicit in the murders of fellow journalists and the bombing of colleagues whose pieces we have fact-checked.

Even when they try to leaven  Harris’s position as a perpetrator of genocide with her “good” domestic policies, they can’t resist bringing up Gaza again and again:

Harris, for instance, promises to provide tax credits to families with newborns and to sign a law to restore the right to abortion nationwide. Yet her commitment to the welfare of children doesn’t extend to the more than 17,000 kids killed in Gaza, hundreds of whom died from inadequate postnatal care like incubators. She will fight for reproductive care in the United States, but in Gaza, tens of thousands of mothers have or will give birth without access to doctors, pain relief, hospitals, or food and water.

Harris also pledges to strengthen our healthcare system. But in Gaza, as many as 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed, 30 of 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, and fewer than half are even partially functional. People routinely die from the blockade of basic sanitary equipment, ordinary medicines, and vaccines.

Harris’s plans to relieve the housing crisis in the United States ring hollow next to her support for Israel’s destruction of homes in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. With the Biden-Harris administration’s full knowledge and aid, 90 percent of Gazans have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged and destroyed. Nor has the administration done anything to stop the demolitions of houses and illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

So who do the interns think the magazine should endorse for President? Nobody, of course. It’s curious that the Washinton Post would get slammed for not endorsing anybody, but the interns haven’t been slammed (or so I’ve seen) for the same action. Of course accusing Israel of genocide is perfectly okay with the “progressive” Left. One more bit from this execrable whine:

There will be people wondering whom we would endorse, if not Harris. Our answer is that we choose not to endorse any party’s candidate for president. We know that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster, but we believe that we cannot vote our way out of this genocide. And while some of us will be voting for president in November—and some of us will not—we all reject the idea that democracy will be safe under a Harris administration.

This is, to my mind, ridiculous, and exemplifies the Jew-hatred that is permeating young people and gradually working its way up into journalism, government, and corporations.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that, in fact, the genocide is on the side of Hamas, which put into words (and acts repeatedly on) its desire to eliminate Israel. It is Hamas that deliberately tries to kill Jewish civilians, while Israel does its best to avoid killing civilians (its ratio of civilians killed to terrorist fighters killed is one of the lowest of modern times). Does Hamas warn Israeli civilians to get out of the way when it fires a rocket? No, it wants to kill civilians. It targets civilians, both with rockets and, of course, personally, as the October 7 massacre and subsequent acts of terrorism attest.

And, of course, we all know that part of Hamas’s strategy is to ensure that Gazan civilians get killed as a way of winning the world’s sympathy. They do this by embedding their fighters and rocket launchers among civilians and even in hospitals and humanitarian zones.  That guarantees not only that civilians will die as “collateral damage” (I hate that phrase, since all non-combatant human life should be preserved), but also that journalists, who have to be close to the action, will die as well. As the saying goes—and you know it’s true—”If Hamas put down its weapons, the war would be over. If Israel put down its weapons, all the Jews would be killed and Israel would disappear.” The reason Israel sustains fewer casualties is that it has more weapons than do the Palestinians as well as defense systems against rockets fired by Islamist terrorists.

I regard it as a touchstone of ignorance (willful ignorance, not simply “failure to know”) when someone accuses Israel of genocide when it’s palpably clear that Israel is not engaged in a program of eliminating all Palestinians, whose population has grown rapidly in the last decade. And of course where are the accusations of genocide against Hamas? I haven’t heard any lately, except, perhaps, by Israelis, but even then I can’t think of any.

I can’t print here what I think of these ignorant interns since this is a family-friendly site. Just let me say that I hope to Ceiling Cat that they don’t take over journalism and politics. Harris is already weakening American support of Israel by repeatedly calling for a cease-fire, which if effected now, would simply allow Hamas to regroup and continue perpetrating terrorism. If I were a paper and had to endorse a candidate (of course I don’t think papers should be endorsing candidates), it would of course be Harris. But to withhold that approbation because of a supposed “genocide” is sheer stupidity.

The abiding sin of the interns is their failure to blame Hamas rather than Israel for the deaths of Gazan civilians.  If beginning in 2005, a subset of Palestinians was not intent on killing Jews and getting rid of Israel, Gaza would now be a Mediterranean paradise, rich and full of big-spending tourists and beach resorts.

Companies charge money to change your Wikipedia page

October 11, 2024 • 12:00 pm

This article, from Pirate Wires, shows something that many of us already knew: there’s a thriving industry out there to either create or buff up your Wikipedia page, despite it being against the rules.  (I note immediately that I neither created nor had anyone buff up my page.)

There are two types of editing: “white hat editing” in which paid interests are disclosed and direct edits aren’t made, and which may be okay (I don’t agree), and “black hat editing,” in which edits are made without conflicts of interest being disclosed, which is definitely against Wikipedia’s rules. New article are even created to boost businesses or organizations. Both of the latter two are against Wikipedia’s rules, but are hard to police.

I’ll give just a few examples to show you what kind of stuff is subject to paid editing:

. . . . . Today, Wikipedia’s list of black-hat editors includes over 200 companies, many of which operate dozens of front companies and subsidiary brands. One of the biggest and highest-profile is Abtach, a Pakistani firm founded in 2015 linked to an IT company called Intermarket Group. On Wikipedia, Abtach has been tied to at least 130 different Wikipedia editing front companies that operate under domains like Wikicreatorsinc.com, Wikicreation.services, Wikipedia Pro, Wikipedia Legends, and USAwikispecialists.com. Alongside its Wikipedia activities, Abtach’s owners run a parallel business selling low-cost trademark applications under names like Trademark Terminal, Trademark Eminent, Trademark Excel and more than a dozen others. In 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that firms tied to Abtach had defrauded customers, in some cases by billing them for multiple filings when only one single-class trademark was filed. USPTO invalidated 5,500 trademarks as a result of the investigation and Google banned the companies from advertising. The previous year, the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s equivalent to the FBI, investigated the company for criminal fraud.

While Abtach may have pushed the boundaries farther than most, there are hundreds of Abtach-like companies out there — many based in Pakistan, India and Ukraine, but some of the longest standing and most impactful in the UK, Switzerland, France, Spain and the US — each with a profusion of front sites and domains ready to slurp up overflowing demand. Most of what these black hat firms offer is a kind of blunt-force approach to reputation management. For $1,200 to $1,500, they promise to create a Wikipedia article about you or your company. The process will take around a week (or so you’ll be told) with half the payment made up front and the other half upon completion. Payments are usually made in the form of bank wires, which are much more difficult to reverse than credit card charges. Frequently, the newly created article will be taken down by Wikipedia community editors patrolling for articles that don’t meet the site’s notability threshold. In some of these cases, black-hat companies will demand further payment to get the article back up, forcing clients to double the $1,500 investment, then triple it, etc.

And oy, the NYT does it!

While the mainstream media has covered the issue of Wikipedia editing, they have not been immune to its temptations. In 2020, during the lead-up to A.G. Sulzberger — the scion to the Sulzberger dynasty that controls the New York Times — assuming the chairman position at the newspaper, the Times hired one of the first and most highly regarded white-hat Wikipedia firms, Beutler Ink. Readying A.G. for the new post at the height of the #MeToo movement, the firm requested community editors beef up of the section on the incoming chairman’s journalistic experience, including a heroic account of Sulzberger’s time as an intern at the Providence Journal, where he “revealed” a local country club was not open to women. A range of other similar additions were requested — and made — including Sulzberger’s stint at The Oregonian newspaper, “writing more than 300 pieces about local government and public life, including a series of investigative exposés on misconduct by Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto” — language provided almost verbatim by Beutler Ink.

This seems unethical for a newspaper, and especially unethical for what is supposed to be a leading and reputable newspaper.  A few more clients, which will surprise you.

The list of Beutler Ink’s clients alone reveals the staggering scale of this activity. A small sample includes media executive and Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, Simon and Schuster CEO Jonathan Karl and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Corporate clients include Reddit, MetLife, Accenture, Intel, IBM, Hubspot, Hilton, Vox Media, Dick’s Sporting Goods, United Airlines, Amdocs, Gallup, Allergan, Breyers, Vimeo and Waymo.

The PR tactics and marketing KPIs involved are just as diverse. While the New York Times turned to Wikipedia to burnish its brand, NBC News hired a white-hat firm to do damage control during a period of major upheaval. The scandal began when Today show host and media super-star Matt Lauer was abruptly fired in 2017 following serious allegations of sexual misconduct. In October 2019, an excerpt from a book by Ronan Farrow reported shocking details on the allegations, and claims top NBC executives, including NBC News chairman Andrew Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, quashed Farrow’s reporting on the scandal when he was at the network.

The revelations sent NBC into a tailspin. . .

Does this mean you can’t trust Wikipedia? No, though Greg Mayer has been promising me a post on “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?” for about a decade now.  But surely nobody is going to pay to have articles about specific species of animals, chemical compounds, some biographies altered. But as for politics, history, or currently controversial subjects (including people), caveat emptor!

BBC again accused of biased reporting—with a personal introduction

October 6, 2024 • 12:15 pm

I’ve been struggling to understand the new articles in Nature on the fly brain, and it’s not easy! I will write about the issue, but not until I have something clear and interesting to impart to readers.

When I look at my draft posts, I see that many of them are about Israel, which prompted me to call Malgorzata and whine, “Everything I’m writing is about Israel; people are going to think I’m obsessed.” Malgorzata responded that. as with her, I likely have two reasons. First, I’m a Jew and am naturally concerned with an existential crisis threatening the Jewish state. Second, she said, both she and I have been worried about the new rise in anti-Semitism that goes by the name of “anti-Zionism”.

Before 1880, anti-Semitism was called “Jew hatred,” but that was deemed too crass, so “anti-Semitism”, coined by Wilhelm Marr, arose as a softer, more scientific euphemism. Now with the rise of Jew and Israel hatred, and the reluctance of liberals to say they are “antisemitic”, we have yet another euphemism: “anti-Zionism”.  But at bottom they’re all the same thing, softened variants of “Jew hatred.”  And that hatred, expressed as approbation for eliminating the existence of Israel, threatens not only the Jewish state, but the West as a whole, for the sentiments are more than “Jew hatred”: they’re “West hatred.”

Or so Malgorzata said, and sent me a video, saying that I would get a better explanation by watching the section of this video between 9:15 to 22:30. I’ve pasted it in so it starts at 9:15. The speaker is Dr. Einat Wilf, “former Knesset member and expert on Israel’s foreign policy,” and she’s quite eloquent.  Wikipedia notes that “Wilf describes herself as a Zionist, a feminist and an atheist.”

 

At any rate, that’s her take, and I guess I have no choice about the topics I cover, since they just issue from the determined molecular movements going on inside my head. So here’s my post.

The BBC, accused repeatedly of biased reporting, has formed a division called “BBC Verify”, dedicated to fact checking and preventing misinformation.  The announcement of its inception says this:

We’ve brought together forensic journalists and expert talent from across the BBC, including our analysis editor Ros Atkins and disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring and their teams. In all, BBC Verify comprises about 60 journalists who will form a highly specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips.

They’ll be fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and – crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.

This is a different way of doing our journalism. We’ve built a physical space in the London newsroom, with a studio that BBC Verify correspondents and experts will report from, transparently sharing their evidence-gathering with our audiences. They will contribute to News Online, radio and TV, including the News Channel and our live and breaking streaming operation, both in the UK and internationally.

But investigative journalist David Collier, who has investigated “Verify,” cannot verify that it’s fulfilled its mission. In fact, on this post on his website (click to read), he calls for this BBC unit to be shut down.

One example: Verify purported to verify that the Iranian missiles raining down on Israel last week were aimed solely at military targets. (Regardless of what they were aimed at, of course, it was an attack unprovoked by any Israeli attack on Iran.)  But some elementary fact-checking showed that Verify dissimulated:

On Tuesday evening, 1 October 2024, Iran fired approximately 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Many were intercepted, but several sites were hit. On Wednesday evening BBC Verify published a 1 minute 20 second video – titled ‘where Iran’s missiles struck in Israel’.

The BBC Verify team tells us they have been looking at ‘where Iran’s missiles have landed’ and the video is to counter ‘a lot of false imagery’ being circulated online. They say they managed to verify strikes in the vicinity of three key locations – all of them military sites:

Here’s the figure from “Verify”, showing the verified Iranian missile strikes:

More from Collier:

This creates an immediate problem. Why only these three? For example, a verified strike by Ramat Gan shopping mall has not been included. The BBC had reported on this – and so were well aware of it – but for some reason, BBC Verify left the shopping mall strike out of their analysis.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that BBC Verify were deliberately pushing a pro-Iranian propaganda line that the missiles were fired only at military targets.

But it gets a lot, lot worse.

Having told us that the three targets verified were ‘in the vicinity’ of military targets, we are then shown the evidence. The first we see are several apparent strikes on Nevatim airbase, but it is when the journalist turns her attention to the attack on the Tel Nof base that things become surreal.

We find the base was not hit at all. This is the script:

Location two is the Tel Nof airbase. In this video you can see a crater where a missile has landed. It is not the airbase itself, but a school a few miles away”:

And Collier makes a clever analogy:

What? So the Iranian’s didn’t hit Tel Nof airbase with this missile – they hit a school. So why isn’t the school listed in the original map. How on earth can BBC Verify know that the intended target of this missile was an airbase? They can’t.

The school that was hit is the Shalhavot Chabad school in Gadera. About 5 miles from the place BBC verify tells us was the target.

. . . . To put this into context. Below on the map are two marks, Gaza City Centre and Jabalia camp. The distance between them is approximately the same distance as between the school and the airbase. Can you imagine Israel hitting a school in Jabalia camp and BBC Verify virtually forgiving them by suggesting it was a close call on a Hamas military target 5 miles away.

There is no excuse for this – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to whitewash an Iranian ballistic missile strike on a school. Why on earth didn’t the BBC put the school as one of the verified strikes on the map at the start? We all know why. For the same reason they didn’t mention the strike on the shopping mall. It doesn’t fit the propaganda story they are seeking to tell.

Yes, this is of course biased reporting, made worse that it was made by the “Verify” team.  This is just one more incident in the Beeb’s history of biased anti-Israel reporting. I’ve written before about the Asserson Report that accused the Beeb of violating its own journalistic guidelines 1500 times during the Gaza War, and you can see my collection of pieces on the BBC’s bias here. The Beeb is the British equivalent of the NYT, and it’s doing exactly what the NYT does—passing off biased reporting as if it were unbiased.

Collier discusses the author of this “verified” piece, Verify correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi, showing that she has a history of reporting for anti-Israeli publications like Middle East Eye, Al-Jazeera, and even for PRESS TV, the state media outlet of Iran!  This is hardly the person for Verify to choose as author of a piece that tries to exonerate Iran of trying to kill civilians!  He concludes that BBC Verify should be shut down (indeed, the Beeb needs a top-to-bottom housecleaning). Check out the numbered links.

The BBC has spent decades demonising Israel – but since Oct 7, the situation has become blatant and inexcusable (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Two damning reports have recently been published on BBC Bias (Asserson, Cohen)

The BBC has gone completely off the rails. It isn’t just that it is incapable of putting together proper impartial coverage of Israel’s conflict with its neighbours – it is that it doesn’t think it is doing anything wrong. The inability to even begin to identify the problem it has – means it cannot be salvaged in its current form. No public funds should ever be used to finance something so deeply and irredeemably flawed.

Well, so much for that. Nobody claimed that the liberal MSM media, whether in the US or UK, was objective when it came to the Gaza war.

After reading that, I immediately came upon Tom Gross’s newsletter, which said this:

No surprise here. Just a publicly-funded BBC journalist leaving today after 4.5 years to go and officially work as an anti-Zionist influencer.

Check out the Palestine Media Centre yourself; I’m not sure it’s a mouthpiece for anti-Zionism, but there are suggestions of that in its mission, for how many Palestinians dare speak against their rulers?

The Britain Palestine Media Centre connects media professionals with Palestinians – from academics and artists, to human rights activists and ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

An independent non-profit, the Centre is an invaluable resource for journalists, editors, and producers seeking expert opinion, information, and contacts in a timely and reliable manner.

How we can help:

  • Looking for Palestinian experts to talk to for an article or report? We can connect you with the right person for your topic.

  • We can provide quick turnaround Palestinian guests for TV, radio or online broadcasting, to respond to breaking news.

  • Need information or data for a Palestine-related story? Let us know what you’re researching, and we’ll be happy to help.

********

Finally, something that I read today in the Times of Israel: a report on a woman who used to be “a vocal supporter of the Islamic Republic” but now heads a pro-Israel group that accuses the BBC of war coverage biased towards Hamas (this, of course, is not a new accusation).

When Catherine Perez-Shakdam took the helm of Britain’s biggest grassroots pro-Israel campaign group this summer, she inherited a bulging inbox .

Aside from the continuing domestic fallout from the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the UK’s new Labour government has made a string of decisions that have dismayed and infuriated large elements of the country’s Jewish community and supporters of Israel.

Since taking the helm in July, Labour has restored funding for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA; pulled out of a legal case opposing the International Criminal Court application for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant; and partially suspended arms exports to Israel.

The last paragraph surprised me, though I knew about the suspension of arms exports. But I thought Labour had purged itself of its anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism.  In this case, we have the reverse of the case of Karishma Patel (above), for Perez-Shakdam was once a talking head for Iran and is now excoriating the Beeb for its anti-Israel bias. The article continues:

Born to Jewish parents in Paris whose own parents had fled Nazi persecution, Perez-Shakdam lived as a Muslim while studying in the UK after marrying a Muslim man from Yemen. She later spent years as a journalist and commentator in the Middle East and began appearing on Iranian state media. Increasingly trusted and valued by the regime, Perez-Shakdam was granted an audience with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei; interviewed the late Ebrahim Raisi during his initial, unsuccessful 2017 bid for the presidency (he would succeed in 2021 and serve as president until his death this year); and was invited to a pro-Palestinian conference in Tehran attended by Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal.

That was then; this is now. Influenced by her “Zionist” daughter, Perez-Shakdam did a 180°:

Perez-Shakdam’s journey was capped by her appointment last month as director of We Believe In Israel. She replaces Luke Akehurst, who was elected as a Labour MP in the July general election. The campaign group seeks to counter the well-organized pro-Palestinian lobby by mobilizing grassroots support for the Jewish state.

For years, I was motivated by a kind of self-hate. But you realize that you can’t deny who you are

The group’s latest campaign has the BBC firmly in its crosshairs.

The new report into the BBC led by British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson says the public service broadcaster’s coverage associated Israel with war crimes, genocide, and international law violations far more often than it did Hamas. It claims that the BBC downplayed Hamas terrorism, and finds that the BBC’s Arabic service was among the most biased global media outlets in covering the Israel-Hamas conflict.

. . . . Perez-Shakdam says her organization’s campaigning is not driven by hostility to the BBC, which is prevalent in the opposition Conservative party and its media allies, as well as on the far left. “It’s not a witch hunt. This is not an effort to bring down the BBC,” she says. “It’s just to elevate the level of journalism and to make sure that ethic [of impartiality] is at the forefront of it all.”

“The BBC has a lot of answering to do and I don’t think that it’s willing to do that; it [has] already doubled down,” she says. She believes the government may have to take action. “Taxpayers’ money is being used, through the vehicle of the TV license. The government needs to do something about it. This is not a case of free speech. It’s a case of holding the BBC accountable for a service that it is not providing in violation of its own [guidelines].”

You can read the Asserson Report here. But if you’ve followed the Beeb’s coverage of the war you hardly need to  Just think of all those British Jews who have to pay for a television license to listen to the distortions of the BBC.

The BBC once again won’t use the word “terrorists” for Hamas

September 27, 2024 • 11:45 am

This article just appeared in Spiked (click headline below to read), but you can see a similar piece in the Times of Israel. The upshot is that the BBC, which has long bridled at using the word “terrorists” for Hamas, is now bridling again when the Beeb itself shows a documentary about the Nova Music Festival. I haven’t seen the film yet (it’s has the great title “We Will Dance Again”), but the trailer is below.  And, of course, the Nova festival is where the butchery of October 7 began. Yes, the butchery was largely by Hamas, and Hamas are, for anyone with two neurons to rub together, TERRORISTS. But not to the Beeb, so the word “terrorist” has been expunged from the film.

It’s not clear whether that bowdlerization was at the request of the BBC, or whether the filmmakers were just cowed by the BBC’s long-standing refusal to apply the “t-word” to Hamas, but either way it’s a blot on the BBC, though the network at least partly redeems itself by showing the film. But really, a film on terrorism that won’t use the “t-word”???

I’ll give excerpts from the Spiked piece below.


An excerpt:

The BBC has reached a new low. It has tumbled further down the well of moral relativism. This week, it will broadcast a new documentary about Hamas’s massacre at the Nova music festival on 7 October last year. But according to the doc’s director, the version the Beeb is showing ‘won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. If this is true, if the BBC can’t even park its weird aversion to calling Hamas terrorists when it is airing a film about Hamas’s butchery of the young at a festival in the desert, then that shames Britain.

We Will Dance Again tells the story of what the pogromists of Hamas did when they happened upon the Nova festival in the Negev desert during their invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023. Combining harrowing testimony from survivors with graphic footage of Hamas’s barbarism, it paints a grim picture of arguably the worst event of the pogrom: 364 people were slaughtered at Nova. Yet according to the director, Yariv Mozer, one thing will be missing from the version us Brits will see: the T-word.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter on ‘what they kept’ and ‘what they cut’ from their disturbing film, Mozer says ‘the version [the BBC will] air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. Hinting at his irritation at this alleged omission, Mozer says ‘it was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities’. Then Brits can decide for themselves, he says, ‘if this is a terrorist organisation or not’. Some of us have already decided, of course. The BBC might be reluctant to call the mass murderers of Jews ‘terrorists’, but others are more than happy to do so.

It is not clear from the interview with Mozer if the BBC explicitly instructed him to take out the word terrorist, or if Mozer and his team pre-empted the Beeb’s odd concern about that word and decided to take it out themselves for an easier life. The Jerusalem Post assumes it’s the former: the BBC ‘told director’ to ‘not describe Hamas as “terrorists”’, it says. Yet even if it’s the latter, even if there are tellers of Israelis’ stories out there who get the vibe that you shouldn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’ if you want to appear on the BBC, then that’s still epically embarrassing for Britain.

If this was self-censorship, it’s understandable. After all, for the past year, ever since Hamas visited its racist terror on Israel, the BBC has been pathologically resistant to calling Hamas ‘terrorists’. Even though that’s what they are. There was a storm in the aftermath of the pogrom over the BBC’s linguistic cowardice. Just four days after the pogrom, Beeb big gun John Simpson offered a thin explanation for the corporation’s dodging of the T-word. ‘We don’t take sides’, he said. ‘We don’t use loaded words like “evil” or “cowardly”. We don’t talk about “terrorists”.’

And yet O’Neill points out how the BBC has no hesitancy about applying the term “terrorist” to “far-right terrorists”! It’s only when the terrorists kill Jews that the Beeb pulls back. (“Terrorism” is commonly used to refer to illegal and deliberate killing or intimidation of civilians in pursuit of political aims, so of course Hamas is a terrorist organization and the Nova festival is an example of terrorism.)

The Time of Israel is a little bit more forthcoming, as its article is called “BBC airs Nova massacre film after insisting references to Hamas as terrorists removed”, and also says this:

“We Will Dance Again,” a full-length documentary film about the Hamas massacre of over 360 people at the Supernova music festival during the terror group’s October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel last year, aired on Britain’s BBC2 on Thursday evening, though only after filmmakers agreed not to refer to Hamas as terrorists.

The word “insisting”, as well as the notion that there was an “agreement”, both imply that the BBC demanded that the word not be used. Well, it doesn’t matter: what matters is the BBC’s craven historical reluctance to use the word “terrorist” to refer to Hamas. Of that O’Neill says this:

One year after 364 young Jews were murdered by anti-Semitic terrorists – yes, terrorists – Britain’s public broadcaster won’t call their killers by their proper name. You couldn’t ask for better proof of how Israelophobia rots the brain and warps the soul.

Does anyone doubt that the BBC has an anti-Semitic slant?

Well, the ToI says a bit about the movie:

Mozer, Zirinsky and others have stressed that the film is apolitical. An opening title of the film notes, “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” adding: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

Nevertheless, similar efforts to tell the story of the attack on the Nova festival have been protested against, including a New York exhibit of personal artifacts from the festival that drew expressions of open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as chants endorsing the attack.

Here is the trailer (there’s also a 32-minute video that includes interviews with the director and producers).

The Atlantic unfairly disses Dawkins

September 27, 2024 • 9:30 am

The Atlantic decided they needed a piece on Richard Dawkins’s “farewell tour”, but they either chose the wrong journalist or asked the author to write a semi hit-piece that made Dawkins look bad. Not completely bad, mind you, for the author does mention a few good things Dawkins has done. But, overall, the piece depicts an aging man who simply needs to fight battles, and now there are no battles to fight.  Once it was creationism, says senior editor Ross Andersen, but now it’s the lesser battle of “fighting wokeness”.

Since Andersen himself shows signs of “progressive” thought in his piece (he defends, for example, the teaching Māori legends as science in New Zealand), he may have an animus against Richard. I don’t know, but I know two things. First, Andersen shows no signs of having read Dawkins’s books or followed his career.  Second, Anderson ends his piece, which describes his opinion of Richard’s recent lecture in Washington D.C., by saying “I was bored.” His pronouncement is distinctly un-journalistic given that Andersen describes a very enthusiastic audience lining up to get books signed, and bespeaks a reviewer more concerned with his own personal reaction than with the effect of Dawkins, his writing, and his Washington discussion on the audience (and on society in general).

Click on the headline below to read it, or, if you can’t, you can find it archived here. Several readers sent me this piece—I suppose expecting to get my reaction. So here it is: the piece stinks.

The dissing starts off in a subtle way with the title (granted, Andersen may not have written it, but the Atlantic approved it). But in the second sentence, Andersen says this:

[Dawkins] has adapted his swaggering Oxbridge eloquence to a variety of media ecosystems.

Anybody who knows or has even heard Richard knows that his eloquence is not “swaggering,” but measured and reserved.  But I’ll leave that aside and pass on. Here, also, in the first paragraph, Andersen describes Dawkins’s first foray into atheism:

In 2006’s The God Delusion, another mega–best seller, Dawkins antagonized the world’s religions.

“Antagonized the world’s religions”?  Well, yes, some believers may have been offended, but what about adding that this book made an eloquent argument against religion, and, in fact (as Andersen says later!), changed people’s lives for the better. That sentence is like saying, “In Mein Kampf, Hitler antagonized the world’s Jews.”  It may be true, but both statements are certainly pejorative and woefully incomplete.

Throughout the piece, Anderson describes how energized, worshipful, and jazzed up the audience was. But of course Anderson was “bored”.  Here is part of his description:

Now, at age 83, Dawkins is saying goodbye to the lecture circuit with a five-country tour that he’s marketing as his “Final Bow.” Earlier this month, I went to see him at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Dawkins has said that when he visits the U.S., he has the most fun in the Bible Belt, but most of his farewell-tour appearances will take place in godless coastal cities. After all, Dawkins has a new book to sell—The Genetic Book of the Dead—and at the Warner, it was selling well. I saw several people holding two or three copies, and one man walking around awkwardly with nine, steadying the whole stack beneath his chin. The line to buy books snaked away from the theater entrance and ran all the way up the stairs. It was longer than the line for the bar.

As for the audience, which was surely diverse:

The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

. . . Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty [JAC: the “warm-up” act], told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition.

Indeed, Dawkins has changed many lives for the better; his books were an important impetus for people not only accepting the scientific truth of evolution, but also grasping the wonder and majesty of both natural selection and evolution—not to mention helping people throw off the constricting chains of religion. (I’m a small fish, but I myself have been told that that Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact have also changed lives.) Given the dominance of creationism in America—37% of Americans still accept Biblical creationism, 34% accept a form of God-guided evolution, while a mere 24% accept naturalistic evolution, making a total of 71% of Americans who think the supernatural played a role in evolution—accepting naturalistic evolution as true is a powerful reason to jettison your faith. And that’s what several people have told me about my first trade book.

More on audience appreciation for what Dawkins has done (attacking wokeness), a description tinged with opprobrium (my bolding):

Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations.

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

Is the discussion of wokeness (mainly how ideology affects science) a problem? And doesn’t the author realize that the interlocutor, economist Steven Levitt, confected the questions without Dawkins’s knowledge of what they’d be? If Levitt wanted to ask Dawkins about wokeness or campus ferment, is that Dawkins’s fault? Besides, the audience wanted to hear a thoughtful person’s take on wokeness, which includes science: not only the biology of sex, but the low value of indigenous “knowledge” (see below).

And that brings us to one of several major misconceptions about Dawkins. Andersen seems to think that, throughout Richard’s life, he was motivated by contentiousness: everything he did was motivated by his need to have an enemy. That enemy was, avers Andersen initially creationism, but now has morphed into wokeness (see “whack-a-mole” above):

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics. Its leaders—Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—worried that public-school students would soon be learning creationism in biology class. But there has since been a realignment in America’s culture wars. Americans still fight over the separation of church and state, but arguments about evolution have almost completely vanished from electoral politics and the broader zeitgeist. With no great crusade against creationism to occupy him, Dawkins’s most visible moments over the past 15 years have been not as a scientist but as a crusader against “wokeness”—even before that was the preferred term.

First, creationism is still with us, and in a big way. I gave the figures above, but Andersen, who’s supposed to know science, doesn’t seem to realize that far more Americans are creationists than are materialistic evolutionists, and more than 7 out of 10 of us think that God played some role in evolution. We have a long way to go.  Further, arguments about evolution aren’t gone, for the Intelligent Design miscreants are still plaguing us. As for electoral politics, evolution never played a prominent role there except once (in 2008, three of the Republican Presidential candidates in a debate raised their hands to show they didn’t accept evolution.) Evolution simply isn’t on the electoral agenda compared to the economy and, right now, immigration. And doesn’t Andersen know that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is a creationist?  Further, many of us worry, and justifiably so, that the Supreme Court, which hasn’t adjudicated the teaching of evolution since 1987, might now revisit the issue and allow creationism to be taught. Given the present composition of the court, that’s entirely possible.

I’ve known Richard for much longer than has Andersen, and I can’t agree with his conclusion that Richard needs an enemy to thrive.  Dawkins started off writing a book expounding how evolution worked (The Selfish Gene), and as far as I remember that book barely mentions creationism, if at all. It was designed not to fight creationists but to enlighten both scientists and readers about how natural selection worked. This was followed by more books explaining evolution (Climbing Mount Improbable. The Extended Phenotype—Richard’s favorite—and my favorite, the Blind Watchmaker) and of course there are several more books explaining evolution.

The fight against creationism, I think, only came later, when Richard saw to his dismay that his views weren’t immediately embraced by the American public (I had the same reaction when I wrote Wby Evolution is True). He saw, correctly, that that opposition came almost exclusively from religion. And so, only in 2009 (three decades after The Selfish Gene) did Richard write an explicitly anticreationist book: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidcence for Evolution. My own parallel is having the same realization about religious opposition to evolution, which led to my writing Faith Versus Fact after WEIT. Richard’s main motivation, as I see it, was not to fight creationism, but to share the wonder of evolution and natural selection that he himself felt. Since The Selfish Gene, he’s written 18 books, only two against religion and creationism; and his most recent books,  Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, and The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, are pure science.

As for Richard’s new “opponent”, wokeness, Andersen has to reach back into Dawkins’s Precambrian Twitter feed, basing this criticdism on just three tweets. He even mentions Elevatorgate, without noting that Richard apologized for that tweet. And as for this one, well, I see nothing wrong with it: it raises a good question for debate first broached by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the journal Hypatia:

Dawkins is raising the question for discussion, though Andersen denigrates this important issue by saying it’s a “just-asking-questions” (JAQ) tweet.  He doesn’t seem to realize that Dawkins was a professor and teacher, and this is very similar to the kind of questions an Oxford don would ask his students to write about.

At any rate, Andersen really shows his own wokeness, and, importantly, his ignorance of what’s going on in New Zealand, when he criticizes Richard’s emphasis on not teaching Māori “ways of knowing” alongside and coequal to modern science in New Zealand. This is an ongoing problem that I’ve written about many times, and one Andersen wrongly dismisses as a non-problem:

The tale of Lysenko is almost fable-like in its moral purity, and Dawkins told it well, but only as a setup for a contemporary controversy that he wished to discuss—an ongoing dispute over school curricula in New Zealand. According to one proposal, students there would learn traditional creation stories and myths alongside standard science lessons, out of deference to the Māori, whose language and culture British settlers had tried earnestly to erase. Dawkins noted that some eminent New Zealand scientists had “stuck their heads above the parapet” to object to this idea with an open letter in 2021, and were “unpleasantly punished” for doing so. He called this mob rule, and expressed concern for the young students. They could end up confused, he said, forced as they would be to reconcile lessons about the “sky father” and “earth mother” with those that concern the Big Bang and evolution.

I suspect that kids can hold those two things in mind. I suspect also that the project of science—no innocent bystander in the treatment of Indigenous people—will be best served if its most prominent voices address themselves to the Māori, and other such groups, in an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation. But even if I am wrong about all that, the specter of Lysenko would seem to have little bearing on a case in which no scientist has been officially punished. Complaints about the open letter did produce an initial investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, as a matter of process, but nothing more.

The errors in these two paragraphs are at least four:

1.) The endeavor to keep modern science free from indigenous superstition was not just in the Listener Letter, but is an ongoing battle between rationalism and superstition.

2.) The battle continues because kids CANNOT hold two different conceptions of science in their mind at once. It is confusing and simply bad pedagogy.

3.) Scientists were officially punished for denying the scientific worth of indigenous knowledge. See this report by the New Zealand Initiative. Not only were professors punished and investigated, but the ubiquity of Māori sacralization in New Zealand has chilled both university teaching and the speech of professors and students.

4.) Andersen’s ignorance is particularly strong when, Tom-Friedman-like, he proposes a melding of Māori “ways of knowing” and science in “an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation.”  That idea has led to the ludicrous notion, for example, that kauri blight (a tree disease) might be cured by rubbing the trees with whale bones and whale oil while saying Māori prayers. That is the imaginative synthesis that’s happening at this moment, and it’s in all the sciences.

The final paragraph is, frankly, offensive to journalists and readers alike:

After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.

Who cares if Andersen was bored? The crowd wasn’t bored and many paid extra for VIP tickets to get their books custom-signed and say a few words to Richard, while others formed a bigger line to get pre-signed books.  All we learn here is that the author feels superior to both Dawkins and the crowd.  I went to Dawkins’s talk here in Chicago, and I wasn’t bored, even at times when I disagreed with what Richard said.  And I’m an evolutionary biologist who’s written a lot about the fracas in New Zealand.  It appears that Mr. Andersen is not just journalistically ham-handed, but also incurious.

BBC accused of deep bias in its coverage of Gaza/Hamas war (guess which side got demonized more).

September 12, 2024 • 11:45 am

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. . .