The BBC has displayed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel while covering the early phase of hostilities in Gaza, according to a new report publicized by The Telegraph on Saturday.
The study, led by Trevor Asserson, a British-born lawyer based in Israel, analyzed four months of the BBC’s broadcast early in the conflict, examining its output on television, radio, podcasts, websites, and social media. The research team involved around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, who used artificial intelligence to process nine million words of output from the broadcaster.
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“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, as quoted by The Telegraph.
According to the study, the broadcaster allegedly committed a total of 1,553 breaches of its own editorial guidelines, which are supposed to guard impartiality, accuracy, editorial values, and public interest.
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The BBC has proportionately used certain lexicons to describe the actions of the two parties in the conflict, despite the fact that “Hamas members filmed and publicized themselves committing acts that appear to constitute war crimes,” the report asserted.
In particular, BBC coverage mentioned “war crimes” in association with Israel four times more than with Hamas, 1,270 times against 30, and “breaching international law” six times more – 167 versus 27. The word “genocide” turned out to be the most used one, with Israel associated with it 283 times and the Palestinian group only 19.
“Our analysis reveals a significant deviation from this standard, especially 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’s Arabic content,” Asserson stated.
The report identified a dozen cases where BBC Arabic’s broadcast featured reporters who had previously made statements in support of Hamas or praised the October 7 attack. The BBC had previously acknowledged the latter issue, launching an internal investigation into six reporters.
However, the broadcaster dismissed the findings set out in the report, criticizing the methodology used. “We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyze 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,” a BBC spokesperson told The Telegraph, stressing that the corporation is actually “required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report.”