The broadcaster allegedly breached its own guidelines more than 1,500 times at the height of the Gaza conflict
A new report by The Telegraph alleges that the BBC displayed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel during its coverage of the early stages of the conflict in Gaza.
The study, conducted by Trevor Asserson, a British-born lawyer based in Israel, analyzed four months of the BBC’s broadcast at the beginning of the conflict, examining its output across television, radio, podcasts, websites, and social media. The research team, comprising around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, utilized artificial intelligence to process nine million words of content from the broadcaster.
“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 stated, as quoted by The Telegraph.
According to the study, the broadcaster allegedly committed a total of 1,553 breaches of its own editorial guidelines, designed to ensure impartiality, accuracy, editorial values, and public interest.
The BBC has employed disproportionate language when describing the actions of both sides in the conflict, despite the fact that “Hamas members filmed and publicized themselves committing acts that appear to constitute war crimes,” the report asserted.
Specifically, BBC coverage mentioned “war crimes” in connection with Israel four times more often than with Hamas, 1,270 times compared to 30, and “breaching international law” six times more – 167 versus 27. The word “genocide” proved to be the most frequently used, 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 declared.
The report identified a dozen instances 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 rejected the findings outlined in the report, criticizing the methodology employed. “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, emphasizing that the corporation is actually “required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report.”