BBC broke its own guidelines 1,553 times in Israel-Hamas war coverage, report claims
Leading lawyer's forensic inquiry into bias at the BBC exposes situation he says is 'far worse' than he expected
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
The BBC has repeatedly breached its own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy in its reporting of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a report released this week, fronted by the British-Israeli litigation lawyer, Trevor Asserson.
But, speaking at the press launch of the 200-page report, Asserson challenged the broadcaster’s immediate response, which had expressed “serious concerns” about the methodology of the investigation, which as well as using standard litigation measures and assessment of language used, has employed AI and “deep dive” data analysis. At the same time as complaining about the report’s methodology, Asserson said, the BBC had also said it had “not had time to study the report in detail”.
The lawyer said: “The BBC had the report for a few days and its response” — which he called “petulant” and “childish” — was designed to undermine the credibility of the work.”
In detailed analysis of the BBC’s television and radio output between 7 October 2023 and 7 February 2024, Asserson’s team of researchers, lawyers and data scientists uncovered a situation “far worse” than anticipated when they began the project.
He had a sense, he said, “that the BBC was getting the story badly wrong.” But he did not realise how wrong until the figures — looking at BBC reports in English and Arabic — suggested that there was “an overwhelming disparity in the perception of the two sides, with sympathy for Palestinians vastly outstripping sympathy for Israelis, even shortly after the massacre of October 7 2023.”
What was often blamed on reports made “in the fog of war” as a BBC defence, did not stand up when looking at the BBC’s own complaints procedure, Asserson said. Almost no apologies or corrections of reports showing bias against Israel appeared in the BBC’s own corrections and complaints procedure. This, in turn, led to “a negative feedback loop” — because senior management at the Corporation was concluding that if there were few or no corrections, then, broadly speaking, it was getting things right.
Answering a question from Jewish News, Asserson said he was not ready to conclude that the bias in reporting was due to antisemitism. “I don’t want, as Queen Elizabeth I said, to find the windows into the souls at the BBC. I don’t care what they think. Everybody has their own personal basis about everything. That’s not the issue. I care about legal obligations, for which the British public pay £4million, to be fair and impartial, and breaches of those legal obligations. I think that some of those breaches occur through pure negligence.”
He did not believe, he said, that there was any kind of editorial briefing within the BBC which said “let’s get Israel”. He had spoken to “very senior people” at the BBC who had said they “wished that they were doing a decent job. But we are in a situation where the BBC is utterly failing in its obligations, because it is not controlling its output”.
Among the myriad findings in the report, Israel comes off worse in BBC Arabic output in comparison with its English-language TV and radio broadcasts. And it is more likely to be accused of war crimes than Hamas — 592 times in the four months surveyed, compared with 98 times for Hamas.
One of the most contentious complaints regularly levelled against the BBC is its refusal to call Hamas a terrorist group. The report said: “Although Hamas was responsible for the massacre of 7 October and numerous previous terror attacks, the BBC has repeatedly failed to report on it accurately. Hamas is referred to as a terrorist organisation in just 7.7 per cent of instances, and is significantly more likely to be referred to as a health ministry”.
Asserson said that one area in which the BBC was anxious to show its compliance with government descriptions relating to the region, was its insistence on calling the West Bank “the occupied” West Bank. This had even led to corrections where the word “occupied” had been missed from previous reports. But, Asserson observed, the government had designated Hamas a proscribed terrorist organisation, and yet the BBC had failed to describe it as such.
If the BBC does not respond with a serious overhaul of its procedures, Asserson said, “the next step may be to apply for a judicial review.” He believed that “the rentamob” on the streets were encouraged by misleading reports made by Western journalists, including the BBC, and called for the broadcaster’s Editorial Complaints unit to be made “independent of the editorial team in the BBC, and given power to express criticism”.
But the lawyer also believed that there were lessons for Israel in the report’s findings. “Can Israel do a better job? It is extraordinary that we are in a world where social media is dominating the airwaves and certainly the attitude of the young. Israel is one of the strongest technology countries in the world and it is utterly failing to grasp this particular nettle.
“I have no great words for this [Israeli] government, which I think in some respects is a disgrace to the country. But the country is still an open, democratic, liberal society, with an independent judiciary, a free press, representative government and freedom of expression… Whether or not you like the government, it could do better on this particular topic”.
A BBC spokesperson 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. We are required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this, despite the highly complex, challenging and polarising nature of the conflict.
“However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.
“The most recent research shows that audiences are significantly more likely to turn to the BBC for impartial coverage than to any other provider. Independent research from More in Common found that the highest proportion of people thought BBC coverage of this story was mostly neutral.”
Addressing claims in the report of reporter bias, specifically in the naming of Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet, the BBC spokesperson said: “We strongly reject the claims that our reporters ‘celebrated acts of terror’ and we strongly reject the attack on individual members of BBC staff, all of whom are working to the same editorial guidelines.”
Trevor Asserson led the report in collaboration with Dr Haran Shani-Narkiss and other data scientists. It is a first project from the newly launched Campaign for Media Standards, committed to redressing what it says is “significant systemic imbalance and promoting accuracy in journalism”.
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