A new report The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been accused of violating its own editorial guidelines more than a thousand times in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
According to The TelegraphThe report analyzed four months of the BBC’s output on television, radio, online, podcasts and social media during the height of the conflict and found a “deeply worrying pattern of prejudice” against Israel.
British lawyer Trevor Aserson and a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words from news outlets starting on October 7, 2023, the day of the terrorist attacks.
The researchers allegedly identified 1,553 cases where the BBC breached its editorial guidelines on fairness, accuracy, editorial values and the public interest.
The report accused the BBC of downplaying Hamas terrorism and portraying Israel as the aggressor in dozens of cases.
Israel was four times more frequently implicated in “war crimes” than Hamas (127 vs. 30); Genocide 14 times more often (283 vs. 19), and violations of international law six times more often than Hamas (167 vs. 27).
BBC journalists who expressed hostility towards Israel on social media were also featured in the network’s war coverage, the report claims.
Researchers found 11 instances on the BBC’s Arabic channel, where they were shown to journalists who had previously made public statements in support of terrorism and Hamas.
“It reveals a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on fairness, impartiality and the establishment of truth,” the report said, according to the Telegraph.
A BBC spokesman questioned the report’s methodology and said it would “carefully consider” its findings after reviewing the report. Fox News Digital.
“We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyze fairness, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. We do not think coverage can be assessed simply by counting specific words divorced from context. Rather than the ‘balance of empathy’ proposed in the report, we need to achieve appropriate impartiality, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this despite the highly complex, challenging and polarizing nature of the conflict,” the spokesperson said. .
“However, we will consider the report carefully and will respond directly to the authors once we have time to study it in detail,” the spokesperson added.
The BBC also strongly denied the report’s claims that its journalists “celebrated acts of terror.”
Watchdog group Campaign Against Semitism claimed the report exposed the BBC’s ideological bias.
“Despite its constant claims of impartiality and stubbornness in the face of complaints, the BBC’s ideological bias is now embarrassingly clear. This report proves with empirical data what we have said – and the Jewish community has long known -,” the group said with a link to The Telegraph report. said.
“Our poll shows that the majority of British Jews – 86% – believe that anti-Israel bias in our media fuels anti-Semitism. The BBC should apologize for its biased and inflammatory reporting, but since the BBC has so stubbornly closed ranks and denied there was a problem for decades, the fundamental reform that is clearly needed must come from outside. The response to this report must begin with a transparent and unfettered independent investigation,” the post continued.
The BBC has been criticized for refusing to label Hamas a terrorist group after October 7. In the previous statement For Fox News Digital, the BBC said they use the terrorist label when it is attributed to others such as the UK government.
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