Israel and the BBC: 1553 examples of bias

Over the past year and more I have written a number of pieces for The Article about BBC bias against Israel. I make no apology for returning to this subject. First, few people – and no one currently at the BBC – have addressed this serious problem. Second, it is of huge importance to anyone concerned with the state of British broadcasting and the BBC, in particular. The BBC has an international reputation, often well deserved in the past, for its thoughtful and impartial news reporting and this matters enormously in countries around the world where there is little access to a free press. Thirdly, the BBC’s biased coverage of Israel is in the news. Not on the BBC, of course, but elsewhere. 

In the Sunday Telegraph this was their lead story. The headline read, “BBC ‘has breached rules 1,500 times’ over Gaza war”. This is an astonishing headline and if anyone is actually running BBC news any longer — and it’s not clear that anyone is — they should hang their heads in shame. The article by Camilla Turner and Patrick Sawer begins, “The BBC breached its own guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found.”

The article continues, “The report revealed a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of BBC’s output  [beginning on October 7 2023] across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media.”

The report was led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, a leading British litigation lawyer, whose clients include major banks including HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and CSFB; multi-national corporations including some of the world’s largest telecoms companies; and sovereign states including the UK government and Ministry of Defence. The research was compiled by a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists who used AI to analyse nine million words of BBC output. Camera UK was a contributor to the report. It is one of the most thorough critics of media bias towards Israel.

The research finds that Israel was associated with genocide fourteen times (my emphasis) more than Hamas in the BBC’s coverage of the conflict. In BBC coverage, Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas (127 examples versus 30) and with breaching international law six times more (167 versus 27). According to the report, the BBC has downplayed Hamas terrorism and has notoriously failed to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Perhaps worst of all, the report claims that some journalists used by the BBC have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and have even celebrated acts of terror committed by Hamas. 

The Asserson report identified no fewer than 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, including impartiality, accuracy and public interest. Well-known reporters like Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet come in for serious criticism. The BBC’s Arabic channel’s coverage of the war is one of the worst offenders. Eleven cases are mentioned where its coverage has featured reporters who have previously made public statements in defence of terrorists, and specifically Hamas, without making this history clear to the BBC’s audience.   

The report concludes, “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 BBC said it would “carefully consider” the report, but rejected its findings and criticised its methodology, particularly the use of AI to count usages of key words and their association with Israel.

Elsewhere, the report has been greeted with widespread condemnation of the BBC. The lengthy news article in The Sunday Telegraph was accompanied by a commentary piece by Danny Cohen, the director of BBC Television from 2013-15, and a consistent critic of the BBC’s coverage of Israel over the past eleven months. He attacks the BBC’s failure to acknowledge repeated criticisms of its coverage of Israel, ignoring complaints and only issuing corrections after unacceptable delays. “The focus of the BBC’s senior leadership,” he wrote, “appears to have been on reputation management rather than a transparent relationship with licence-fee payers about the failings in its coverage.” They were consistently failing to provide vital information (for example, that the Gaza “health ministry” is a mouthpiece for Hamas). The conclusions of the Asserson Report, he says, are “shocking but not surprising”.

Writing in Monday’s Daily Mail , Lord (Ian) Austin, the former Labour MP, is equally critical. He begins, 

“I have spent decades defending the  BBC .

 I have spoken up in Parliament and in the media to praise its journalists, applaud its coverage and defend its funding.

“As a former  Labour  MP, I believed it was my job to defend public service broadcasting and the licence fee on which it depends. In fact, I was convinced Auntie was the best broadcaster in the world, operating to the most rigorous standards.

“So if someone like me can now believe that the BBC is failing to uphold its responsibility to provide unbiased, fair coverage, we know there’s a serious problem.”

He concludes,

“The detail in the Asserson report cannot be dismissed with the same arrogance that has met previous complaints. 

“The BBC’s public funding means it has a duty to uphold impartiality and accuracy.

“New chairman Samir Shah must get a grip – or the calls to scrap the licence fee will become impossible to ignore.”

Sir Oliver Dowden, shadow deputy prime minister, said, “Serious questions should be asked as to why this has been allowed to happen, and licence-fee payers should expect to see the BBC stick to its own editorial guidelines.”

The scale of the report and the detailed criticisms are devastating. Many of us have been calling for the BBC to appoint an independent inquiry into its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, especially following its refusal to publish the Balen Report, a 20,000 word report commissioned twenty years ago to examine the BBC’s coverage of Israel after mounting criticism at the time.

I have not only called for such an independent inquiry. I have suggested three distinguished broadcasters as possible chairmen of such an inquiry: David Elstein, former Director of programmes at Thames, head of programming at BSkyB and then Chief Executive at Channel 5; Mark Damazer, former Editor of BBC News Programmes and former Controller of Radio 4; and Roger Mosey, previously the Head of BBC Television News.

This report is deeply damaging to the reputation of BBC News and the BBC’s senior management. It matters far more than recent scandals about Huw Edwards or Jermaine Jenas. This gets to the very heart of the BBC’s reputation, at a time when its audiences are shrinking. This isn’t just about the BBC Arabic service. This involves flagship news programmes: Today, Newsnight and The Ten O’Clock News. If the BBC can’t report impartially on such an important news story over almost a year, what can licence fee payers trust the BBC to do? 

However, the BBC is not the only offender. Over the past year, many of our important national institutions have let Britain down badly over the war in Gaza. Sky News have been just as bad as the BBC in their biased reporting. Ofcom have failed to deal with the problem of anti-Israel bias at the BBC and at Sky News. Many of our universities have failed to deal with anti-Israel protests and to protect Jewish students from appalling abuse. Our police, especially the Met, have failed consistently to deal with Hate Marches in our capital city and elsewhere. Numerous Labour MPs have condemned Israel again and again, using words like “genocide” and “war crimes” and the party leadership have put the need to appease Muslim voters ahead of an even-handed approach to the Gaza conflict. 

This is a crisis for the BBC. The timing could not be worse, just when the “Defund the BBC” movement is growing. There are many reasons why the BBC is on the rocks and the Asserson Report is just the latest and the most significant. But there is a larger national problem with antisemitism and hostility towards Israel. This also needs to be addressed, though I have serious misgivings about the will or the ability of the Labour Government to lead the fight.  

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.