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Tim Graham
Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is considered the crown jewel of “public” broadcasting. All global journalism in English seeks to mimic it. That’s not a good thing, since it is rife with leftist bias, and on the Israel-Hamas war, it can be difficult to distinguish from Al-Jazeera.
At FoxNews.com, lawyer Trevor Asserson explained his research into anti-Israel bias, and how the BBC “flunks Journalism 101.” Like PBS and NPR in America, the BBC is legally obliged to produce impartial news. For this, it is rewarded with $5 billion a year by British taxpayers. (PBS and NPR surely envy that.)
Asserson and a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words from the BBC on TV, radio, podcasts, and social media, starting on October 7, 2023 – when Hamas slaughtered innocent Israeli citizens and others (including Americans). At the MRC, we wouldn’t trust software to substitute for human reading, but knowing the BBC’s patterns, we doubt a different result.
In BBC’s English language TV output, they found while some programs were neutral, the remainder were between 90 per cent and 100 per cent pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli.
The BBC broke almost every rule in its own rule-book – the ‘Editorial Guidelines.’ They use BBC as a platform for Hamas sympathizers, and Hamas members; they report death figures they know to be wrong without adequately conveying their unreliability to audiences; they air reports from Gaza without mentioning that Hamas controls journalistic output; their own journalists express personal opinions. Each of these is a separate breach of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality.
While we found that BBC English was disappointingly bad, we found that BBC Arabic was significantly worse. In a ‘sympathy analysis’ conducted by the RIMe data scientists across global media, BBC Arabic was snuggled up with such outlets as Al Jazeera; Palestine Chronicle and Iraqi News. It must surely degrade trust in the BBC to discover that it is being used to peddle extremist views.
The BBC News machine displays a strong anti-Israel view from almost every angle we analyzed.
BBC’s Jeremy Bowen is a “truthful not neutral” chap. In response to Asserson's report he claimed, “Searching for some kind of spurious balance is entirely wrong, the truth is the objective.” Bowen also said Hamas is a “good” source of information on Gaza casualty figures during a closed-doors “masterclass” on reporting war impartially – their numbers are “pretty accurate” – and objected to the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas.
Way back during the first Gulf War, Bowen did reporting from inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for NBC News, and in our newsletter MediaWatch we concluded it was dreadfully anti-American and sympathetic to the Iraqi dictator.
At this point, the BBC’s anti-Israel bias matches the ideology of the new Labour Party government. Asserson concluded his study “blows the myth of impartiality out of the water. The BBC doesn’t achieve impartiality and is not remotely close to achieving it. BBC management must either take back control of the ship, or the British people should demand a refund.”
PS: In Israel, comedians mocked the BBC’s anti-Israel bias with reporter “Harry Whiteguilt.”
This article was originally published by MRC NewsBusters.
