Saturday, September 14, 2024

The BBC’s anti-Israel bias

Readers of this blog will have heard me criticise the BBC’s v. obvious anti-Israel bias in its reportage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Living in the UK, I see it all the time. They won’t call them “terrorists” ... they’re quick to jump on Israel but have to then backtrack their “inaccuracies” (by which time, damage was done).

And the most common approach is to focus on what Israel does but scarcely address what Israel is responding to.

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Camilla Turner, in “BBC ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war” (The Daily Telegraph):

The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found.

The report revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media.

The research, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, also found that Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict.

The Asserson report analysed the BBC’s coverage during a four-month period beginning Oct 7, 2023 – the day Hamas carried out a brutal massacre in southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 251 into Gaza as hostages.

Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.

“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 said.

It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.

It claimed that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is accused of excusing Hamas’s terrorist activities and comparing Israel to Putin’s Russia, while Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, is also cited for allegedly “downplaying” the October 7 attacks on Israel.

The report singles out the BBC’s Arabic channel, saying that it is one of the most biased of all global media outlets in its treatment of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

I do not pay the TV license fee.

10 comments:

  1. Thank you for citing the Asserson Report which analysed the BBC’s coverage during 4 months from Oct 7 2023 when Hamas carried out a brutal massacre and rape of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of another 251 into Gaza. The researchers clearly identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality and accuracy.
    Now the question is: did the BBC leadership establish a policy of anti-Semitism and hand it down the organisation? Or did individual reporters set their own personal standards of anti-Semitisim, presumably ignored by the BBC management?

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    1. Well, I think it's the culture at the BBC (which is heavily left wing) that is highly prejudicial against Israel.

      Bowen is a joke. He went along with blaming Israel for hitting a hospital with a missile when it was a failed Jihadist rocket. He then admitted he had got it wrong, but had no regrets.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/11/25/bbc-bowen-wrong-gaza-hospital-no-regrets/

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  2. The BBC is frequently inaccurate and biased in ALL its reporting and historically has been so for decades.

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  3. You hit the nail on the head Liam. I have many times reported the bias of the BBC and their failure to report the news from the Israel and Palestine correctly. I don't actually watch any BBC news and have not done so since 2016 when I gave it up completely but in Britain it seems to be somehow unavoidable to bump into BBC news somewhere at some point in a day. They are biased and without apology. Some news items are corrected on line without attention being drawn to an earlier "error". As you say, the damage has already been done.

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    1. Indeed Rachel.

      They supressed the last internal investigation on the matter.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/06/bbc-must-publish-israel-bias-report-suppressed-for-10-years/

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  4. I am just now reading this research on the lies of the bbc and I wanted to write about it but I gave up, these lies and the shaping of public opinion that follows them has a direct effect on our lives here, they increase the danger to our existence here, and this danger is increasing when the world public opinion Against us is increasing without any justification for it.

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  6. I don't watch the BBC news very much so I have no opinion on whether their coverage is biased or not. What I do know is that people are somehow excusing the attack by Hamas on October 7 last year as if there can be some justification for completely unprovoked mass murder.

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