Inaccuracies, omissions, and sneaky language have made Hamas a blameless victim

T

he long-held view that the BBC’s reporting is tainted by anti-Israel bias got powerful confirmation with the recent publication of the Asserson Report. Commissioned and led by British-born-and-educated Trevor Asserson of Asserson Law Offices in Israel, who has decades of public affairs litigation under his belt, its objective was to assess the BBC’s coverage post-October 7, and “hold the Corporation to account against its own standards of accuracy and balance.”

The raw data paints a grim picture of inaccuracies, omissions, careful selection of interviewees, and strategic use of language, all designed to paint Israel as the aggressor and Hamas as blameless victims. Those in the know say it’s absolutely typical of the BBC, whose structures and processes have directly led to the poisonous narrative that dominates their coverage of the issue. The looming question is whether this comprehensive report will finally lead to change at the BBC.

Challenging the Behemoth

With a weekly global reach of nearly half a billion people and an annual budget of nearly $8 billion, the BBC is funded by a license fee paid by any UK resident who owns a television. One of the core principles in its Royal Charter is its obligation to impartiality.

Its delinquency in this area when it comes to Israel is well-known, but for the first time, the scale of its failure to remain unbiased, and the extent of its pro-Hamas sympathies, has been clearly-documented and presented to the BBC as a direct challenge. The report’s graphs, pie charts, and legalese-peppered paragraphs lay out the multiple ways in which the BBC’s coverage of the conflict since October 7 couldn’t be further from the neutrality it claims to practice.

Asserson has decades of experience in cases involving governments, and quasi-governmental bodies. His work exposing bias in the BBC began in the early 2000s, when he published several reports around the time of the Second Intifada, showing the BBC’s hostility to Israel. More than 20 years on, Asserson had access to a significantly larger pool of resources, and this report is many times longer, and more in-depth.

Lest critics argue that Asserson approached this from the viewpoint of a Jew living in Israel, his team of lawyers and data scientists arrived at their findings through a rigorous and scientific methodology, looking only at the hard data their investigation uncovered.

“We used both language learning models and other AI tools, as well as a human team,” says Asserson. “You can argue that a lawyer might be biased, but the computer isn’t biased. Each team looked at the same information, and came to the same conclusions. It’s as if we used two separate teams, and their findings reinforced each other.”

Utterly Skewed

The report analyzed four months of BBC coverage across all its outlets in English, as well as BBC Arabic — television, radio, podcast and online articles, amounting to over 8 million words. It’s divided into sections, each one a different aspect of reporting on the conflict, like language designed to evoke sympathy, the nature of interviewees (civilian or otherwise), omissions of critical facts and the accuracy of reporting casualty numbers, to name a few. On each and every metric, the data showed an unmistakable bias against Israel and toward the Palestinians.

“It was worse than we thought,” the seasoned litigator admits. “Some things were bad. Most things were terrible. And BBC Arabic is even worse. We marked it against other outlets, and BBC Arabic’s output (which, as a BBC outlet, is also required to be impartial) is on par with al-Jazeera. Ninety percent of its coverage is pro-Palestinian.”

Considering that, according to investigative journalist David Collier, the BBC uses al-Jazeera as a recruitment pool, this should not come as a surprise. Collier’s spent decades infiltrating and exposing anti-Israel movements in the UK, and can pretty well guess at some of the structural causes of BBC bias.

“The BBC has one office in Jerusalem, which they share with BBC Persia, BBC Middle East, and BBC Arabic,” he says. “Just imagine when they send a reporter to the region, who speaks neither English nor Arabic. All their information, contacts and translation will come through — you guessed it, BBC Arabic.

“They won’t admit it, but even their normal Middle East reporting is entirely dependent on BBC Arabic, so I believe every article produced on Israel has the hands of BBC Arabic journalists on it. They’re all from Lebanon, Tunisia, or Egypt, one of the countries that hate Israel. It’s completely and utterly skewed.”

Collier has done extensive work on exposing anti-Israel bias within so-called humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International and UNRWA, whose complicity in promoting the Palestinian cause and antipathy to Israel have been proven beyond all doubt. Yet the BBC invites representatives from these groups on as trusted and objective experts.

“If you believe the BBC when they say these are respected aid agencies, then you’ll believe the nonsense these people are spouting, particularly because they can usually go unchallenged by the interviewer for six or seven minutes at a time.”

This is particularly damning given the BBC’s own official editorial guidelines on contentious topics: “When dealing with ‘controversial subjects,’ the BBC must ensure a wide range of significant views and perspectives are given due weight and prominence. Opinion should be clearly distinguished from fact.”

Asserson believes the corporation itself is inherently anti-Israel. “There’s an institutional mindset that Israel is a terrible country. Any aspiring BBC journalist who said they supported Israel wouldn’t be hired, and if they were, they wouldn’t be promoted. I’m not saying that’s the rule, but the chances of a good career in the BBC if your views diverge from the dominant view are slim, and becoming slimmer.”

The Troubling Truth

The report’s austere language and neatly laid-out statistics almost belie the extent of the journalistic corruption and institutional rot at the heart of this globally venerated institution.

Some of the figures are staggering. Almost a third of items mentioning Hamas do so in connection with a health ministry, creating the distinct impression that the terrorist organization is a government body concerned with public health. The association of Israel with terms like genocide, war crimes, and breaches of international law is far greater than with Hamas; in the case of genocide, the frequency was fourteen times higher for Israel.

The hostage issue was covered as incidental, with a tiny number of mentions in the context of any illegality, trauma, or abuse. Almost no coverage was given to the existential military threats Israel faces, the most obvious justification for Israel’s actions.

When the BBC has been forced to correct the record on material inaccuracies, in a full 100% of cases it’s been to items that are pro-Palestinian, further proof of the corporation’s instinctive bias against Israel.

Nearly 30% of pro-Israel interviewees have been political or military figures, who are not exactly sympathy-inducing. By contrast, only 4% of pro-Palestinian interviewees were from those categories. The rest were civilian.

And it wasn’t just statistics that proved BBC bias. Journalists are masters of the written or spoken word, and those at the BBC deploy these to great effect — when describing Palestinian suffering.

In an article describing October 7, there were two lines dedicated to the bare facts of Hamas’s murderous rampage in Israel, which was long before a single Israel boot was on the ground in Gaza. But when describing the injured Palestinians caught in the crossfire, the BBC went all out, describing a “massacre, with injured people pouring in [to a hospital],” “severed limbs, intense burning, people crammed into every available space.”

An article on October 9 describes “deserted streets covered with rubble from collapsed buildings following Israel airstrikes” and “widespread chaos, including a body being carried away and a man covered in blood and dust.” It goes on to detail how Israel stopped all supplies entering Gaza, with no mention at all of the horrific events just two days before.

Jeremy Bowen’s analysis of the October 7 attack reads more like a glowing endorsement of Hamas’s capabilities — “Hamas blindsided Israel,” “the most ambitious border operation Hamas has ever launched,” “the complexity of the Hamas operation.” His mention of the slaughter and torture of Israelis is casual — “Videos and photos of dead Israelis, civilians as well as soldiers, are all over social media” — casting doubt on their veracity as he does so. His report of the Israeli response, though, was unambiguous: “Within hours, Israel was responding with air strikes into Gaza, killing many Palestinians.”

Ignorance, Negligence, and Outright Antipathy

Asserson hardly finds these conclusions surprising. “I spoke to senior former and current BBC staff, and they tell me the BBC has no internal mechanism for logging the nature of their previous interviewees. How can they expect journalists to be fair when there’s no way of them knowing whose views they’ve already presented, and whose have been ignored?”

Another of the report’s conclusions was that many pro-Palestinian interviewees had a history of glorifying Hamas terrorism and/or expressing support for Israel’s destruction, clear evidence that the BBC are failing to do even the most basic checks on their interviewees.

“This stuff is so easy to find, it takes me minutes,” says Collier. “For example, the BBC ran a human-interest story on a couple from Manchester with relatives in Gaza whose whole family was killed, and they portrayed it as the deliberate murder of innocent civilians. Well, guess what? This Manchester couple had both celebrated October 7, and it didn’t take me long to find a picture of that very house in Gaza that hosted the funeral of a Hamas terrorist, so obviously this family were linked to terrorism and were totally unsuitable to provide perspective on an impartial outlet.

“Sometimes, it’s clear the BBC haven’t even done a Google search on the people they choose to interview. When the BBC talked about malnutrition and famine, they had a heartbreaking picture of a thin, sick child in hospital, where the mother talked about the devastation the conflict had wrought on this previously healthy child. But it turns out the child had multiple sclerosis, and they got the name of the child’s doctor wrong. They’re not doing basic due diligence to establish the facts.”

The report found evidence of journalists’ own biases. Chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet inadvertently gave the game away in a broadcast in late October 2023: “I think we have to recognize that for journalists, the story has moved on… not the event which was the Hamas atrocities… on October 7... Israel is still focused on that, while the rest of the world is focusing on the response to those events, which is the pain of Gazans.”

Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen revealed his own partiality in his book, The Making of the Modern Middle East, in which Israel is portrayed as a cruel and violent obstruction to peace, while Palestinian leaders are heroic and peace-loving. The report found his book to have omitted examples of attacks on Israel, focusing only on settler violence and Palestinian misery. It was entirely absent of any justification for Israeli action, but provided abundant excuses for Palestinian violence.

The BBC also employs freelance journalists, many of whom have been found to have expressed grotesquely anti-Israel and pro-Hamas views, but fail to mention these to their audience and portrays these contributors as neutral observers.

Will It Effect Change?

Asserson hopes this report will force the BBC to change by demonstrating how it’s failing in its duty to the public. But if the BBC’s initial reaction to the report is anything to go by, that might be a tad optimistic.

They cast doubt in the veracity of the report due to its reliance on AI, a claim Asserson dismisses as outright nonsense, given the rigor, scientific methodology, and second-line reviewing all of the data was subjected to. BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen was similarly contemptuous, calling the report “deeply flawed” and claiming it was a desperate attempt to label the BBC anti-Semitic, although Asserson himself has been circumspect in blaming these galling findings on anti-Semitism.

“If the report doesn’t effect change, we will take the BBC to court and do it that way,” says Asserson.

David Collier is more pessimistic. “Trevor’s operating from the principle of good faith,” he says, with considerable affection for the veteran lawyer. “I think that’s a mistake. Our enemies are not operating in good faith at all.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1029)