Bias at the BBC

 Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, 20 September 2024

            The flagship BBC news and comment TV programme, “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”,  is transmitted first thing every Sunday morning, and then is available indefinitely via the BBC iPlayer, its video on demand service.  The programme always starts with a review of the UK’s Sunday newspapers, showing their front pages and headlines.

            On Sunday morning, September 8, Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, provided her viewers with a sight of every leading UK newspaper except the Sunday Telegraph.  Why was it omitted?  Perhaps because that morning the Telegraph headline read:

“BBC ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war.  Coverage was heavily biased against Israel, report into corporation’s output finds.”

   The report referred to presented an analysis of the BBC’s news coverage during a four-month period beginning October 7, 2023 – the day Hamas burst into Israel and carried out their brutal massacre of around 1,200 people, taking another 251 into Gaza as hostages.

A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists had contributed to the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words of BBC output.

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

“The findings,” said the report, “reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines.”

It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism, while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation, and that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict had previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror

            The report bears the name of Trevor Asserson, a British-born lawyer. Founder and senior partner of an international law firm, he now runs the Israeli arm of the firm from Tel Aviv.

Asserson is no novice when it comes to analyzing the broadcast media.  Back in 2000 he was still based in the UK.  Listening to, and watching, the BBC reporting on the troubled Middle East following the first intifada and the failure of the Oslo Accords, he became increasingly incensed with what appeared to be the BBC’s obvious departure from its declared principles of impartiality.

 Asserting that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is “infected by an apparent widespread antipathy towards Israel,”  Asserson commissioned a series of in-depth studies to determine if the BBC’s coverage was indeed impartial or biased. 

For a seven-week period in 2001, his team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a variety of other sources.  Their conclusion: the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations under its charter and broadcasting licence to be unbiased and impartial.

Trevor Asserson’s reports, matched by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the corporation to commission an investigation and report from one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute detail.  This exhaustive study resulted in a 20,000-word report which, at the end of 2004, was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the BBC.  Thereafter it was treated as Top Secret and locked away. 

Widespread speculation that Balen had uncovered multiple examples of BBC bias and breaches of impartiality led to repeated legal applications for its release under the UK Freedom of Information Act.  These legal challenges were defended by the BBC at a cost of over £330,000. In 2009 the House of Lords, then the UK’s supreme court, ruled that as “a document held for journalistic purposes”, the report was explicitly excluded from the requirements of the Act.  So it remains locked away.

The BBC’s obvious anti-Israel stance in reporting the events of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath enraged one Asserson client. The final straw came a week into the war.  The BBC’s reporting of the explosion that occurred in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City breached BBC Guidelines just too blatantly.  Knowing of Asserson’s work a quarter of a century ago, the client suggested he undertake a similar analysis of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The now 68-year-old Trevor Asserson took up the challenge. The Report reveals that he himself designed and ran the research program.  Work undertaken by solicitors within the firm was mostly carried out on a voluntary basis. An Israeli businessman, based in London, funded such expenses as paying external lawyers to conduct human review, and for work undertaken by data scientists who contributed to the Report.

   In reporting the Al-Ahli explosion, the BBC’s correspondent, speaking live from Gaza, said "it is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes."  The  BBC’s Arabic service repeated this assessment, and anti-Israel protests immediate broke out both in the Arab world and the West. 

It did not take long for the truth to emerge, but by then the damage had been done.  The explosion was the result of a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad.  In its apology, days later, the BBC still failed to make clear that the evidence showed conclusively that the explosion had not been an Israeli attack.

"I think the BBC has a deep problem of bias against Israel," Asserson is reported to have said.  "The BBC continually and consistently failed in its duty to be journalistically accurate, and also in its duty to be impartial and objective."

The hasty and unverified assertion that Israel must be responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital was followed by a further example a few weeks later.  On that occasion the BBC reported that IDF troops had entered Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, "targeting medical teams and Arab speakers."  This was either a wilful or an unprofessional mis-reading of an IDF release, which stated that the troops had entered the hospital "accompanied by Arabic speakers and medical teams" to assist patients. On this occasion the BBC broadcast an adequate apology.

As the vast network of tunnels criss-crossing the Gaza Strip – a system larger than the London Underground – was slowly revealed, the BBC seemed to be doing its best to undermine the IDF’s discovery of a Hamas military command post directly underneath a hospital.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, seemed to suggest that the discovery of Kalashnikov assault rifles found in the hospital basements had nothing to do with Hamas. Implying that they might be part of the hospital’s own security, he said with a smile:  "Wherever you go in the Middle East you see an awful lot of Kalashnikovs."  .

Bowen, now a senior BBC official, was singled out for criticism back in April 2009 when he was the BBC’s Middle East editor. A  series of complaints of inaccuracy and anti-Israel bias were brought against him.  On investigation the charges of bias were not sustained, but three complaints of inaccuracy were fully or partially upheld by the BBC.

The new Asserson Report devotes no less than 16 pages to demonstrating inaccuracy or anti-Israel bias in Bowen’s reporting of the Gaza conflict, and also in his recently published book “The Making of the Modern Middle East”. 

The report singles out the BBC’s Arabic service as one of the most biased of all global media outlets in its treatment of the Israel-Hamas conflict.  It identifies 11 news and comment programs featuring reporters who, it shows, have previously made public statements in support of terrorism, and specifically Hamas, without viewers being informed of this.

The report also finds that the BBC associated Israel with war crimes 121 times as against 30 for Hamas; with genocide 283 times as against 19 for Hamas; and with breaching international law 167 times as against 27 for Hamas.

It is not surprising, in light of the Report’s carefully referenced evidence, that Jewish and non-Jewish voices in the UK are calling for a full independent investigation into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.  Danny Cohen, once Director of BBC Television, has said there is now an “institutional crisis” at the corporation, and called for an independent review.  The Telegraph reported that two leading Jewish groups, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the National Jewish Assembly, have added their voices to the call, while Lord Austin, a former Labour minister, accused the BBC of “high-handed arrogance” for continually dismissing questions over its impartiality.

The Asserson Report has been submitted to the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and to Samir Shah, its chairman, as well as to all board members. 

This positive and hopeful approach was immediately devalued by a BBC spokesperson, who predictably sought to question the technical competence of the research.  The corporation had “serious questions” about the report’s methodology, the spokesperson announced, particularly its heavy reliance on Artificial Intelligence to analyze impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

“However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.”

Once the BBC was its own master, but in 2017 it was made subject to an external regulator, Ofcom (the Office of Communications).  The Conservative MP Greg Smith, shadow transport and business minister, has said: “There are now clear grounds for Ofcom  and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to use every tool they have in their arsenal to bring about greater compliance with the rules around neutrality and fair coverage in the BBC charter.”

Depending on the BBC’s response to the Asserson Report, Ofcom may indeed decide to take action designed to restore genuine impartiality within the corporation.