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Bad journalism leads to bad outcomes.
Slandering Israel brings angry Jew-hating mobs into the streets, which is one step away from being an act of racial hatred. Journalists know this, but they are willing to act as cheerleaders for such hatred, stoking it with distorted, manipulative and sometimes dishonest journalism.
They should know better.
BBC violated editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in Israel-Hamas conflict, report says
The BBC is the biggest and most “trusted” brand in journalism. We know it because the BBC says so. The BBC earned this nickname because of its glorious past and because it is legally obligated to produce “impartial” news. In return for this promise, the BBC is paid over $5 billion a year by the British public.
Asason ReportIn our study “Four months of BBC impartiality in news reporting,” published earlier this month, we take a deep dive into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. We look at around nine million words of output using traditional litigation-style analysis. In parallel, a team of data scientists (operating as Research for Impartial Media – RIMe) carried out a series of experiments using cutting-edge AI techniques. Working independently but together, the two disciplines found strikingly similar results, exposing myths about the BBC’s impartiality.
‘Corrosively woke’ BBC continues to be plagued by retractions and apologies over Israel-Hamas war
We analyzed BBC English TV programs and while some of the programs were neutral, the rest were 90% to 100% pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel.
The BBC has broken almost every rule in its rulebook, the Editorial Guidelines: by using the BBC as a platform for Hamas supporters and members, by knowing that the death toll was wrong but failing to adequately inform its viewers of its unreliability, by broadcasting reports from Gaza without mentioning that Hamas controls the journalistic output, and by using its own
Journalists are expressing personal opinions, all of which would breach the BBC’s own impartiality guidelines.
While BBC English proved disappointingly bad, BBC Arabic proved even worse. In an “empathy analysis” carried out by RIMe data scientists across media outlets around the world, BBC Arabic ranked alongside outlets like Al Jazeera, Palestine Chronicle and Iraq News. If people knew the BBC was being used to spread extremist views, that would certainly reduce trust in the BBC.
BBC News presents a strong anti-Israel view from almost every angle we analyzed. Any pretense of impartiality seems to have been abandoned. Indeed, the BBC’s chief Middle East correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, recently boasted that impartiality means telling viewers what he considers to be “the truth”, which is the exact opposite of what the editorial guidelines dictate.
So why has the BBC strayed so far from its roots? The answer is twofold. First, the BBC is mired in institutional bias on many issues. Journalists who insist on expressing their opinions need to be moved to less harmful venues (such as Gardener’s Question Time) or removed entirely. This seems to happen rarely.
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Second, and more fundamentally, BBC management needs to get a grip on their most sacred product: news. They need to set targets, monitor performance, adjust when targets are not met, and take action against recalcitrant journalists and editors. Currently, BBC senior management sets no KPIs, sets no targets, and has no systematic monitoring of performance – they are effectively operating blind. They expect journalists to achieve impartiality but have not taken effective steps to ensure that. They have let go of the rudder and allowed the BBC to drift with the wind, which means that performance is controlled by a highly self-centred cohort of journalists who hold very vicious views towards Israel.
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The Aserson report undermines the myth of impartiality. The BBC has not achieved impartiality and is not even close to achieving it. BBC management needs to take back control of the ship or the British public needs to demand their money.
