The much-publicised Asserson Report, which claims the BBC is “heavily biased against Israel”, flies in the face of other specialist and academic studies, writes MRC co-founder Des Freedman. This article was originally published by Byline Times and is republished here with kind permission.

Last week’s Sunday Telegraph was dominated by a headline that the ‘BBC “has breached rules 1,500 times” over the Gaza war’. This referred to a new Report by the Israeli-based lawyer Trevor Asserson which alleged multiple breaches of the BBC’s impartiality regulations and and claimed that the BBC ‘was heavily biased against Israel’.

The story was extensively covered in right-wing news outlets including the Express, Mail, Sun, Jewish Chronicle and Spiked as well as on GB News and Talk TV. It played out internationally with coverage in the Jerusalem Post, New York Post and Variety.

Yet a comprehensive analysis of UK news reporting of Gaza published by the Centre for Media Monitoring in March 2024 that came to quite different conclusions – that there have been repeated misrepresentation of Palestinian perspectives – received no attention at all in mainstream media at the time. 

This is the balance of power when it comes to UK media coverage of Gaza.

Artificial Intelligence

The Asserson Report is no lightweight document. It runs to 199 pages with a separate 188-page supporting document and claims to have used both human and artificial intelligence to assess some nine million words of BBC output from 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024.

But there is little intelligence in the analysis itself and instead pages and pages of charts that attempt to prove just how badly the BBC has treated Israel and its supporters.

This is partly a result of a flawed methodology which relies on a very naïve conception of AI,  not least its claim that ChatGPT is ‘not subject to inherent human subjective judgement’ (p. 23) and is instead an ‘unbiased proxy for the “casual everyday audience for news” that does not have an opinion on the conflict’ (p. 123). AI may not have an opinion on the conflict but those asking the questions do and, in any case, its language models are only as good as the content they depend on, a significant proportion of which is generated by major news organisations such as the New York Times who certainly do have skin in the game.

The Report’s reliance on ‘human sympathy analysis’ (carried out here by both humans and AI) is also flawed. Of course there was likely to be significant amounts of sympathy towards Palestinians at a time, after 7 October, when it was they who were being bombed, starved and forcibly required to leave their homes. Not even the mainstream media could fail to notice this. The Report’s finding that the ‘sympathy analysis showed a very marked pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli imbalance across all principal television news programmes’ (p. 41) is therefore hardly surprising and reveals the frustration of pro-Israeli voices that anyone should be sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians under siege rather than a breach of impartiality across four months of coverage.

The background of the Report’s authors is revealing. Asserson himself is a long-time critic of the BBC’s coverage of Israel and has partnered with a series of Israeli lawyers and data scientists organised via a group called Research for Impartial Media (RIMe). There is no information about this group other than that its convenor, Dr Haran Shari-Narkiss is a neuroscientist whose most recent paper is on the ‘Stability and Flexibility of Odor Representations in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb’.

Crucially, it appears that no media researchers or indeed journalists were part of the research team and there is no reference at all in the nearly 400 pages of documents to studies, such as the CMM one, that have found systematic bias against Palestinians in mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine.

Asymetry

The Report is based around allegations that the BBC’s coverage has been marked by absences, inaccuracies and linguistic failures all of which amount to a serious breach by the Corporation of its commitment to impartiality.

Asserson’s crucial argument is that BBC coverage of Gaza is marked by multiple omissions. This includes the BBC’s failure systematically to refer to Hamas as a ‘terrorist organisation’ (p. 82). Yet not only is there no international journalistic consensus on whether to label Hamas using this term but presumably Asserson would not wish every mention of the state of Israel to be preceded by a reference to ‘plausibly genocidal’ as per the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Ruling. The Report even includes a chart showing that the BBC is more likely to describe the West Bank as ‘occupied’ than to equate Hamas with terror (p. 84) which is, once again, odd given that there is an international consensus that the West Bank is indeed occupied.

A further omission according to the Report is that the BBC does not sufficiently acknowledge what it claims as the Hamas-induced lack of journalistic freedom inside Gaza (p. 78). Perhaps the more obvious omission is that the Report totally fails to mention the forced exclusion by Israel of all foreign journalists from Gaza. While the Report claims that Freedom House has praised Israel’s press freedom (p. 81), it neglects to mention that Reporters Without Borders, for example, placed Israel 101st out of 180 states in its press freedom ranking, noting that ‘more than 100 journalists were killed in six months in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces…Disinformation campaigns and repressive laws have multiplied in Israel.’ This is not mentioned in the Report.

The Report then condemns the BBC for not giving equal treatment to ‘war crimes’ perpetrated by both Israel and Hamas (p. 87). This shows not just its pro-Israel sympathy – for example the Report acknowledges ‘that there are more Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths, but those deaths are not obviously evidence of War Crimes’. Really? It also reveals an extraordinary lack of understanding of journalism given that the ongoing (though of course not the only) story for effectively 123 of the 124 days of the sample was about Israeli attacks on Gaza as opposed to Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October. Not surprisingly, there were more stories linking Israel to war crimes, genocide and breaches of international law because this what was taking place each day after 7 October.

Indeed, news organisations like the BBC have been extremely reluctant to describe Israel’s assault as a ‘genocide’ (unlike their willingness to do so in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). The situation changed only when the South African government brought evidence to the ICJ in January 2024 which then found that there was a ‘plausible’ case that genocide was taking place. However, that was a brief interlude after which BBC stories about a genocide taking place in Gaza were few and far between.

The Report also states that the BBC’s reporting neglects to acknowledge the ‘existential   threat to Israel’ and fails ‘to explain the military threats to Israel’ (p. 91). This is a pretty extraordinary claim given the amount of airtime provided to IDF spokespeople and government ministers (a fact acknowledged in the Report) and the reluctance of the BBC and other news organisations consistently to recognise the context of occupation.

This failing was clearly set out in the BBC’s own 2006 Thomas Report – ironically namechecked by Asserson (p. 192) in his own Report despite coming to very different conclusions – when it spoke of the ‘asymmetry’ between the situation faced by Israel and that of the Palestinians. Thomas noted the BBC’s

Failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. Although this asymmetry does not necessarily bear on the relative merits of the two sides, it is so marked and important that coverage should succeed in this if in nothing else.

(Asserson Report, p. 31)

Asserson then goes on criticise the BBC for relying on Hamas’ own figures for casualties and its failure to raise concerns about Hamas as a reliable source (p. 119). Given that the IDF refuses to give any indication of the deaths it has caused and that the Gaza Ministry of Health figures are widely accepted around the world (though not of course by Israel) as the best measure of casualties, this is an entirely disingenuous criticism.

Ambiguity

Finally – and perhaps most brazenly – the Report condemns the ‘obscure or ambiguous language’ (p. 127) used to report on Israeli as opposed to Palestinian casualties. This ignores the many studies that have been carried out, such as the one produced by the Centre for Media Monitoring, that concluded that Palestinian deaths were reported using ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel)’. The CMM Report found that more than 70% of the use of terms like ‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’ referred to Israeli victims while ‘emotive language’ was deployed when speaking about Israeli, rather than Palestinian, victims.

Researchers from the Glasgow University Media Group analysed BBC reporting of Gaza from 7 October to 4 November 2023 and also found that

‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could be seen in relation to ‘massacre’, ‘brutal massacre’ and ‘horrific massacre’ (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinians deaths).

Far from finding that BBC reporting was more likely to legitimise Palestinian perspectives, the researchers concluded that ‘[f]or the BBC and other western media to simply repeat the propaganda of one side while denying legitimacy to the other will in the long run to nothing for the cause of peace’.

These are just some of the disingenuous claims made throughout the Report though there are also some genuinely baffling findings.

For example, the Report claims that Newsnight broadcast ‘no programmes positive to Israel during the Reporting Timeframe’ (p. 41). Even the briefest glance at Newsnight’s output would refute this. For example, it devoted a whole programme on the war on 13 October which featured a range of pro-Israel voices including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, General Amir Avivi from the IDF and the British journalist Hadley Freeman talking about the anxious state of the Jewish population in London.

What exactly would a programme ‘positive to Israel’ look like? Presumably, one without any Palestinian voices. Or perhaps the fact that the episode was titled ‘Desperation in Gaza’ was enough to show its pro-Palestine bias.

The Report also condemns the BBC’s choice of interviewees. Its Executive Summary notes the ‘heavy bias in favour of interviewing civilians amongst Palestinians, with few government or army figures. Far more Israeli interviewees were government or army representatives’ (p. 7).

Actually, conventional academic scholarship associates the use of accredited sources (such as government and army representatives) with authority and power. For Asserson, however, this is a problem because ‘official personnel’, ie the ones giving the orders to bomb Gaza, are likely to ‘evoke less sympathy’ than civilians who are ‘often viewed as innocent and vulnerable’ (p. 58).

Yet ‘impartial’ reporting would not involve an equal distribution of ‘sympathy’ to both Israeli and Palestinian populations but would reflect the simple fact that, for the vast majority of the sampling period, it was Palestinian civilians who were being bombed and not Israelis.   

Focusing on the ‘elite’ status of Israeli interviewees is also an absurd decision given that the Israeli state is much bigger and has a far more extensive PR operation than the virtually non-existent machinery of a non-existent Palestinian state.

The Report’s conclusion that the BBC was overwhelmingly biased in its coverage of Gaza flies not only in the face of other specialist and academic reports and studies but reflects the authors’ frustration that there was ‘sympathy’ for a civilian population under attack. The authors appear to think that the BBC’s acknowledgement – however constrained and intermittent – that a deadly assault on Gaza was taking place was in itself a breach of impartiality regulations. In reality, and despite the Israeli government’s best effort to suppress this coverage by preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza, the fact that these awful scenes have made their way into public consciousness, is actually thanks more to brave reporting from Palestinian journalists inside Gaza than it is to a BBC that is often reluctant to criticise Israel for its actions, let alone to describe them as genocidal.

This piece originally published by Byline Times and republished here with kind permission.