I have spent decades defending the BBC. I have spoken up in Parliament and in the media to praise its journalists, applaud its coverage and defend its funding.
As a former Labour MP, I believed it was my job to defend public service broadcasting and the licence fee on which it depends.
In fact, I was convinced Auntie was the best broadcaster in the world, operating to the most rigorous standards.
So if someone like me can now believe that the BBC is failing to uphold its responsibility to provide unbiased, fair coverage, we know there’s a serious problem.
The report by the respected and experienced lawyer Trevor Asserson lays bare the BBC’s failures to meet its editorial standards in devastating detail.
Ian Austin says: I have spent decades defending the BBC. So if someone like me can now believe that the BBC is failing to uphold its responsibility to provide unbiased, fair coverage, we know there’s a serious problem.
A report by the respected and experienced lawyer Trevor Asserson demonstrates a systemic bias against Israel by almost every metric
Asserson examined almost all BBC coverage of the Israel-Hamas war during a four-month period beginning on October 7, 2023 – the day Hamas carried out its massacre in southern Israel.
His report demonstrates a systemic bias against Israel by almost every metric.
BBC Breakfast, News at Ten and Newsnight were revealed to show an astonishing lack of sympathy for Israel, despite the evil inflicted on its people by Hamas.
We are already familiar with the BBC’s reluctance to call Hamas what it is: a terrorist outfit.
The report found that the Corporation is far more likely to describe it in relation to the ‘health ministry’ it controls in Gaza than a proscribed terrorist organisation.
Most sickening of all is that Israel is more likely to be accused of war crimes and those against humanity in BBC coverage.
All this comes on top of a series of complaints over the past 12 months.
On the day of the attack itself, one BBC Arabic correspondent, Sally Nabil, liked a tweet saying it was a ‘morning of hope’.
She and several of her colleagues were investigated for their social media posts, which likened Hamas to freedom fighters, but allowed to keep on working.
An anti BBC placard is seen at the anti-Semitism march on November 26 last year
Hundreds of protesters take part in ‘March Against Antisemitism’ march in central London
Members of the Jewish community gathered last October outside BBC Broadcasting House to demonstrate against the BBC’s refusal to label Hamas as terrorists
Later in October, amid claims that hundreds had died in explosions around the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen reported that the hospital had been flattened.
BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said: ‘It’s hard to see what else this could be . . . other than an Israeli airstrike.’
Protests broke out across the Middle East. Synagogues were attacked in Tunisia and Berlin.
An independent inquiry later revealed the cause: a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket fired at Israel – and it hadn’t landed on the hospital, as Bowen reported, but in its car park.
The BBC apologised, but the damage had been done.
Even before October 7, the BBC has been hostile to Israel – and Jews.
When, in 2021, Jewish children were attacked in Oxford Street while aboard a Hanukkah party bus, the BBC made the false claim that one of the victims had made an ‘anti-Muslim slur’ – implying the violence was provoked.
All the while, sanctimonious Leftie pundits, such as Gary Lineker, continue to show disregard for impartiality rules.
In January, Lineker retweeted a post calling for a football boycott of Israel, later removing it saying it was ‘an oversight’.
Then, commenting on the war against Hamas, he told The Guardian: ‘One atrocity does not deserve 80 atrocities. Or more.’
Yet he is seemingly allowed to act with impunity.
A member of the Jewish community holds a poster outside the BBC
Failure to deal with those like Lineker has left the BBC looking foolish.
The detail in the Asserson report cannot be dismissed with the same arrogance that has met previous complaints.
The BBC’s public funding means it has a duty to uphold impartiality and accuracy.
New chairman Samir Shah must get a grip – or the calls to scrap the licence fee will become impossible to ignore.
- Lord Austin of Dudley is a former Labour MP
BBC ‘showed extreme bias’ in Gaza reports
By Chris Brooke
The BBC breached its editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times and showed ‘extreme bias’ in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, says a new report.
The study analysed the corporation’s coverage of the conflict on television, radio, podcasts and websites, in both English and Arabic, during the first four months of the war.
It concluded there was ‘anti-Israel bias across all platforms’, with ‘extreme’ bias on the BBC’s Arabic output.
A woman holds a sign in protest against the BBC’s coverage of the Hamas-Israel war
The Asserson Report was led by lawyer Trevor Asserson and Dr Haran Shani-Narkiss, a data scientist, who used AI to review nine million words of coverage and thousands of news items.
It is being published today by the Campaign for Media Standards.
Analysis of 564 articles on BBC Arabic showed that ‘at no point does the level of sympathy for Israelis exceed the level of sympathy for Palestinians’, even in the week of the October 7 attack.
On its English language coverage, it found the allegation of war crimeswas linked to Israel 592 times compared with Hamas at 98.
Hamas was also more likely to be described as a ‘Health Ministry’ than a ‘proscribed terrorist organisation’.
Mr Asserson, who runs a law firm from Jerusalem and has a long history ofcampaigning against anti-Israeli bias, said: ‘The BBC’s responsibility as a broadcaster is to deliver news without bias.
Our analysis reveals a significant deviation from this standard.’
The researchers claimed to have found 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.
Pro-Israeli demonstrators gather outside the headquarters of the BBC to protest about the corporation’s coverage of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas
A BBC spokesperson said: ‘We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.’
However, we will consider the report carefully and respond once we have had time to study it in detail.’
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk