The author of a report alleging that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines 1,500 times has said that the corporation is “at the mercy of personal whims and biases of individual journalists”.
Writing for the JC, Trevor Asserson, a British-Israeli lawyer who has led campaigns to hold the public broadcaster to account for decades, said the broadcaster had “no methodology whatever for ensuring compliance with its own Editorial Guidelines”.
As a result, he alleged, there are no “targets for balance” and no procedure in place for holding staff to account when they depart from the BBC’s core values of impartiality in their reporting.
He said the BBC could therefore be seen to have “a reckless disregard as to the truth of what they are saying”.
Asserson added that a judicial review may now be required to force the BBC to adhere to its own editorial standards.
The Campaign for Media Standards (CMS), a new body launched by the solicitor, could go on to expose biased and partial coverage at other UK media outlets including Sky News, he added.
In a column for the JC (see page 4), Asserson writes: “The BBC is effectively at the mercy of the personal whims and biases of individual journalists. Its management needs to take back control, or as the independent Thomas Review said, it needs to get a grip.
“The chairman of the BBC – to whom I had in fact sent the report – wrote to me requesting a copy, some 48 hours after the BBC had given its views on the content.
“This Alice in Wonderland, ‘verdict first, evidence later’ approach is one which will be familiar to anyone who has wasted their time sending the BBC a formal complaint.”
The Asserson Report, which was published this week, examined BBC coverage over the four months following the October 7 terror attack and the start of Israel’s war against Hamas.
A team of lawyers and data scientists, all with personal ties to the Jewish state, used state-of-the-art tools to assess a vast amount of material.
They concluded that high-profile news programmes, including BBC Breakfast, the News at Ten and Newsnight, had expressed pro-Palestinian sympathies far more regularly than support for Israelis.
Across online BBC English language articles, sympathy for Palestinians was close to twice as high as for Israelis, the report claimed, with a favourability rating for Palestinians ranging from 62 to 66 per cent.
Israel was meanwhile associated with the term “genocide” 283 times, and “war crimes” 127 times, compared to just 19 and 30 times respectively for Hamas.
The corporation has insisted in response that the report’s methodology was flawed and that counting particular words “divorced from context” could not be used to assess its coverage.
“It’s been a gargantuan effort to conduct the analysis of nine million words of output from one broadcaster,” Asserson told the JC.
He was driven to launch the research project, because, he said, “the BBC’s obligations are stricter than other broadcasters because of its public broadcaster position, and the BBC boasts in its guidelines that it sets higher standards than Ofcom”.
He claims to have uncovered examples of the national broadcaster downplaying the severity of Palestinian terrorism. In one example from mid-October provided by the report, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, then based in southern Israel, said in response to a reader’s question: “A military onslaught can destroy its [Hamas’s] metal and concrete but not the mettle of the people whose resolve to die for their cause will only harden.”
The report also found that the BBC had repeatedly failed to use the word “terrorist” in reference to Hamas.
Over the four months examined, the Palestinian group’s name appeared more than 12,000 times, across 1,500 items. In just eight per cent of these mentions and 30 per cent of those articles, however, were they associated with terror.
After initially refusing to call Hamas a “terror group”, Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, said the corporation would “make it clear, where possible” that the organisation was proscribed as a terror group by the British government.
The Asserson report stated: “The BBC’s usage of ‘proscribed’, ‘designated’ or ‘recognised’ terrorist organisation to describe Hamas declined rapidly over time. By the end of December 2023, less than two months after stating it would employ this terminology “where possible”, use of the term had dwindled, so that it was rarely used.”
The report also claimed that the BBC has failed to acknowledge its factual errors “quickly, clearly and appropriately”.
Its pointed to the broadcaster’s coverage of the October al-Ahli hospital bombing, when correspondent Jon Donnison wrongly suggested Israeli forces were responsible for the explosion.
While the BBC has continued to insist that Donnison did not directly state that Israel was responsible, International Editor Jeremy Bowen has admitted that while he was wrong to say the building had been “flattened” he “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting.
BBC Arabic has displayed an “extreme bias” that grossly magnifies the corporation’s other failings, the Asserson Report also stated.
It was found to exhibit pro-Palestinian bias in more than 90 per cent of its online articles and videos, and to have repeatedly platformed supporters of terror.
“In a random sample of 253 (of a total of 487) BBC Arabic speaking interviewees, 27 per cent were either connected to Hamas (or affiliated terror group) and/or had also posted extreme antisemitic rhetoric via social media, including support for the October 7 attack, all undisclosed by the BBC,” the report claimed.
The report marked the latest in a long line of attempts by Asserson to force the BBC to reform its coverage of Israel and Palestine.
In 2000, the lawyer founded BBCWatch to analyse the corporation’s coverage of the region.
After a series of studies published by the body alleged that the corporation had a systematic bias against Israel, the BBC commissioned an inquiry into its coverage.
The Balen Report, written in 2004 by senior broadcast journalist Malcolm Balen, has never been released, however.
Asserson told the JC that he believed the corporation had never been more inaccurate in its coverage of Israel than during the Jewish state’s current war in Gaza. “I think we are reaching a peak in awfulness in BBC bias because when I looked at it some years ago I thought that it was bad but not as bad as it is now,” he said.
“The institutional bias has simply developed. Those people who think differently from the traditional thought within the BBC have probably diminished in number and they have been so unchecked, and the progressive movement has developed legs and become hysterical and it allows the BBC to become hysterical with it so I think they have lost their heads to some extent.”
The next step legally in holding the BBC to account, Asserson said, was to launch a judicial review. This would involve a judge reviewing the lawfulness of decisions made by the broadcaster to examine not if they were right or wrong, but if they were lawful.
“I hope not to have to do that [launch a judicial review] because it’s exhausting, but I think it is the correct next step because I don’t trust the BBC to respond in an adult and mature way towards my report. I think they’re going to say it’s all rubbish and we’re wonderful.”
Asserson said he was not interested in the question of whether BBC were antisemitic, however. “What exactly it is that has turned Israel baiting into a national sport of the left is an extraordinarily interesting question that requires historians, psychologists, sociologists, and they won’t agree,” he said.
Asserson’s newly founded organisation, CMS, which published the BBC report, could now go on to examine other media outlets alleged to be failing the public in their coverage of Israel.
A BBC spokesman 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. We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context. We are required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this, despite the highly complex, challenging and polarising nature of the conflict.
“However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.”
