The BBC hit by accusations of bias again

Opinion

It’s harder to argue against the Centre for Media Monitoring report, which says the BBC is “constructing a moral universe where Israeli suffering is inherently more tragic”.

Controversy over BBC coverage of the various Middle Eastern-Israeli conflicts seem to have been almost as long-lived and bitter as the violence itself.

Usually, bias is in the eye of the beholder, although allegations that the BBC has been guilty of anti-Semitism have been persistent over the years.

More than 20 years ago, Richard Sambrook, at the time the BBC’s director of news, asked senior BBC journalist Malcolm Balen to investigate the accusation that there was an underlying anti-Semitic bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East.

The Balen Report was never published and the BBC spent many thousands in court preventing its publication on the grounds that it was a piece of journalism and therefore exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Standing on its principles, the organisation shot itself in the foot because it was widely rumoured at the time that Balen had found no evidence of systematic bias in the coverage.

We can’t say for sure but, had it been published, that report could have been an important building block in assessing the difficulties journalists face in covering that most complex of conflicts and which grows ever more bloody by the day.

Uncomfortable conclusions

This time round, the BBC has to cope with a very different report and one that it cannot suppress.

A massively detailed report by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a project of the Muslim Council of Britain looking at a year of the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza-Israel crisis, comes to very uncomfortable conclusions.

The study examined more than 32,000 broadcast segments and nearly 4,000 articles, and found that the BBC on a per-fatality basis gave Israeli deaths 33 times as much coverage in articles and 19 times more on TV and radio as Palestinian deaths.

It claims that, despite the fact that there have been 34 times more Palestinian deaths overall, the BBC has run almost as many “humanising” personal stories about Israelis as Palestinians — 279 for Palestinians versus 201 for Israelis.

The analysis of the use of language is particularly telling, with emotive language such as “massacre” or “barbaric” used four times more frequently for the Israeli dead than for Palestinian victims.

There is also the issue that BBC presenters are said to have shared Israel’s “right to self-defence” argument 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective.

The report notes that BBC pressed 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas’ 7 October attacks while “equivalent questioning to condemn Israel’s actions took place zero times, despite Israel’s actions resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths”.

It claims to have documented more than 100 times when BBC presenters have shut down interviewees’ genocide claims, even though a number of international human rights organisations have concluded that genocide is indeed taking place in Gaza.

Different moral universe

Such observations, and many more across 188 pages, leads the report to accuse the BBC of “constructing a moral universe where Israeli suffering is inherently more tragic, more deliberate and more worthy of human empathy than Palestinian deaths”.

The report has received the support of everyone from Alastair Campbell to Baroness Warsi to United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese.

Investigative journalist Peter Oborne, who says he loves and respects the BBC, concludes: “This thorough and fair-minded report documents beyond reasonable doubt that the BBC has failed professionally and morally in its reporting from Gaza.”

Oborne adds that BBC coverage has dehumanised Palestinians, failed to challenge Israeli lies and constructed a framework in which Israeli suffering is more newsworthy.

Unsurprisingly, the report has not exactly hit the headlines. The Daily Mail, which will normally go the extra mile to show the BBC in a bad light, did not have space for a single word.

Nor did The Sun, which instead did a two-page spread on “the toxic feud ripping apart BBC Breakfast”.

The Times managed a concise, single-column piece on page 20.

The rare and the unusual

There is a possible problem with the central allegation that Israeli deaths get more coverage than Palestinian deaths.

It results from the obvious difficulty with conventional news values — that the rare and unusual gets more coverage than something that is happening every day.

Until now, there has been relatively small numbers of Israeli casualties after the initial 7 October massacre and probably more than 50,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza — a total that rises almost routinely by the day.

However horrific, the “commonplace” gradually gets almost overlooked. The first British soldier killed in Northern Ireland generated splash headlines. Eventually, such a death became little more than a paragraph.

Normalising the horrific

The CfMM report makes an important case for the BBC and all of journalism to avoid such a dehumanising tendency. Atrocities such as those happening in Gaza should never be allowed to become “normalised”.

In general, the use of language and the underlying assumptions exposed by the report suggests the BBC now needs to take a long hard look at its coverage.

The BBC says it will consider the report, despite having some questions about its use of AI. As indeed it should and with some urgency. (The CfMM, for its part, insists that all AI-generated classifications were reviewed by human experts.)

And it’s surely time for a new Balen Report and one that would be fully and promptly published.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.