Is the BBC biased over Gaza?
The report I read so you didn't have to
“If they continue to refuse to take these complaints seriously”, Lord Austin of Dudley thundered, “the broadcaster could end up in court facing a judicial review. In that scenario, it won’t just be the BBC’s commercial rivals who are raising questions over the organisation’s public funding.”
Ian Austin, former Labour junior minister, ennobled in 2019 and now an independent peer, was writing in the Jewish Chronicle (on whose board he is now serves) following the publication last week of the Asserson Report into alleged BBC anti-Israeli bias over the Gaza war – a report compiled by a British Israeli lawyer, Trevor Asserson, and widely reported in the British press. The Sunday Telegraph for example headlined its coverage, “The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found”.
So I read the whole thing. Very nearly 200 pages of it. Did its contents substantiate its principal author’s conclusion that there is a “deeply worrying of pattern of bias” against Israel among the Corporation’s journalists? Is there shown to be a consistently unprofessional attitude amounting, as former BBC executive Danny Cohen claimed, to an “institutional crisis” at the Corporation, one requiring an independent inquiry?
The report itself, as the Telegraph informed its readers, had required a big effort. “A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists contributed to the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyse nine million words of BBC output.” Having conducted this analysis, said the Telegraph, “Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.”
In fact the researchers hadn’t. In summarising their work it was Trever Asserson who had claimed to identify these breaches, as the report makes clear.
The BBC’s response to Asserson read as follows:
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.
“The BBC”, wrote Austin clearly irked by the summary dismissal of such an ambitious enterprise , “tries to brush off these criticisms, but this week’s report by the respected international litigator Trevor Asserson provides devastating evidence of the BBC’s failings.”
Trevor who?
If, as a journalist and part-time BBC employee, I have skin in the game, Trevor Asserson “the respected litigator” has organs. Last November he gave an interview to the Israeli business website, Globes. The piece was headlined “Trevor Asserson says the BBC's biased coverage of the war in the Gaza Strip breaches its own rules - and he intends to prove it.”
Almost ten months before the report was published and long before the end of the scrutiny period his researchers would use to examine BBC output, Asserson was in no doubt that the BBC was institutionally biased and had been for a quarter of a century. For example, he told his interviewer, the BBC’s foreign editor Jeremy Bowen “is always quick to attack the Israelis, and very slow in finding negative things to say about the Palestinians.”
"In the present state of affairs, anyone with right-wing views will not last long at the BBC," he added, “It’s no secret that almost everybody at the BBC has The Guardian on their desk, metaphorically and in fact, and so the employees have a leftward bias.”
This prejudice started at the top, said Asserson, “because in organisations with a specific world view, the senior management clearly prefers to employ and promote journalists who have the same world view. If the more junior journalistic ranks don’t share that world view - for example in connection with the Israel-Palestinian conflict - those who work in them tend not to be promoted. When this approach continues for many years, the result is institutionalized bias”.
Just how familiar Asserson is with the BBC as an institution (its privately educated Director General was famously once a deputy chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Association) is moot. For example he tells Globes that the BBC is “financed by the taxpayers”. It is, of course, financed by the licence fee payers.
The Globes piece ends by informing readers that “the current examination of the BBC, is expected to mature into an official complaint (and) was commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a non-government organization in the UK founded by members of the British Jewish community.” You may think (as barristers like to say) that the guilty verdict had been read out before the trial had begun.