A report has claimed the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict to be heavily biased against Israel.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper writes that the report, based on four months of analysis of the broadcaster’s output across television, radio and other platforms, states that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines of impartiality more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias.”
Former BBC executive Danny Cohen called for an independent inquiry into the news coverage following the publication of the report, which was compiled by a collection of 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, using artificial intelligence to analyse nine million words of BBC output.
The BBC has questioned the methodology of the compilation of the report, which currently stands alone in its verdict of bias against the Corporation. Deadline has reached out to the BBC for a statement on these aspects.
Protests have previously taken place outside the BBC’s headquarters in London by people angered by the broadcaster’s description of Hamas as “a resistance movement.”
In October 2023, the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson explained it wasn’t the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn.
