BBC Chairman Calls for Deep Review

On the Saturday 7th September news broke of analysis that indicated the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines 1,533 times in four months of its early reporting on the Israel-Hamas war.

Researchers led by Trevor Asserson, a British-Israeli lawyer, used artificial intelligence to analyse coverage of events by the BBC beginning with Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel on 7th October.

The analysis created a storm of controversy by highlighting serious problems such as:

• Broadcast of false information
• Repeated failure to label Hamas a terrorist organisation
• Downplaying Palestinian terrorism
• Sympathy imbalance in favour of Palestinians
• Inconsistent and inadequate corrections

Particular criticism fell upon the BBC Arabic service, but problems with that were known beforehand. A separate report in July 2023 showed that the channel had issued more than 130 corrections since the beginning of 2021, in response to complaints of bias and inaccuracy.

More recently, BBC Arabic was forced to make corrections to its news coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas, on average, every other day during the first five months of the conflict.

This week’s renewed controversy has prompted the corporation’s chairman, Samir Shah, to say the BBC’s coverage of Israel and the war with Hamas in Gaza should be subject to a "deep, systematic" review - something many would see as long overdue.

In this Talk TV broadcast, Mike Graham discusses the new analysis with Trevor Asserson, who led the research and was surprised that the results showed a bias far worse than he had ever expected.