Leftists hate Jews and Israel, and leftists control the Western media. That’s why it shouldn’t be any surprise to learn that the BBC, the taxpayer-funded media outlet that is still the largest news purveyor in the UK, is reported to have violated its own editorial guidelines over 1,500 times in its Israel reporting in just the four months after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. But before piling on the BBC, remember that our own taxpayer-funded NPR is probably just as bad.
The report comes from a research cohort led by Trevor Asserson, a British lawyer. The investigatory team included around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists. Using human intelligence and AI, the group examined the approximately nine million words the BBC generated in the four-month period immediately after the October 7 attack, when Hamas (which Iran outfits and finances, and for which Iran does planning) slaughtered over 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped over 250 more (subsequently murdering many of them).
Public domain images (edited).
What the team concluded was deeply disturbing:
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.
The report revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media.
[snip]
Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.
The bias was not subtle. The report concluded that “the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.”
This bias may have come about in part because some of the BBC’s reporters don’t even pretend to be objective. For example, a BBC Arabic contributor named Mayssaa Abdul Khalek has openly stated “death to Israel,” while praising Hitler. Another reporter from Lebanon called Israel, the only nation in the Middle East that has a multicultural society and full civil rights for all, a “terrorist apartheid state.”
Among the report’s findings are that:
There’s much more, but I’m currently unable to find a complete text of the report. Media outlets, instead, are referring to The Telegraph report from which I quoted at the top of this post.
But of course, it’s not just the taxpayer-funded BBC that shows this type of bias. The taxpayer-funded NPR does, too.
NPR has always been hostile to Israel. Indeed, it was its dishonest reporting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was a regular listener, that led me to the conservative blogosphere and my political transformation. I finally figured out that the legal maxim of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything) applied to both witnesses and media outlets.
If you type in “Israel” or “Gaza” or “Palestine” in NPR’s search box, you can see these headlines—and you might spot just a little bias.”
And please note that none of the following NPR headlines explains that Hamas, after holding and torturing the hostages for 300 days, executed them to prevent their being rescued:
The “BBC report” is shocking, but I can guarantee that an “NPR report” would be just as shocking. Our only taxpayer-funded media outlet is a cesspool of leftist garbage and antisemitism. If we ever get a Congress and President with testicular fortitude, they should act to defund and break up NPR and PBS entirely.