Asserson Report on BBC bias debunked
JVL Introduction
We are grateful to Byline Times for their permission to republish an important article by media scholar Des Freedman, which originally appeared over a month ago, assessing claims by lawyer Trevor Asserson of overwhelming BBC bias against Israel in coverage of the Gaza genocide.
Freedman questions the methodology and assumptions in the Asserson Report and says: “The authors appear to think that the BBC’s acknowledgement – however constrained and intermittent – that a deadly assault on Gaza was taking place was in itself a breach of impartiality regulations.”
Strangely, while the Asserson Report was splashed all over mainstream media, Freedman’s article debunking it has gone virtually unremarked – including by the BBC itself.
NWI
This article was originally published by Byline Times on Thu 12 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
BBC, Bias and Gaza: A Partial Study of Impartiality
A new much publicised report that claims the BBC is “heavily biased against Israel” flies in the face of other specialist and academic studies
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It’s pretty obvious that Israel’s leaders and their supporters would only be happy if the BBC and every other global news organisation never reported on Palestine at all. That is the idea, isn’t it? to shut everybody up so that they can go on with their genocide without interference and without having to explain themselves at every step? Or am I being too cynical?
I happen to agree that “the BBC’s reporting neglects to acknowledge the ‘existential threat to Israel’.
If the BBC was doing its job properly, it would explain how the ISRAELI GOVERNMENT’s actions since 7.10.23 risk the destruction of the state of Israel. No wonder those Israelis who can leave are now leaving in such numbers.
I think the BBC bias in favour of Israel in its news reports is so glaringly obvious that the parties complicit in the Gaza genocide (which includes all the establishment organs and US,UK, Eur governments) have decided to make this preposterous charge to get their defence in first and give the issue of bias some some sort of spurious equality of it being a debatable issue
An AI generated analysis of media coverage of the history of slavery in the USA would (I hope) show a bias in sympathy to the enslaved people. A similar analysis of the media history of the Irish famine would show a bias in sympathy to the Irish. An analysis of the reporting of Jack the Ripper would show a bias towards his victims. It is not the function of the media to be even-handed in their attitudes to different participants but to report the facts and to draw the moral conclusions that those facts indicate.