On September 8, 2024, The Sunday Telegraph splashed a headline across its front page announcing that the BBC “breached guidelines 1,500 times” over the Israel-Hamas war. Those inverted commas around “breached guidelines 1,500 times” were an immediate red flag for anyone who had followed the Telegraph’s staunchly pro-Israel (and longstanding anti-BBC) editorial position. What was the source of that – very serious – allegation? And was it legitimate?

Allegations of BBC bias by the UK’s right-leaning press are almost as old as the BBC, prompted usually by a combination of ideological and commercial opposition to a publicly funded broadcaster whose free and trusted news makes life difficult for publishers trying to make a living from advertising and subscription.

In this case, with views polarised on both sides of a highly charged debate about whether Israel was going beyond a proportionate response to the terrorist attack of October 7 last year, it was more important than ever to ask questions about the provenance of the Telegraph story – especially since its conclusions were, predictably, quoted by both The Sun and Daily Mail and pro-Israel advocates across the media.

There was no mystery about the story’s provenance. The Sunday Telegraph was given advance notice – to ensure there was an appropriate front-page splash – of a 196-page report (excluding schedules and appendices) written by Trevor Asserson. Under the heading “Author and Principal Contributors”, Asserson describes himself as follows:

Trevor is an experienced English litigation solicitor, formerly at Herbert Smith and Bird & Bird, UK based law firms. In 2005 he set up Asserson Law Offices, today Israel’s largest international law firm. Asserson is a UK and US law firm based in London, with its principal office in Tel Aviv.

In a preceding paragraph, explaining the report’s origins and funding, Asserson is again transparent about affiliations:

The research … was designed and run by Trevor Asserson independently of the direction of any particular client. Most of the work from solicitors within Asserson Law Offices was carried out on a voluntary basis. However, one Israeli businessman, based in London, has funded out of pocket expenses, including paying for external lawyers conducting human review and expenses incurred by the data scientists who have contributed to the Report. The majority of the contributors to the Report have personal connections to Israel.

This was not, therefore, an academic project funded through a grant-giving body such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) or Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), where proposals and methodologies are subjected to rigorous peer review. That in itself does not disqualify its approach or conclusions. Given the project’s funding and origins, it does, however, necessitate a particularly careful examination of the validity and reliability of its methods. Unfortunately, they do not stand up to proper academic scrutiny. They do, however, raise important questions about how and why the report was covered so extensively in The Sunday Telegraph, and subsequently in other newspapers.

Before embarking on a critique, given the controversial nature of the subject matter, the authors of this article need to exercise the same level of transparency as Asserson.

We are both Jewish and both regard ourselves as Zionists – believing in a two-state solution that guarantees the security of both Israel and a safe homeland for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. As journalism educators, we are particularly concerned by the 128 Palestinian journalists who have died, some of whom are alleged (by the non-partisan Committee to Protect Journalists) to have been directly targeted by the IDF despite wearing press vests.

We are also internationally recognised media academics, with a long track record in peer-reviewed publications, and experienced in conducting rigorous research in media and communications.

The report – a critique

Assessing bias, as every social scientist will tell you, is difficult and requires a healthy degree of self-criticism and awareness of the complexities. Previous studies undertaken, for example, by the Glasgow Media Group, Cardiff University and Loughborough on other controversial areas of television news have both contextualised their approach within a carefully defined framework, and qualified their findings through a number of caveats about the difficulties of measurement and the necessarily subjective interpretation that such studies can entail. Unfortunately, the Asserson report demonstrates no such self-awareness or understanding.

The “dataset” is derived from four months of monitoring between October 7, 2023, and February 7, 2024. It analysed four BBC programmes (Today, Newsnight, Breakfast and News at Ten) as well the Bowen-Doucet BBC podcast and all articles on the BBC website and BBC Arabic website containing the relevant key words (of which, more below). Both the sampling time frame and selected programmes are reasonable enough. At the heart of this project, however, is a fundamental methodological flaw that disqualifies its findings from any serious consideration.

The report’s approach is based on a simplistic premise: that “the level of coverage given to and sympathy shown to Israeli and/or Palestinian perspectives … represents a reliable indicator of what the BBC considers correct to achieve due impartiality”. In fact, “level of coverage” is not measured and would anyway be fairly meaningless without benchmark figures from other broadcasters. The body of data that leads the report’s author to his conclusions is based almost entirely on what he calls a “sympathy analysis”.

Crudely stated, the selected texts are subjected to a binary analysis which asks simply “Does this text create sympathy for…”? The sentence is completed by three binary pairs consisting of Israel v Palestine; Israeli people v Palestinian people; and the IDF/Israeli military v Hamas. This approach is lent a spurious sense of scientific legitimacy through what it calls “both a human sympathy analysis, and an AI based sympathy analysis”.

This merely means that the same crude approach was implemented using both Chat GPT and lawyers working for Asserson who were asked to code relevant news items from the perspective of a “fair minded and informed observer” – a common law test of supposed objectivity, which has no basis in social science research, nor indeed in the BBC’s and Ofcom’s codes on impartiality. That these reviewers were “experienced lawyers, trained to distinguish good arguments from poor ones” does nothing to vitiate the essential subjectivity of such an analysis, especially given the project’s manifest objectives at the outset.

The results need not detain us, given that they were entirely predictable: “Except for the first week immediately after the Hamas attack on October 7, there was a marked excess of sympathy in favour of Palestinians as compared with sentiment for Israelis.” Had this conclusion extended to the Hamas/ IDF binary analysis, there might have been some cause for concern. However, the report notes, almost in passing, that “in relation to the IDF/Hamas … the IDF receives more positive sentiment than Hamas”. Entirely as expected.

It can hardly be a surprise to any genuinely impartial observer that, while the events of October 7 would have evoked a huge amount of sympathy for Israel and its people, the events that followed would have evoked a similarly emotional reaction for Gaza and the Palestinian people, given the sheer scale of reprisals. With 90 per cent of Gazans rendered homeless, more than 40,000 dead and countless more wounded, warnings from humanitarian agencies about imminent starvation and the spread of disease, and clear evidence of at least one aid convoy being deliberately targeted by the Israeli military, there cannot feasibly be any surprise about why reporting might have appeared sympathetic.

These reports were, to put it bluntly, factually accurate descriptions of what was happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. Nor were they unique to the BBC: we can be very confident indeed that, had similarly crude analytical frames been applied to reports from Sky, ITV, Channel 4, CNN and countless other news outlets seeking to cover the conflict as impartially as possible, the same conclusions would have been reached. The problem was the method, not the BBC.

Beyond the “sympathy” analysis, the report seeks to challenge the BBC’s reporting on the basis, among other things, of its selection of interviews; through what it defines as eight serious “omissions”; through alleged breaches of accuracy (some corrected, others not); through analysis of “obscure or ambiguous language”; and through an analysis of “trends” carried out by reviewers. Needless to say, all five trends supported the author’s conclusions.

This is followed by a 15-page ad hominem attack on the reporting of Jeremy Bowen, one of the most respected BBC correspondents whom most journalists would regard as a model of impartiality in probably the most highly charged conflict area in the world. All of these chapters unfortunately suffer from the same flaw of subjective interpretation in what can only be described as an agenda-driven project.

Thanks to some diligent reporting by the former Times (and Jewish Chronicle) columnist David Aaronovitch – whose Substack analysis of the Asserson report was more comprehensive and even more scathing than ours – we know more about its provenance. Aaronovitch discovered an interview that Asserson gave to the Israeli business website Globes last November – when his carefully designed “research” project had only just started. 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.” During the course of the interview, he trots out the now familiar – if outdated – right-wing tropes about almost every BBC journalist having The Guardian on their desks and the whole organisation suffering from “institutionalized bias”.

The Globes’ piece ends with the words: “The current examination of the BBC is expected to mature into an official complaint [and] was commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism.” As Aaronovitch wryly commented: “You may think … that the guilty verdict had been read out before the trial had begun.”

A different report into media bias

Six months before the Asserson report, another study of media bias was published using different techniques. Running to a mere 147 pages (including appendices), this report did not confine itself to the BBC but examined 13 TV channels and the online news sites of 28 publishers for one month between October 7 and November 7. Using a keyword search to

identify relevant news items, it analysed more than 176,000 TV clips and 25,000 news articles. The keywords were any one of Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Palestine or Palestinian. In terms of its sampling and time span, this study was, therefore, just as valid as the Asserson research but ranged over a much wider media landscape.

Very few people will have been aware of this report because it received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media, and certainly no headlines or editorial comment in the press. This is no doubt because it was commissioned by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a project established in 2018 by the Muslim Council of Britain Charitable Foundation to “monitor the British media on how it reports on Muslims and Islam”. Its main author, Faisal Hanif, has a background in journalism and research. On the basis of its analysis, the CfMM report established what it called “20 statistical insights” grouped into six themes.

CONTEXT: more than three-quarters of the articles described the conflict as an “Israel-Hamas war”, rather than “war in Gaza” involving displacement of nearly two million Palestinians, and denial of food, water and medical aid. There was also very little acknowledgement that Gaza was an occupied territory.

FRAMING: the conflict was labelled as an Israel-Hamas war twice as much as an Israel Gaza war in Western media. “Israel’s right” to defend itself appeared five times more often than the rights of Palestinians.

LANGUAGE ON TV: in broadcast news, two out of every three emotive terms were applied to Israeli deaths, compared to just one in 10 for Palestinian deaths.

LANGUAGE IN ONLINE NEWS: emotive terms were four times more likely to be applied to the actions of Hamas against Israelis, compared to the killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

UNVERIFIED CLAIMS : there were 361 references to “beheaded” with “babies” when referencing the Hamas attack on Israel, nearly half of which occurred on GB News and Talk TV. Very few of these claims were challenged.

LACK OF PALESTINIAN VOICES : on TV, Israeli perspectives were referenced nearly three times as often as those of Palestinian voices, and in online news they were referenced almost twice as much. In addition, sources of information about Palestinian deaths were undermined by applying the tag “Hamas-run” despite humanitarian and UN agencies describing them as accurate.

Just as with the Asserson project, there are legitimate questions that can be raised about the efficacy of this research and the authors themselves acknowledge (unlike Asserson) that “an element of subjectivity … may impact some of these findings”. But there is no question that, particularly in its analysis of some of the headlines and reporting in the UK’s right-wing press, the CfMM report uncovered levels of partisanship in news stories (as opposed to op-ed comment pieces) that clearly breached journalistic norms of impartial reporting. Unlike Asserson, there was no hidden agenda designed to attack a particular news institution, nor any ad hominem critiques of individual journalists. In our view, the conclusions of this report are significantly more difficult to debunk than those of Asserson.

Our main concern here, however, is not to compare critiques of two very different approaches to measuring impartiality. It is to draw attention to the way in which agenda-driven journalism exploits the notion of “research” to lend a spurious legitimacy to a very partial perspective. The Telegraph papers have made no secret of their unconditional support for Israel and its response to the October 7 terrorist attack. They have also made no secret of their hostility towards the BBC. The same applies to the Murdoch papers and to the Daily Mail.

The uncritical trumpeting of a deeply flawed study that was manifestly designed to reach a predestined conclusion only serves to undermine further any remaining trust in professional practices that are already under attack from online sources. These agendas might suit the commercial and ideological interests of those publishers, but when basic journalistic norms are subsumed beneath a corporate worldview, is it any wonder that people are losing faith in the mainstream media and turning to the conspiracy theories that are proliferating on social media?