Standards? What Standards?

A new report by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, now based in Jerusalem, alleges persistent anti-Israel bias on the part of the British Broadcasting Company. Asserson led a team of 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists who used artificial intelligence to analyze the BBC’s news coverage. The Telegraph reports:

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.

The research, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, also found that Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict.

On Saturday, Danny Cohen, a former BBC executive, warned that there was now an “institutional crisis” at the national broadcaster and called for an independent inquiry into its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

The Asserson report counts how many times the BBC has associated terms like “genocide” and “war crimes” with Israel vs. Hamas:

This won’t surprise anyone who has paid attention. The BBC has coasted on its World War II reputation for decades. For some time now, it has been one of the world’s less reliable news sources. It isn’t just anti-Semitism: its pervasive leftist bias colors just about every news story the BBC publishes on any topic of controversy.

The idea of a state-supported news service is anachronistic at best. At this point, the British should cut the BBC loose and let it take its place somewhere alongside MSNBC and the New York Times.

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