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:

• The BBC refused to label as “terrorists” Hamas members and the other Palestinians who participated in the attack on Israel, an attack the BBC also refused to label as “terrorism.”
• The BBC insists on using the term “occupied Palestinian land” when referring to the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, if the BBC doesn’t want to recognize that Israel obtained the land by conquest in 1967, it could refer to the West Bank as Jordan and refer to Gaza as Egypt because those countries seized the land in 1948 (although Jordan subsequently relinquished a claim to the West Bank).
• The BBC loves to call Yasser Arafat “presidential,” as, for example, when it claims that Israeli bombs landed on “the presidential compound of Yasser Arafat.”
• The BBC refers to all Israeli settlements near Gaza and the West Bank as “illegal,” implying that they are legitimate military targets.
• BBC reporting is vitriolic when referring to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a surprise given that it was Sharon who had Israel retreat from the Gaza Strip.

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.”

• Killed in her pink roller skates, a Palestinian girl’s photo in Gaza goes viral
• Health workers in Gaza administer polio vaccines during pauses in fighting
• An American woman was shot and killed while protesting in Israeli Occupied West Bank
• Whatever happened to ... the Gaza neurosurgeon who faced a wrenching decision
• Father in Gaza mourns his daughter, who was killed while wearing pink roller skates
• Is Netanyahu an Obstacle to a Ceasefire Deal Between Israel and Hamas?
• Will Israel's mass protests motivate Netanyahu to make a deal with Hamas?
• Children in Gaza who need medical care are not being allowed to evacuate, say aid groups (As a reminder, before the war, only Israel provided sophisticated medical care to children in Gaza and the West Bank)
• Evacuation orders force families in Gaza into perilous and overcrowded 'safe zones' (No mention, of course, of the fact that Israel has had to evacuate all of Northern Israel because of non-stop Hezbollah shelling since October 7)

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:

• Israelis protest and workers' strike is planned after 6 more hostages die in Gaza
• Israel Mourns Dead Hostages; Gaza Civilians Don't Know Where to Go
• 6 hostages in Gaza were found dead by the Israeli military
• Israelis protest Netanyahu government after bodies of 6 hostages recovered from Gaza

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.