The Media Research Center loves its shoddy and biased media “studies,” and has found a new one to champion. Tim Graham did the deed in a Sept. 22 post:
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is considered the crown jewel of “public” broadcasting. All global journalism in English seeks to mimic it. That’s not a good thing, since it is rife with leftist bias, and on the Israel-Hamas war, it can be difficult to distinguish from Al-Jazeera.
At FoxNews.com, lawyer Trevor Asserson explained his research into anti-Israel bias, and how the BBC “flunks Journalism 101.” Like PBS and NPR in America, the BBC is legally obliged to produce impartial news. For this, it is rewarded with $5 billion a year by British taxpayers. (PBS and NPR surely envy that.)
Asserson and a team of about 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words from the BBC on TV, radio, podcasts, and social media, starting on October 7, 2023 — when Hamas slaughtered innocent Israeli citizens and others (including Americans). At the MRC, we wouldn’t trust software to substitute for human reading, but knowing the BBC’s patterns, we doubt a different result.
In BBC’s English language TV output, they found while some programs were neutral, the remainder were between 90% and 100% pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli.
Graham plays down the fact that AI was used to compile the study, which is odd because the MRC has repeatedly attacked Google’s AI for purported bias — and it appears Graham should have similar skepticism here, as the AI usage is key to how much of a garbage study this is, as an analysis by the UK’s Media Reform Coalition found:
But there is little intelligence in the analysis itself and instead pages and pages of charts that attempt to prove just how badly the BBC has treated Israel and its supporters.
This is partly a result of a flawed methodology which relies on a very naïve conception of AI, not least its claim that ChatGPT is ‘not subject to inherent human subjective judgement’ (p. 23) and is instead an ‘unbiased proxy for the “casual everyday audience for news” that does not have an opinion on the conflict’ (p. 123). AI may not have an opinion on the conflict but those asking the questions do and, in any case, its language models are only as good as the content they depend on, a significant proportion of which is generated by major news organisations such as the New York Times who certainly do have skin in the game.
The Report’s reliance on ‘human sympathy analysis’ (carried out here by both humans and AI) is also flawed. Of course there was likely to be significant amounts of sympathy towards Palestinians at a time, after 7 October, when it was they who were being bombed, starved and forcibly required to leave their homes. Not even the mainstream media could fail to notice this. The Report’s finding that the ‘sympathy analysis showed a very marked pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli imbalance across all principal television news programmes’ (p. 41) is therefore hardly surprising and reveals the frustration of pro-Israeli voices that anyone should be sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians under siege rather than a breach of impartiality across four months of coverage.
It also turns out that Asserson brings a certain pro-Israel bias to the project, as well as a lack of actual researchers to do the work:
The background of the Report’s authors is revealing. Asserson himself is a long-time critic of the BBC’s coverage of Israel and has partnered with a series of Israeli lawyers and data scientists organised via a group called Research for Impartial Media (RIMe). There is no information about this group other than that its convenor, Dr Haran Shari-Narkiss is a neuroscientist whose most recent paper is on the ‘Stability and Flexibility of Odor Representations in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb’.
Crucially, it appears that no media researchers or indeed journalists were part of the research team and there is no reference at all in the nearly 400 pages of documents to studies, such as the CMM one, that have found systematic bias against Palestinians in mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine.
[…]The Report’s conclusion that the BBC was overwhelmingly biased in its coverage of Gaza flies not only in the face of other specialist and academic reports and studies but reflects the authors’ frustration that there was ‘sympathy’ for a civilian population under attack. 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. In reality, and despite the Israeli government’s best effort to suppress this coverage by preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza, the fact that these awful scenes have made their way into public consciousness, is actually thanks more to brave reporting from Palestinian journalists inside Gaza than it is to a BBC that is often reluctant to criticise Israel for its actions, let alone to describe them as genocidal.
Meanwhile, the BBC itself called the report discredited:
The BBC continued: “We do not accept that impartiality can be assessed using ‘sympathy’; nor by quantifying daily coverage of events or counting words.
“We believe the use of AI to measure impartiality in this way is unreliable and unproven. The methods used in the report fail to take account of basic journalistic principles and practice, and often rely on selective interpretations and incomplete evidence.
“We do not see any new evidence to suggest we have breached our obligations for due impartiality and accuracy during our coverage of this highly complex, challenging and polarising conflict.”
Instead of acknowledging the serious flaws in the study, Graham simply parroted Asserson’s discredited claims:
At this point, the BBC’s anti-Israel bias matches the ideology of the new Labour Party government. Asserson concluded his study “blows the myth of impartiality out of the water. The BBC doesn’t achieve impartiality and is not remotely close to achieving it. BBC management must either take back control of the ship, or the British people should demand a refund.”
Just like a shoddy “media researcher” to embrace the shoddy reaearch of others.