BBC ADMITS Bias In Favour Of Israel - With ABSURD Defence

This is an astonishing confession from the BBC about its pro-Israel bias. Let's just go through this. News Chord is a media watchdog. It's done really, really important work on challenging mainstream media bias, not least on Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. So, for example, earlier this year, they did this crucial report which analysed how Western media outlets have sanitised Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. And they did it, you know, with the statistics, the raw stats. Not anecdotes, not kind of vibes, but actual empirical data which showed exactly how the genocide was sanitised. Now, last month, they took up an example of BBC reporting and they encouraged people to complain about it. And it was a classic of the genre. On the 21st of July, the BBC reported the killing of Firas al-Masri. His wife, Salza Biel, and their four children, Faryal, Salma, Amira and Nine, all of them burned alive by an Israeli attack at their home in Gaza City. But the fact they were burned to death was reported as a claim rather than as a fact with the perpetrator erased. Now, the BBC said the following. The brother of Firas al-Masri told the BBC that he'd be burnt to death along with his wife, Salza Biel, and their three daughters and son, Faryal, Salma, Amira and Nine. Now, as News Corp put it, six people were burned alive and the sentence contains no one who did it. Compare the sentence the BBC writes about Israeli deaths in the same passage. Four Israeli soldiers have been killed in Palestinian attacks in Gaza. So there, the killer is named in the same breath as the killing, they say. Now, we'll get to their response, which is so revealing, by the way, about overall how they're approaching this heinous crime, by which I mean the genocide. But as usual, what the BBC did in this report, just to go through various issues, is treat Israel as a credible source in a way they'd never treat Russia, despite its obsessive record of lying. They write the Israeli military said its target was a Hamas operative and said it was looking into the results of the attack. As News Corp put it, the first time Israel appears, it is to excuse the strike. The army that killed the family gets on to say why, before anyone has established what it hit, the BBC prints the justification without noting that no evidence was offered for it. So, and we will come on to Israel's record as well, because this is linked to, the BBC say, in terms of their record of lying and deceit. Now, there's part of the article which says this, on Tuesday afternoon, another four people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a home in the al-Samar area of central Gaza City, Palestinian media cited medics as saying. Two more were killed in an Israeli drone attack on a vehicle in the al-Zahra area to the south of Gaza City, they added. Now, News Corp say, Palestinian deaths arrive at three removes, Palestinian media cited medics as saying, then they added, an Israeli statement in the same passage travels at one, the Israeli military said, every extra step is a nudge to the reader to doubt what follows and only one side gets them. Now, here's just the crucial, really crucial part. News Corp know this line of the piece, according to Gaza's Hamas run health ministry, at least 1,168 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October, four Israeli soldiers have been killed in Palestinian attacks in Gaza over the same period. I mean, this talk of a ceasefire, by the way, just before we get on to the actual key point is so Orwellian, you know, in a passage in which you're talking about the killings of over a thousand people in the space of a year, and then you're talking about a ceasefire, when clearly the Israeli military is doing anything but ceasing to fire. Now, so News Corp say, two paragraphs later, the BBC attributes 1,168 Palestinian deaths to Gaza's Hamas run health ministry, then writes that four Israeli soldiers have been killed in its own voice with no source at all, both figures come from a party to the conflict, only the Palestinian one is treated as a claim. They expand on this, the Palestinian dead are attributed to a ministry the BBC labels by the party that runs it, Hamas, the Israeli dead are simply stated in the BBC's own voice with no source at all, even though that figure comes from the Israeli military. The BBC speaks in its own voice about a death toll exactly once in this article, and it does it for the Israeli one. Over 200 official complaints were submitted to the BBC about this article. The BBC response which News Corp had printed goes like this, some complain that the report did not attribute Israeli casualties in the same way as it attributed Gazan casualties. Our editorial guidelines recognise that impartiality is resistant to simple quantification. It does not, for instance, require identical wording is used about different sides of the conflict. As you will appreciate, there are significant distinctions between the two places. The idea it's possible to establish a like-for-like standard of ignores the enormous differences of what is an asymmetric conflict, not least the fact it is taking place in Gaza, where civilian infrastructure has entirely crumbled, whereas Israel remains a functioning democracy. Consequently, there has been an asymmetry in the information coming out of Gaza, which is reflected in our reporting, and where the editorial guidelines also requires to maintain due impartiality and accuracy, meaning that which is adequate and appropriate to the Where to even begin here? They claim here that they accept the deaths of Israeli soldiers as fact, unlike the far, far, far, far, far greater numbers of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel, because it's an asymmetric conflict. Now, their use of the term asymmetric conflict is completely absurd. You'd think they'd be referring to the fact that it's a military superpower which is armed to the teeth by the United States and its Western allies, versus a tiny strip of land the size of East London, which is an estate. It doesn't even have a state, which has a rank-and-file guerrilla army with light arms. That's not what they mean. They mean it's because Israel is what they call a functioning democracy, whereas in Gaza, civilian infrastructure has entirely crumbled, which they say means there's an asymmetry of coming out of Gaza. Let's just unpack the asymmetry of information coming out of Gaza. There is an asymmetry because, in large part, Israel has massacred Palestinian journalists. They have been butchered in the biggest killing of journalists ever in history. There has been no bigger slaughter of journalists in such a short space of time, and at the same time, foreign journalists have been banned from entering Gaza. Now, the BBC should be kicking off about this. They have complained about it, but they should be doing so loudly and angrily and demanding their journalists are allowed to enter, and they should say, as a matter of course, in their reports, that foreign journalists are banned by Israel from entering Gaza, in the way they keep weaving in, as we can see, Hamas-run health ministry. But they don't weave in the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. You'd think that's a pretty salient point, which should be woven into their articles, but they don't do that either. They say Gaza's civilian infrastructure has entirely crumbled. How did that happen, BBC? Crumbled? I mean, it's a passive word. It literally strips away any sense of a perpetrator. You don't listen to entirely crumbled and think it's you're talking about something that's been attacked. I mean, it sounds like wear and tear. It sounds like something falling apart because of age, or because it's not been built properly or something, rather than being systematically obliterated. The infrastructure of Gaza did not mysteriously crumble of its own accord, did it? It was bombed to pieces by Israel. But you don't get that at all from that expression, crumbled. And they're saying because Israel succeeded in destroying Gaza's civilian infrastructure, that means we don't treat the killings perpetrated by Israel as a fact, unlike the killings of the soldiers doing the genocide. So they're rewarding Israel for destroying Gaza by then diluting the hideous truth about what Israel is doing to Gaza. So what they're saying here is the more that a powerful belligerent destroys or controls the institutions that are capable of documenting its conduct, the more the authority is subsequently granted to that belligerent's own account. So you give it more authority because it's destroyed the institutions capable of documenting it. That's in part what it's saying. And you know, it says Israel's a functioning democracy. Absurd, by the way. Israel is the occupying force between the river and the sea, with millions of Palestinians who are under its domination and occupation, who have no say over their own future or say over what Israel does to them. That's not a democracy, that's an ethnocracy. It's a state which practices apartheid. I've been to the West Bank, I've seen apartheid up close, where Palestinians are deprived of their most basic rights, live under a military occupation, where the only country on earth which routinely puts kids through military courts, kangaroo courts, which the trials last a few minutes, with an IDF officer as the judge, conducted in Hebrew, or people are just, sorry, they're incarcerated with no charge or trial, they're routinely massacred, their basic rights are just taken away, they're driven from their homes violently. I'm talking about the West Bank here. Functioning democracy. I mean, that's a tyranny in the West Bank. And that's three million Palestinians in the West Bank, let alone the survivors of Gaza, around two million or so, who again live under Israeli occupation and have been driven into a tiny area of Gaza, which is already a tiny strip. Now this idea, even on its own terms, says it's a functioning democracy, that Israel constantly lies about deaths, about killings. So just one example, when Israeli forces massacred 15 Palestinian emergency workers back in March 2025, the IDF initially said the vehicles had approached without lights or marking. Then video came out which showed clearly marked ambulances and fire engines with their lights on. That's just one example. They lie and lie and lie. So what's the function of this so-called functioning democracy? What are they talking about? And also, we know that every academic study shows that the death toll, the official death toll issued by Gaza's health ministry, is a drastic underestimate. Every academic study shows that. Now as News Corp put it, so to be clear, the occupying power that flattened Gaza speaks in the BC's own voice because it holds elections. The Palestinians beneath the rubble get caveats because their hospitals and ministries no longer stand due to the genocide the occupiers committed for almost three years. Israel destroyed the means of verification. The BBC uses this to give them complete impunity. Then it casts doubt on every death toll in Gaza from an Israeli massacre. Now I mean, look, the BBC talking about this concept of due impartiality, which means coverage should be adequate and appropriate to the output, but that doctrine is about the weight and prominence given to perspectives. It's not about applying different standards for deciding whether a fact is established or not. That's not what it means. I mean, the BBC guidelines say due impartiality doesn't require mathematically equal coverage, but they also demand consistent editorial judgment that you distinguish fact from an opinion and require the BBC to hold power to account consistently. So this is a category error. Due impartiality means different political airtimes need not receive identical airtime. So for example, I don't know, someone who thinks the climate emergency is real, which is just a scientific fact, and someone who doesn't, which isn't. You don't need to go, well, one person thinks this, one person thinks that. The BBC had to, originally they did do that, but then they rode back on that. What it means due impartiality in practice is different factual claims have to be assessed through the same journalistic process. Source, evidence, corroboration and uncertainty. It doesn't mean that the BBC is given a licence to apply different standards of proof, which is what they're doing here. Now, the asymmetry of power should actually mean more scrutiny of Israel, not more deference, because they're invoking asymmetrical conflicts as justification for different treatment. But an asymmetric conflict means a vast asymmetry, not just in the infrastructure, but it's the military force, the control of territory, surveillance, the ability to shape the international information media environment. Israel invests in a vast international propaganda campaign, Hasbro. Now, the rules of the BBC say it must apply appropriate scrutiny to governments and others who exercise power and responsibility. Its overarching impartiality principle requires it to hold power to account consistently. Now, because Israel is the vastly more powerful actor here, with one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, as well as the vast resources it ploughs into propaganda, its censorship regime, there's a military censorship in Israel, its banning of international journalists from Gaza, and its killing of Palestinian journalists. That means its claims warrant particularly rigorous scrutiny. That's what the BBC should be doing. It's absurd to say that asymmetry means that the weaker, devastated population gets more caveats, while the stronger belligerent receives the decorative, active voice. So, what the BBC have done here is just, this is more evidence. This should be seen as evidence about how they are accepting Israeli propaganda about Israel's Western-facilitated genocide. It's a completely indefensible, outrageous response. But it's useful, just not in the way that the BBC probably thought. Please like and subscribe, leave your thoughts in the comments, help us take on a media which has facilitated genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, Israel's genocide. They facilitated it. It wouldn't have been possible without the media. Patreon.com. You make all the work we do possible. Please like, subscribe, share the video.