Overview
This work aims to shed light on bias in BBC reporting on Palestine in a way that is both transparent and reproducible. We analyzed a total of 600 articles and 4000 livefeed posts on the BBC website between October 7, 2023 and December 2, 2023 in an attempt to surface the systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated in the media.
The pipeline of the study is as follows:
We obtained source articles and livefeed posts from the BBC website by selecting relevant topics (see below for full list) and
We parsed the individual sentences using the Stanford CoreNLP natural language processing
Using the results from step 2, we identified sentences with mentions of death and manually tagged each one of them as referring to Palestinians, Israelis, neither or both. None of the tagging was performed automatically.
I fail to understand the results, is it possible to formulate it for simple folks like me?
There’s a lot of analysis about frequency but to me this is one of the most important statistics:
Does that imply BBC bias towards favoring Israel? Or is it weighted by ground truth somewhere? What I mean by this i expect there is lots of mentions of “murdered” israelis in the week of Oct 7 compared say towards the last week of November, given when the actual events took place. Frequency is not that informative without a distribution to compare it to.
Yes, this Owen Jones video explains it in more detail
Another clear example from the CNN which recently had a whistleblower that leaked that the IDF censors their content
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this Owen Jones video
Another clear example from the CNN
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
When talking about Israelis killed, the BBC used the word “grandmother” 52 times, while it used it 32 times when describing Palestinians killed. Likewise, it used the word “murdered” 101 times for Israelis killed while only once when talking about Palestinians.
The rest of the rows are similar.
The intended takeaway is that Palestinian deaths are reported blandly, while Isrseli deaths are painted in a much more endearing light.
Granted, there are some considerations of possible biases towards the results. For example, maybe there were less articles about Palestinians and as such less opportunities to use the same word. Maybe there isn’t enough information flowing out of Gaza as opposed to Israel or BBC. There are also the more extreme options of the authors of the data trying to paint the BBC negatively and the BBC strategically painting Israeli deaths as more tragic and brutal than Palestinian desths.
Which option you take as the most plausible is your call tho.
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