Is the BBC politically biased?

The BBC's guidelines oblige it to remain impartial across its news reporting, but the corporation is again facing scrutiny over its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Its Middle East online editor, Raffi Berg, was accused by columnist Owen Jones of reframing stories to be favourable towards Israel in a piece on Drop Site entitled "The BBC's Civil War over Gaza".

The site said Jones spoke to "13 journalists and other BBC staffers" who offered "remarkable insights into how senior figures" at the BBC "skewed stories in favour of Israel's narratives". He added that concerns raised by staff members about bias had been dismissed.

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Since the article was published in December, reports suggest Berg is considering legal action against Jones. In response, the BBC said it rejected "any suggestion of a 'lenient stance'" in its reporting and that it was the "world's most trusted international news source".

Is the BBC biased over Israel-Hamas war?

As with many issues, when it comes to Israel-Hamas the BBC is often simultaneously accused of bias towards each side. In March last year, The Telegraph's Danny Cohen, a former BBC television director, accused "journalists working for its heavily promoted BBC Verify brand" of "anti-Israel bias", adding that there is a "serious problem with anti-Israel bias in its newsroom".

Then in November, the corporation was accused by more than 100 employees of giving "favourable coverage toward Israel", said The Independent. The letter, anonymously signed by staff and more than 230 media industry workers, said the BBC failed to provide "consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza".

The question of Israel-Gaza bias was the subject of a much-publicised research paper, called The Asserson Report, which used AI to analyse BBC reporting. It concluded that the BBC has "materially breached its obligations" of impartiality and revealed "overwhelming disparity" between reporting on the two sides, with "sympathy for Palestinians vastly outstripping "sympathy for Israelis".

The report was produced by Trevor Asserson, a British lawyer who now runs Israel's largest international law firm, and has been described by The Telegraph as a "long-standing campaigner against BBC bias".

Its findings were "extensively covered in right-wing news outlets", said Des Freedman at Byline Times, who criticised the report for a "flawed methodology" and "genuinely baffling findings".

A comprehensive assessment of UK news reporting of Gaza published by the Centre for Media Monitoring in March 2024 "came to quite different conclusions", he added: that there has been repeated misrepresentation of Palestinian perspectives – but this "received no attention at all in mainstream media at the time".

This is the real "balance of power when it comes to UK media coverage of Gaza" it added.

What does the public think?

There is a trend among "right-wing populist voices" to claim that the BBC's political coverage is "systematically biased pro-Labour and anti-Conservative" and that the "silent majority" is being "suppressed", wrote Patrick Barwise at the London School of Economics. In reality, he added, the "majority of the public won't agree with the claim".

A YouGov poll from October last year suggests a similar outlook. Around 23% of those polled said the BBC was generally favourable to Labour, while 18% said it was generally favourable to the Tories. The results suggest the majority of the general public "explicitly or implicitly disagree" that there is a "systemic" bias either way.

A report by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport under the Conservative government in January last year suggested reforms to "boost confidence in the BBC's impartiality and complaints system" among the public, including plans for Ofcom, the media regulator, to police the BBC's news website and YouTube channel as part of the mid-term review of the corporation's charter. The Labour government has yet to outline any plans for BBC reform.

Is regulation the answer?

Ofcom currently regulates the BBC's TV, radio and on-demand output, but the government said last year that oversight should be extended to digital services to allow the watchdog to hold the BBC to account "in a more robust way".

After complaints about bias rose by 50% in 2023, the then culture secretary Lucy Frazer "set out reforms including plans for Ofcom, the media regulator, to police the BBC's news website and YouTube channel" as part of the mid-term review of the corporation's charter, said The Times. The regulator can now "take enforcement action if articles don't meet relevant broadcast standards", the BBC reported.

One useful idea is to "move the final stage of its complaints process on alleged bias – Gary Lineker's tweets and the like – to Ofcom", wrote Anne McElvoy for The i Paper. This would mean the BBC would no longer "be judge and jury in its own major controversies, which is hard going on everyone involved".

But attacking bias is "also about figuring out where coverage that the market or algorithms do not support should figure in the future, and how they can avoid extinction".