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.
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
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