Mainstream media are biased against Palestinians Opinion by South China Morning Post

When Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, took over Twitter, now renamed X, he forced state-funded or affiliated media around the world to identify themselves as such on his platform last year.

The BBC and the CBC, Canada’s equivalent, threw a fit. How dare you, Musk, they effectively said, we are the epitome of journalistic integrity and objectivity, South China Morning Post reports.

“The BBC is, and always has been, independent,” a spokeswoman said at the time.

The CBC sent off an even angrier and condescending missive.

“Editorial independence … is the beating heart of what we do each day in the news division of Canada’s national public broadcaster,” it said.

“We are beholden to no one. We report without fear or favour. We act only in the public interest.”

You do wonder if anyone blushed making public statements like that.

As it turns out, Musk was right, at least when it comes to reporting on Palestine. Sadly, X this week temporarily suspended many accounts perceived to be critical of Israel; not exactly an endearing stance for Musk to take on free speech.

Now, a new study using automated “machine learning” techniques shows that thousands of online articles and posts by the BBC tended to use emotive words that consistently conveyed compassion for victims of brutality in reporting on Israeli deaths, but far more neutral words when it came to Palestinian deaths.

Meanwhile, in responding to viewer complaints about systematic bias in the CBC’s reporting on Israeli and Palestinian deaths, CBC’s senior manager of journalistic standards, Nancy Waugh, said it was editorial policy not to use terms such as “murderous” and “brutal” in reporting on the killing of Palestinians. Really, that’s a real job title and apparently one of the highest paid in the business in Canada.

Her reply followed a complaint from a retired academic at Humber College in Toronto, who shared the correspondence with The Breach, a Canadian publication.

“You wrote that CBC reporters refer to the October 7 attacks as ‘murderous,’ ‘vicious,’ or ‘brutal,’ but don’t use the same words to describe Israeli attacks that kill Palestinians,” Waugh wrote.

“Different words are used because although both result in death and injury, the events they describe are very different. The raid saw Hamas gunmen stream through the border fence and attack Israelis directly with firearms, knives and explosives. Gunmen chased down festival goers, assaulted kibbutzniks then shot them, fought hand to hand, and threw grenades. The attack was brutal, often vicious, and certainly murderous.

“Bombs dropped from thousands of feet and artillery shells lofted into Gaza from kilometres away result in death and destruction on a massive scale, but it is carried out remotely. The deadly results are unseen by those who caused them and the source unseen by those [who] suffer and die.”

Maybe it’s just me but I find her reasoning alarming. As Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian journalist, has commented on the CBC reply, “Westerners have an absolutely psychotic view of air strikes.”

“Military explosives rip human bodies apart. They burn people alive,” Johnstone wrote. “They trap them under rubble where they die excruciatingly slowly in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable. They leave people without limbs. They dismember and disfigure children for life. Many of the most agonising deaths in human history have been caused by bombs.”

Having caused some controversy in Canada, another CBC spokesman defended Waugh and elaborated on her response.

“Respectfully, we flatly reject the suggestion that Nancy Waugh’s response is an admission of a double standard,” the spokesman said.

“Every story CBC News covers is different and as such may be described in different ways, but always in accordance with CBC’s journalistic standards and practices.”

What makes both CBC replies even worse is the completely disproportionate death tolls between the Palestinians (23,300-plus deaths or 1 per cent of the Gaza population) and Israelis (1,200-plus).

While Israeli authorities have constantly revised down the October 7 death toll, we also know that some of the deaths and burned bodies were actually caused by Israeli friendly fire.

On average, according to Save the Children, more than 10 Palestinian children have had one or both legs amputated each day since Israel’s military assault was launched after the Hamas terror attacks on October 7. The amputation is now almost always carried out without anaesthetic because all the medicine ran out long ago after Israel blocked the resupply of vital food, clean water and medicine; and famine is now becoming a reality, as independent NGOs and United Nations agents have long warned.

But that’s not “murderous,” “vicious,” or “brutal”, according to the CBC. Frankly, I don’t know what kind of world we live in any more.

Oh, sorry, I almost forgot about the new BBC study, carried out by two data scientists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, who have identified a similar and “systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated”. But if data analytics are not your thing, a more user-friendly graphic presentation of the data is available here.

From 672 articles, 4,404 individual posts and 29 live feeds published by the BBC between October 7 and December 2, the study finds that words such as murder(ed) (101 times), massacre(ed) (23), and slaughter(ed) (20) were almost exclusively used to describe Israeli deaths. For reported Palestinian deaths, their respective word frequencies were 1, 1 and 0!

BBC reports were also much more likely to describe Israeli victims as mother and grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, father and grandfather, husband and wife, and son and grandson while the Palestinian dead were more likely to be described as such without the use of the more emotive descriptors.

Of course, the BBC and CBC are hardly the only ones. An expose by the news website The Intercept has found that all CNN reports related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have to be approved by its Jerusalem bureau, which operates under the Israel Defence Forces’ censors. So even if you are a CNN reporter working out of Amman or Riyadh, your copy has to be vetted in Jerusalem, and therefore by the Israeli military censors.

“War crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” a CNN staff member told The Intercept. Bombings are “blasts” attributed to no one until the Israeli military weighs in. And quotes from Palestinians face heavy scrutiny, while those from official Israeli sources sail through review.

Imagine the outcry if a major Western news network had to route all its reports about China through its bureau in Beijing to be approved by Communist Party censors!