Last night I slowly digested the new Owen Jones report, that claims (unbelievably) that there is a pro-Israel bias at the BBC (here are a few examples that prove the opposite 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). And as a result here is something I never thought I would ever say – that we should perhaps thank Owen Jones for writing what he did. His report on BBC bias may be utter junk, but it inadvertently highlights that identifiable Jews inside the BBC are being bullied and targeted by other BBC staff who hate Israel.
Let me explain.
The Owen Jones death spiral
Ever since the October 7 atrocities, Owen Jones has been falling deeper and deeper into his rabbit hole. As a journalist who started out as a Jeremy Corbyn fanboy, OJ’s standing was badly shaken by the Labour party antisemitism crisis and never truly recovered. Since 2019 he has tried to recreate himself numerous times yet found that the only people willing to listen to him were those that didn’t think that Labour had an antisemitism crisis in the first place. That particular bubble has a habit of forcing participants into a self-radicalisation spiral, and post October 7, Owen Jones became almost completely lost in an anti-Israel conspiratorial world. Dan Hodges recently went as far as describing Owen Jones as ‘being stuck in his death spiral’.
So Owen Jones just wrote an attack piece on the BBC claiming it is full of pro-Israel bias. His attack on the BBC is not new. Back in January, Owen Jones was referencing BBC bias in this conflict, highlighting research by two ‘data specialists’ Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava to show it.
These are the same two data specialists he has utilised for his latest work. Najjar is from Lebanon, a nation involved in the conflict with Israel. You also have to wonder if the ‘researcher’ Jan Lietava is the same person as the ‘photographer’ Jan Lietava who signed an ‘artists for Palestine’ petition in December last year. And the work of those two was merely continuing the argument put together by an academic activist named Holly Jackson. Jackson’s thesis at Columbia was on the ‘Israel lobby’. It seems Owen Jones only has concern for bias if it leans in a particular way.
The Owen Jones hit piece
The Owen Jones report is over 9200 words long. It is split into only four key points.
- The first section is about 13 journalists connected to the BBC who seem to think the BBC should be more pro-Hamas. Jones refers to them as ‘whistleblowers’. They remain anonymous but they are almost certainly BBC Arabic types or other BBC journos who began their careers working for Al Jazeera or stationed in Cairo or Beirut. This covers about 1000 words.
- Then the report focuses on Raffi Berg. A Jewish editor who works on the Middle East pages. Raffi Berg is mentioned 63 times in the report. In the 35 or so paragraphs in which Raffi Berg is explicitly mentioned there are over 3090 words. And that does not include the paragraphs around these mentions which are still all about him. Which means this report is obsessively focused on attacking a Jewish editor.
- A third section uses the death of a man with Downs Syndrome as a case study to highlight bias. More about this later. Contained about 1300 words.
- A final section presents a (very skewed) data analysis of BBC output. Approximately 1900 words.
First things first
The Owen Jones report is junk. Do not for a second think otherwise. If you want to be certain of its ‘junk’ status, consider this. The central thesis of his report is pro-Israel bias at the BBC. And yet he must have been aware that at least two major reports have recently been published (both serious studies -involving large teams and research spanning months -from Trevor Asserson and Danny Cohen) that argued the very opposite. Yet Owen Jones does not even mention them.
It would have been the first port of call for anyone considering a serious counter argument – the need to explain what was flawed in two large reports that argue the exact opposite of what you are claiming yourself. But Owen Jones ignored them completely, as if they do not exist. And this provides absolute proof that Owen Jones had no interest in truth or balance. He has turned up to spin a story. His has created an amateurish hit piece – with one central target – and it is no surprise to find the central target is a Jewish one.
The Owen Jones examples
To show just how bad the academic method in the report is – Owen Jones throws up examples of reporting errors made in the early days of the conflict. He mentions a story of twenty Israeli children tied together that turned out to be false. The fact this has not been corrected is given as evidence of pro-Israel bias. But that is not what bias is – or means. Jones is just cherry picking one factual error to suit his own bias. Did he look for errors the other way? Clearly not, because if he had so wanted – he could have chosen to look at hundreds of examples where the publication of false claims from Hamas strongly support the claim of anti-Israel bias. None of the examples from this mountain of evidence interested him.
It would have been possible to write an entire book about how amateurish and flawed the method is. The fact the BBC must always mention the October 7 atrocities when reporting on the conflict (to add needed context), is the pillar upon which the false claim of bias is created. It means Israeli deaths are always going to be referenced and words like ‘atrocity’ will appear more times than not.
Add that to the fact that mentions of deaths in Gaza will often be related to Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists means language referencing Palestinian deaths would have to reflect that. If these issues were not addressed in the study – and they weren’t – then those omissions make the entire report childish gibberish. This skew means that an article containing a false claim from Hamas – that uses 1000 words to reference a massacre that never happened, will be considered pro-Israel bias by Owen Jones, because it would reference the October 7 atrocities in a single sentence at the end.
The Owen Jones case study
Just to show how ridiculous the Owen Jones piece is – he highlights a specific case study. It involved a man with Downs Syndrome being mauled by an IDF dog. What Owen Jones fails to mention (isn’t it odd how someone who demands such accuracy from others, is so inept and inaccurate himself), is that the family of the victim were a family of terrorists. In fact, I took a close look at that particular event at the time, and found numerous issues with the story that the Palestinian propaganda machine had put together. The brother – the BBC’s first witness, was an Islamic Jihad propaganda agent. The mother was a widow – and her husband had been buried in Hamas colours. Two of the brothers inside the house were terrorists and arrested at the scene.
Owen Jones is taking this BBC pack of anti-Israel lies – this pro Hamas propaganda piece – and claiming it is pro-Israel simply because he doesn’t like the headline. This is the level of OJ’s investigative work. It isn’t even student journalism. It is third-rate, uninformed, lazy, factually illiterate, and misleading, bunkum.
The morally corrupt need for balance
There is only one thing that the Owen Jones piece successfully highlights. It shows us how bad the situation at the BBC has become for Israel and for BBC’s identifiable Jews. BBC hierarchy have long been able to cover-up the continual deterioration using a well-worn and morally incoherent claim. They suggest that because both sides complain about bias, they can therefore assume that they are balanced and doing things right.
Carry that argument elsewhere and it soon becomes clear how corrupt it is. If they had as many complaints that they went too hard on Peter Sutcliffe as they did that they went too hard on the police chasing him – would that also be evidence they had found the right balance? It is really that stupid. There is no moral equivalence between the radical Islamic terror groups who want to slaughter Jews, and Israelis who do not want to be slaughtered. There is no balance.
The identifiable Jews in the village.
Although Owen Jones may not have the self-awareness or intelligence to understand the fine print of his own hit piece – he inadvertently shines a spotlight straight onto the festering problem that the BBC has. He refers to it as a ‘civil war’ (an internal mob trying to get rid of the few remaining identifiable Jews at the BBC is ethnic cleansing, not a civil war). And all those people complaining about Raffi Berg (and we know they are almost all Islamists working at the BBC) they are agitated into action because there is still a proud Jewish editor employed there. Every single one of those ‘whistleblowing’ employees would not be complaining if the Middle East editor was an ex Al-Jazeera staffer based in Beirut. This has nothing to do with a need for impartiality – and everything to do with Raffi Berg’s Jewish identity.
And there is a flip side to this. All of these people are current or ex-employees of the BBC. They help shape BBC output. No wonder the BBC has an anti-Israel bias. The problem with the BBC suddenly becomes easy to understand. Owen Jones has this upside down. The BBC’s problem is not Raffi Berg – it is all those people who have a problem with him.
Survival
If the BBC seeks to truly survive as a media outlet of international standing, the first thing it has to do is recognise the problem and ringfence its identifiable Jews. There is no disputing now they are under attack from within. They are probably not the only minority group under attack either – and the BBC needs to protect them all. As a second step the BBC hierarchy needs to look for and identify all those who are seeking the geo-political Islamification of the BBC workplace. Nobody who thinks that the BBC should be more pro-Hamas should ever hold a BBC pen. Only if the powers that be at the BBC take this action – will they save themselves.
Sadly of course, it is far more likely those like Raffi Berg will eventually be forced out of the BBC workplace, than the BBC will ever find the guts to crack down on the pro-Hamas mob who are chasing him.
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Owen Jones is displaying the extreme Jew hating left modus operandi of reverse accusation with whatever they have been accused of .
This has been the case since the start of Labour’s Momentum with Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 .
It has seriously become an infestation within those ranks as behaving like Zombies !
To be honest, I have read Owen Jones piece and your response. Objectively speaking there is certainly things to say about Owen Jones’ piece – but yours is really filled with biased and unverified positionning.
Just the framing of this section it is clear that in your mind there is no way other people than this group could think in the same lines as the group of 13 journalists. This is pretty preoposterous.
The first section is about 13 journalists connected to the BBC who seem to think the BBC should be more pro-Hamas. Jones refers to them as ‘whistleblowers’. They remain anonymous but they are almost certainly BBC Arabic types or other BBC journos who began their careers working for Al Jazeera or stationed in Cairo or Beirut. This covers about 1000 words
To further use of the term Islamists referring to recognized bbc journalists frames you as being extremely biased.
But that s just my opinion.
Have to disagree. I have been researching the BBC for years. It is absolutely true that the 13 whistleblowers remain anonymous. It is also absolutely true that we know who they are (even if we cannot name them all individually). If you think that saying most of these people are BBC Arabic types is incorrect, it only means you are approaching this without understanding how deeply the problem runs at the BBC. I have 100,000 words written on this site that provide my evidence. That’s my frame.
What did you think of OJ using the example of the terrorist family, without mentioning they were a family of terrorists?
Are comments actually posted?
Yes of course. I am very much in favour of allowing people who disagree with me to post.
Yours was despite the fact that it was simply a load of biased garbage.
I got as far as “The first section is about 13 journalists connected to the BBC who seem to think the BBC should be more pro-Hamas”, at which point YOUR bias became clear and stopped me reading further.
By conflating justifiable concerns over the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza with support for “Hamas” your intention is obvious – to smear and thereby “neutralise” all those who raise concerns about the killing, mutilation, starvation and suffering inflicted by Israel on tens of thousands of Palestinian women and CHILDREN (by ANY definition INNOCENT) during the last 14 months of industrial destruction of Palestine by Israel in their self-termed Biblical “War Of Vengeance”.
Dishonest, egregious and callous.
Oh Jay – bless. Putting aside all your empty propaganda – which kind of show that you had no intention of actually reading my piece – you have made the same mistake as the previous poster. You are starting from scratch. There are 10,000s of words written in dozens of pieces over the last year – that carry more than enough evidence to show that the BBC is riddled with pro-Hamas commentary. I am absolutely sure these journos have an issue with the Jewish editor. You should spend some time coming out of your toxic little bubble and read some of it. I don’t really need to go into further detail or seriously address your post – I think anyone reading it can see it exactly for what it is. Seriously. You are in too tight a bubble. It is unhealthy. Step back a bit.
While you are here.. What did you think of OJ using the example of the terrorist family, without mentioning they were a family of terrorists?
The population of Gaza is higher now than at the beginning of Israel’s response to the October 2023 atrocities. Were this to be a genocide, boy, it would be the most incompetent genocide in history.
In a bid to smear Israel, please don’t cheapen the word ‘genocide.’
You forgot to advise people that Hamas is totally responsible for the deaths and destruction in Gaza. If Hamas hadn’t invaded Israel on Oct7/23 slaughtering innocent civilians beheading BABIES and roasting others alive and taking hostages, there would have been no reason for Israel to retaliate in order to prevent or minimise further action by your terrorist buddies. So if you want to be honest, blame them.
There were no babies beheaded or roasted alive as the Israeli media reported afterwards. They admitted these stories were false. Do your homework and read the history of the Zionists in Palestine over the last 76 years instead of just repeating sound bites that suit your narrative. It might help if you visit the West Bank and see for yourself what an apartheid regime looks like at first hand as I have done. Get real this is a genocide. I am sick and tired of Israel forces targeting hospitals and clinics and journalists and infrastructure with the same old lame excuses…..oh Hamas was using it as a base …..oh a Hamas fighter was in the building so we slaughtered another 40 people to get this one guy.
BBC R4 Naked Weed Joke yesterday: Why are there no Father Xmas in a Gaza hospital? Coz Netanyahu says hospitals are being used as military bases and a legitimate target. Straight from a similar Gaza Why are there no children in Gaza hospitals……Better joke would be: Why are there no children in Gaza hospitals? coz hamas terrorists are using them as human shields.
Muhammed Bhar was the man’s name and he was mauled to death by an IDF dog. But that’s OK because his brother was a terrorist.
Oh Mike. that is pretty weak. If anyone innocent dies it is a tragedy. But if you are a terrorist and you are fighting an army – and you bring them into your home because you are fighting them – then you hold quite a lot of responsibility for what happens next. Now on top of this – the BBC never told the story properly. The dog enters the rooms first – not with the soldiers but before them. Where was the family? How was it the brothers (two grown men who are terrorists) were using Mohammed as a human shield – or how else did the dog arrive in the room with Mohammed and nobody else? When you start asking these questions (as I did) you begin to grow suspicious. I then turned to the family and asked for photos of them with their brother – because all the images of him online were of him alone. And guess what? They did not have any. So whatever did or did not happen in that home – the story being told isn’t really the full picture. And I am a full picture kind of guy. You it seems, just buy any old crap.
The man with Downs who was mauled to death by an IDF dog had a name: Mahommed Bahr. But some members of his family were terrorists. So that’s OK then.
Oh Mike. that is pretty weak. If anyone innocent dies it is a tragedy. But if you are a terrorist and you are fighting an army – and you bring them into your home because you are fighting them – then you hold quite a lot of responsibility for what happens next. Now on top of this – the BBC never told the story properly. The dog enters the rooms first – not with the soldiers but before them. Where was the family? How was it the brothers (two grown men who are terrorists) were using Mohammed as a human shield – or how else did the dog arrive in the room with Mohammed and nobody else? When you start asking these questions (as I did) you begin to grow suspicious. I then turned to the family and asked for photos of them with their brother – because all the images of him online were of him alone. And guess what? They did not have any. So whatever did or did not happen in that home – the story being told isn’t really the full picture. And I am a full picture kind of guy. You it seems, just buy any old crap. (AGAIN)
Hi David,
I studied Trevor Asserson’s report. He ran a blind keyword count for the incidence of specific keywords in BBC articles, radio and TV programmes, and some podcasts. Apparently millions of words were assessed by ChatGPT 4. He also researched which way “sympathy” swung in the same sample. Asserson didn’t define what he meant by sympathy. So I’ll take it to mean “shedding a kind light” on the plight of either Israelis or Palestinians. These two methods provided the basis for defining impartiality in the BBC’s reporting.
So. If the BBC reported that doctors tried their best to save minors that had been sniped by the IDF, I assume that article would be more “sympathetic” to Palestinians than the snipers. Similarly, when the IDF shot at starving Palestinian crowds gathered to receive flour and basic essentials will make Israel look bad. I also assume that reports of the ICC’s request for arrest warrants for B. Netanyahu et al. for possible genocide charges doesn’t make Isreal look very good. Mentions of Amnesty International’s report defining Israel as an Apartheid state certainly doesn’t help Israel’s case. And Human Rights Watch’s report into the targeted destruction of Gaza’s water plants, indicating Israel’s genocidal intent, I assume, is also not going to shed the acting government in a good light. Maybe you or Asserson would prefer that they weren’t reported at all?
One particular graph struck me in Asserson’s report. At the start of this latest war, Israel understandably started high on his sympathy scale. But as the “war” progressed, sympathy towards Isreal plummeted and the plight of the Palestinians “sympathy” line went up. Asserson himself says: “It may be argued that some imbalance favouring the Palestinian narrative is to be expected due to the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza as compared to Israel. We question whether balance of reporting should be based upon a single vector such as civilian deaths.”
If that is the case, then maybe we should ignore the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and adopt Asserson’s new Sympathy scale. Maybe we should revise how the Third Reich felt victimised by all the bad publicity they received for their own behaviours, all in the name of balance and impartiality.
A certain Rolling Stones comes to mind.
Seb
(First generation descendant of Holocaust survivors)
you should have studied it more closely. Asserson also drew on many concrete examples – and his report was not just reliant on AI search (which you have misrepresented above anyway). And you know – when you write that the ‘IDF shot at starving Palestinian crowds gathered to receive flour’… you merely show everyone you are not here in good faith. And please – signing off as a descendant of Holocaust survivors – people who do that in a Jewish environment (like this site) are either beyond needy or just not Jewish at all.
Hamas demonstrated their ‘good faith’ by attacking Israel on Oct7/23.
Hi David,
I should have posted this before my previous reply. Naturally, I read Owen’s piece and your rebuttal.
Reading your piece instead I was immediately struck by your lack of dispassion. I understand that it may be a subject that stirs your heart, much like the loss you suffered of losing Dominique. But your use of highly charged, emotive language levelled towards OJ detracted from the possible counter-arguments you were trying to raise, which I was ready to entertain. Labelling OJ’s work as junk, bunkum, [lacking] self-awareness / intelligence, amateurish, third-rate, uninformed, lazy, factually illiterate, [lost in a] self-radicalisation spiral, deeper rabbit holes etc, somewhat put me off. Name-calling is not a valid argument.
What impressed me about Owen’s piece was the large body of replicable evidence that he produced. I thought that the close scrutiny that Raffi Berg, as well as BBC management, was afforded was justified. If there’s any overall directed bias at the BBC, then the editors and directors should be closely examined. They call the shots.
As a technologist, I particularly enjoyed studying Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava’s Github page where they explain the methodology and language models used to analyse over 2,900 BBC articles. They looked first if an article reported deaths and then determined by whom the death was caused. Having determined if it was the IDF or Hamas, they ran the results through another language model to determine the incidence of emotionally charged language used to describe the deaths. They found that Israeli deaths tended to be described as massacres, atrocities, etc when they were the victims. When Palestinians were on the receiving end, more neutral language tended to be used (dead, were killed, collateral damage, got in the way of a 2000 pound bomb etc). Everything about their study can be replicated or questioned.
As mentioned previously, the Asserson report that you offered as proof of the BBC’s impartiality did no such thing. It looked for “Sympathy” towards Israel’s official narrative and ran a keyword search with ChatGPT-4. Asserson also admitted that the scale of death and destruction in Gaza was inordinately greater but the number of civilian deaths shouldn’t be used as a measure… of antipathy towards Israel.
Similarly, your attempt to dismiss Dana Najjar,Jan Lietava and Holly Jackson’s work just because Dana and Jan signed a petition against censorship in the arts and Holly wrote a thesis on the Israeli lobby also didn’t help your argument. It pointedly ignored the content of their work that OJ’s original piece referenced to. Again you failed to tackle the argument, in this case the research proposed. Instead you tried to discredit the cited authors by ridiculing their other activities.
You also conflate OJ’s research as anti-semitic: “the central target is a Jewish one”. At no point has OJ ever come across as a Jew hater to me. He mostly criticises Israel, the IDF, the disproportionate death and destruction that they have brought upon Gaza and the skewering in mainstream media of the whole affair. What makes you think that he’s anti-semitic? If I criticised, say, the British government’s land grab of Diego Garcia and behaviour towards the forcibly expelled Chagossians over the last 50 years does that make me anti-British? Or would I be anti Church of England? Would my criticism of Mussolini during fascist Italy have made me anti-Catholic or, if I were, un-Italian?
And lastly, as another commentator noted your definition of BBC journalists as Islamists vs a “proud Jewish editor” (Raffi Berg) also had me thinking. Why call them Islamists and not muslim? If they all truly have a political agenda because of their religion, why shouldn’t that also be true of a prideful Jew? This led me on to fantasise of a way out of the impasse from both sides of the argument. How would you feel if all BBC management and journalists had to be, say, strict atheists or humanists? If we removed Abrahamic religions from the mix, do you think everyone would stop arguing about bias? If not, what would? Maybe, if both Palestinians and Israelis feel hard done by by the BBC’s reporting it may actually be doing something right!
Thanks.
Seb
(First generation descendant of Holocaust survivors, and proud of it)
I have been doing this far too long to waste my time here. You are not a ‘descendant of a Holocaust survivor’ – nor are you a ‘technologist’. You are an anonymous poster on this website. You can call yourself an astronaut if you so please it still has no value.
As I pointed out in my previous reply – when you wrote that the ‘IDF shot at starving Palestinian crowds gathered to receive flour’… you merely show everyone you are not here in good faith. You were caught spouting empty unverified Hamas propaganda. Truth and decent reporting are not interests of yours. That immediately identified yourself as a worthless, anti-Zionist troll however much your latest creation (the particular identity you use this time) may try to hide behind flowery sentences.
And again – you ignore much of the Asserson report. You only focus on the keyword search – rather than the various concrete examples used to support the work. Another report by Dan Cohen (ex BBC) also highlighted the undeniable BBC bias. My latest – showing the different ways in which the Rabbi, Imam and Reverend were interviewed just follows another dozen or so examples on my own website – none of which you have provided an ounce of evidence against.
Arguing that BBC journalists signing anti-Israel petitions isn’t a sign of bias that needs to be taken into account, is just silly. As is your support for the consipracy theorist Owen Jones – who since Oct 7 has fallen of the rather steep proverbial cliff.
Why do I call those people I identified as Islamists rather than Muslims? Because they are Islamists – it is a far better description for them than Muslims – and it would conflate people pushing a geo political argument based on their particular Islamic religious ideology with Muslims who simply want to follow their faith. This is basic stuff and the fact you question it shows how much you do not understand the core issues being discussed on my site.
OJs work is indeed junk – utter bunkum. And those who cannot see it really should try to find an interest completely unrelated to political analysis.
You’ll be remembered in the Accountability Archive as having enabled genocide you vile inbred scum. Free Palestine and everyone from evil imperial empires.
You seem like a nice chap