No tracking. No cookies
Subscriptions
Subscriptions
Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features
Few institutions are as embedded in the British psyche as the BBC. With its global reach and reputation for impartiality, it occupies a central place in the UK’s information ecosystem. Yet a new report by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a Muslim Council of Britain project, challenges that image. Covering BBC output on the Israel-Gaza conflict from October 2023 to October 2024, the CfMM claims the broadcaster has failed its duty of “due impartiality.”
Instead, their report ‘BBC On Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standards’ argues, the UK’s national broadcaster has diminished Palestinian suffering, amplified Israeli perspectives, and applied double standards to reporting on the war that amounts to institutional bias.
The CfMM analysed some 3,873 online articles and 32,092 broadcast segments, to identify what it called “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.” Central to their claim is that despite Palestinian fatalities outnumbering Israeli ones by more than 34 to 1, coverage of Israeli deaths dominated.
For instance, the report found Israeli deaths mentioned 33 times more per fatality in online articles and 19 times more in broadcasts than Palestinian deaths. By October 2024, 42,010 Palestinians and 1,246 Israelis had been killed.
“Does the BBC find Palestinian lives and deaths less newsworthy than Israeli ones?” the CfMM report asks.
BBC Scraps Pledge to Show Gaza Medics Documentary ‘As Soon as Possible’
The BBC has shelved plans to broadcast the harrowing ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ documentary pending an “ongoing review” into its coverage of the conflict
To stress-test these claims, Byline Times conducted its own analysis, on a small scale. We examined the output of BBC Special Correspondent Lucy Manning who had filed at least 27 digital reports focused on 7 October and its aftermath, profiling Israeli victims, survivors, and hostages. We compared this to Fergal Keane, another Special Correspondent, who had focused on civilians in Gaza. Keane had some 31 stories published.
While Keane may have also filed for broadcast, the editorial decision to commission a seeming digital balance between his and Manning’s reporting does not — as the CfMM also claims — appear to account for the far greater scale of Palestinian casualties, nor how that disparity should influence the overall balance of coverage.
Some may argue that drawing such comparisons creates a false moral equivalence. After all, most of those murdered on October 7 were civilians, and Israel has not explicitly taken hostages. Furthermore, British journalists are not allowed into Gaza. But the question of proportionality in Gaza reporting remains urgent and unresolved and, it seems, of major concern to those working for the BBC.
One journalist who has worked closely with the BBC over Gaza reiterated the CfMM’s findings to Byline Times. They said that they were “shocked at just how explicitly partial the BBC editorial policy department and BBC management are on the issue of Israel – to say they are one-sided is an understatement.”
“One BBC member of staff told us that UN sources cannot be trusted,” the journalist said. “Palestinian or any sources perceived to be Muslim are treated with suspicion, even when they are Western academics who happen to be Palestinian or Arab by heritage. There is a total lack of journalistic standards and ethics, especially when dealing with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) – Israeli IDF propaganda statements are treated as statements of fact. Scripts are peppered with Israeli “right to replies” without any legal or ethical basis.”
The source – who asked to remain anonymous – told Byline Times that “BBC staff perpetuate Israeli untruths in scripts and meetings – and on a few occasions expressed surprise when we told them Israel had been found to be lying and so we could not use these Israeli statements as fact. Pro-Israel lobby groups and lobbyists are mentioned by name in editorial meetings, and we saw first-hand how the BBC’s journalism is led by its fear of these lobbyists.”
“The BBC has an aversion to any language that describes Israel’s actions as war crimes – even when this language is being used judiciously by respected experts. We were told not to use the word “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” even when attributing these words to UN experts.”
Israel’s ‘Grotesque’ Detention of Palestinian Bodies Is Intended to Silence and ‘Traumatise Families’
Since the October 7 attacks, the number of Palestinian bodies held by Israeli state incommunicado has soared
Other concerns were also raised by the CfMM report. Language use was a particular concern. The BBC’s use of the word “massacre” was said to have appeared 18 times more often in reference to Israeli victims. Words such as “atrocities,” “slaughter,” and “brutal” were used four times more frequently when describing Israeli deaths. By contrast, Palestinian deaths were often conveyed in passive constructions, such as “Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 15 people,” with little attribution of responsibility.
The phrase “Hamas-run health ministry” appeared in 1,155 articles—almost as often as Palestinian casualty figures themselves. “The BBC often reported Palestinian deaths with passive language that obscured both responsibility and humanity,” the CfMM argues. Israeli victims, however, the report says were regularly named, profiled, and mourned with personal detail.
The BBC was also criticised for linguistic asymmetry when referring to detainees. During a January 2025 exchange that saw 90 Palestinians released for three Israeli hostages, 70% of the BBC’s coverage focused on the Israelis, offering emotive accounts of reunion and trauma. The Palestinians were largely “nameless.”
The deaths of journalists showed a similar disparity. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 176 media workers were killed in Gaza. The BBC covered just 6% of these. In contrast, it reported on 62% of journalist deaths in Ukraine.
Gaza Tribunal Gathers in Sarajevo in Attempt to Hold Israel to Account Over ‘Genocide and War Crimes’
One Gaza doctor told the Tribunal that he witnessed “mass casualty events” multiple times a day.
Wider concerns about the BBC’s Gaza coverage have been raised following their senior editorial decision to delay ‘indefinitely’ the showing of a documentary about the killings of Palestinian medics. Though it had passed editorial checks and was described internally as “compelling” and “important,” the film ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ has still not aired.
It must be said that the BBC has repeatedly been accused of anti-Israeli bias. The Board of Deputies of British Jews on June 10 reportedly wrote to the BBC to condemn an analysis piece by the corporation’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, regarding Israel’s alleged “war crimes” in Gaza. The Board called it “problematic, unnecessary and offensive references to the Holocaust”. The Telegraph recently opined that the BBC has been “entirely captured” by the “death-cult” of Hamas. And the US White House’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt in June attacked the BBC, saying it has – on occasion – taken Hamas’s word as “total truth.”
The BBC itself told Byline Times that they “plan to consider the report carefully and study its findings in detail.”
“We believe it is imperative that our journalists have access to Gaza, and we continue to call on the Israeli government to grant this. We agree that language is vitally important but we have some questions about what appears to be a reliance on AI to analyse it in this report, and we do not think due impartiality can be measured by counting words. We make our own, independent editorial decisions, and we reject any suggestion otherwise.”
The veteran journalist who spoke to Byline Times, however, said that “in decades of reporting I have never witnessed a media organisation prostrate itself to Israel and its propaganda the way BBC does. It is really extraordinary.”