BBC is still actively employing Hamas members, Trevor Asserson says

The BBC is still actively employing members of Hamas, attorney Trevor Asserson told Tamar Uriel-Beeri on The Jerusalem Post Podcast.

Asserson recently released a detailed 200-page report detailing the anti-Israel bias of the BBC's news reporting of the Israel-Hamas War, which was first covered by the Telegraph.

"We looked at the things they should be talking about that they have omitted, and we looked at the things they did say and said in a very biased way," he explained.

"We hired lawyers who were trained to try to look at evidence in a way that could come before a court," Asserson said of the methodology. "We specifically asked them to read articles and then to take detailed notes." The goal was to see if it would take an average fair-minded but ignorant audience and lead them into liking Israelis and disliking Palestinians, or into liking Palestinians and disliking Israelis, or leave them neutral.

One of the big editorial leanings the BBC seems to be having with its news coverage is that it is focusing more on the human tragedies happening in Gaza.

"The BBC really have made their reporting of this war a reporting of civilian casualties," Asserson said. "That is clearly part of the story, and it's a tragic part of the story, but it's not the only part of the story."

But another aspect they looked at in this report was that BBC actively employed Hamas members.

"We looked at their backgrounds and found they were Hamas supporters or even Hamas members," Asserson said. "The BBC should not be giving a platform to terrorists, and if they do at all, they should be telling the audience these people are Hamas members or supporters."

BBC breaks its own rules

Asserson also took the BBC to task for violating its own rules in its coverage of the war.

One such way they did this, he said, was not disclosing whether people being interviewed by the broadcaster were Hamas sympathizers or members. Another way is not reporting that they are reporting from a place where freedom of the press is limited, which Gaza is.

But even worse than the BBC's biased coverage, he said, was that of BBC Arabic.

"BBC Arabic has been used effectively as a platform for Hamas," Asserson said, noting that on October 7, "they were airing Hamas promotional films to music with Hamas branding."

The data found in his report compared its reporting to that of Al Jazeera, the Times of Egypt, and Iran Times.

"The British people are paying billions of pounds, effectively, for Al Jazeera to be promoted by the BBC," Asserson said.

He argued that the BBC continues to exist as a news outlet is because unlike other outlets, it has a duty to produce impartial coverage.

This, Asserson said, is its contract with the British people: the BBC will provide fair an impartial news, and the British people pay collectively four billion pounds a year. But now, Asserson said, that contract has been breached.

"The British people give it four billion pounds, but the BBC is not producing true, impartial news," he said. "They're producing very biased news... And the BBC Arabic is the most extreme version of that breach of contract."

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