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Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

And here is an article on Raffi berg, BBC’s Middle East editor:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-bia...

And here is an analysis of BBC's anti-Israeli bias: https://asserson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-r...

And from the BBC itself: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d4egk17l2o "Questions still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary"

https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/skcfkb1iyx "From bias to blunders: The BBC’s anti-Israel shift since October 7"

And opposite all that are Tiktok videos by Israeli soldiers, for which questions of journalistic bias are irrelevant.

Bad things happen in wars. And yes there are questionable videos of Israeli soldiers on TikTok. I'm not sure how this supports your view point. It's is entirely possible for Israel to be the good guy, for the BBC to have a strong anti-Israeli bias, and for there to be questionable actions by certain Israeli soldiers (including on TikTok). There are also questionable actions by Ukrainian soldiers and there have been questionable actions by American, British, and Australian soldiers in their war on ISIS and Al Qaeda and there have been questionable action by the allies in WW-II. Israeli soldiers are young adults fighting an enemy that has complete disregard to human life (theirs or others) or pretty much anything else. That enemy has been attacking them for decades. Many of them may have friends and family that have been impacted by this enemy's brutality. So yes- there are going to be questionable incidents. This is human nature.

We can fix this by forcing Hamas to release the hostages, surrender, and end this war. Could have happened a long time ago if the pressure was on the right side.

You can't get a picture of reality through anecdotes. In every war you can cherry pick any narrative. For what its worth I've spoken to soldiers who fought in Gaza and they maintain they hold high standards and the incidents you hear of are outliers.

Don't misunderstand. My views are not driven by random Tiktok videos. I mentioned them to point out that bias questions cannot be relevant in their case.

You might think those videos are aberrant, but I see it as just part of the overall pattern.

"War" is a misnomer when Israel has 10x the money, the resources, the military, controls Palestinian movement/water/food, erects walls completely surrounding Gaza, and bombed 100% of the hospitals and universities in Gaza.

"War" creates the illusion of roughly-equal enemy forces.

You don't have "war". You have a displaced, dehumanized people living in modern apartheid conditions, who periodically strike out against their conditions and history, and then get vengeance visited upon them 100-fold.

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"You can't get a picture of reality through anecdotes ... I've spoken to soldiers who fought in Gaza"

So... you heard some anecdotes.

I read the 1st third (it's really long) and while the data analysis is interesting, the conclusions say a lot more about the biases of the author(s) than those of the BBC. Fundamentally you can't use sympathy as a measure of bias without first establishing a baseline for how sympathetic the views and/or groups of people are. The report mentions that Palestinians might be more sympathetic because they're the ones being blown up, but then discards this by pointing out that the BBC is supposed to "ensure broadly comparable treatment of the Palestinian and the Israeli viewpoints" without acknowledging that maybe they do and one viewpoint is more sympathetic than the other. The least sympathetic group according to the report is Hamas, so according to it's logic they're the group the BBC is most biased against. Not a reasonable conclusion. There's plenty of other indicators that this report started with a conclusion then tried to gather data to support it, but I've already spent more time on this comment than the report deserves.

Thanks for giving it a read though.

I think it's an interesting question of how we measure bias.

For me, as an Israeli (who hasn't lived there for decades), who has some first hand knowledge of the situation, much of the reporting appears to be extremely biased. I know there are claims from the other side the bias goes in the other direction. What's the ground truth? I think using AI to crunch the large amount of data is a decent first order approximation.

Ofcourse bias depends on ideology. For some people if a Palestinian guns down an Israeli in a Tel-Aviv bar simply reporting this fact is biased towards Israel. And I mean, from their position that is understandable. And indeed we can see some media outlets that would not report these events at all, which I would consider an anti-Israeli bias.

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