Overview
This work aims to shed light on bias in BBC reporting on Palestine in a way that is both transparent and reproducible. We analyzed a total of 600 articles and 4000 livefeed posts on the BBC website between October 7, 2023 and December 2, 2023 in an attempt to surface the systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated in the media.
The pipeline of the study is as follows:
We obtained source articles and livefeed posts from the BBC website by selecting relevant topics (see below for full list) and
We parsed the individual sentences using the Stanford CoreNLP natural language processing
Using the results from step 2, we identified sentences with mentions of death and manually tagged each one of them as referring to Palestinians, Israelis, neither or both. None of the tagging was performed automatically.
They’re missing the classics!
Kids/children vs people under 18
Hostage vs prisoners
As in *The Israeli hostages are mostly women and children, the Palestinians prisoners are mostly women and people under 18", in both cases they’re people that have nothing to do with the conflict, in both cases some of them aren’t adults.
Or maybe it’s because the Israelis, Thais, French, etc., were kidnapped from their homes for the express purpose of wartime negotiation, i.e. hostages. The Palestinians are all held in connection with crimes, including convictions for violent crimes.
If anything, this has exposed major injustices in the Israeli criminal system, such as people being held for long periods of time without charges, unrealistically high conviction rates, etc.
However, let’s also not buy into the Hamas line that the two groups are equivalent. That’s just an attempt to whitewash their Oct 7 atrocities.
That’s not true. Israel routinely detains Palestinians including children without charge.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67600015
Thousands are held without charge and for indefinite periods:
*As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods.*
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/29/why-does-israel-have-so-many-palestinians-detention-and-available-swap
That’s exactly what I said in my reply. Thanks for providing additional links.
You’re welcome.
This last of your comment is misleading as many of them are held for no reason at all.
The Palestinians are all held in connection with crimes, including convictions for violent crimes.
Also Palestinians are detained and processed by military courts so they do not benefit from civil rights that Israeli citizens enjoy
Differentiating between hostages and prisoners makes absolute sense, the two words mean different things and have each their use case in this conflict. But if (I don’t follow the news reporting about this conflict too much unless I’m in a discussion about it) there is a difference in referring to either sides children as “people under 18” while the same is not done for the other side that is, imo, conscious or subconscious manipulation by the news agency. People react strongly to the word children and replacing that with “people under 18” would significantyl diminish that impact. Again, not sure if applicable as I’m not well read on the news articles but if such distinction takes place at all it is worth looking into how often these terms are used for either side comparatively (ie how many % of the time israeli children are referred to as “people under 18” and how many % of the time palestinian children are referred to as “people under 18”. Absolute numbers mean little there since one side could just be reported on a lot more, which in itself could be bias)