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.
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)