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.
I’m not seeing any mention of how they parsed out the data to account for reiteration of past reporting.
Let’s assume a different situation, one where Individual A slaps Individual B in a high school, and the incident is reported on in the schools newspaper. Initially, there is going to be a set of wording used: “B was the victim of an attack when A slapped them.”
You now have the first instance of “B was the victim” and “A slapped B”. Now let’s assume B slaps A the following day, resulting in a new newspaper story: “As we remember from yesterday, where B was the victim of a slapping by A. Today, B struck A.”
Now we have an instance of “B was the victim” and “A slapped B” but we have the first instance of “B struck A”. We’re two reports in, and using the methods described we have observed a bias.
Over the following days, similar retributive actions are carried out by both A and B. However, the root event doesn’t change. Each article is prefaced with something akin to “As we remember from previous days, where B was the victim of a slapping by A…” This doesn’t necessarily indicate bias, it can also be attributed to keeping the story grouped.
Is that what’s going on? I have no idea, and I’m not at all claiming that is the case. In fact, I don’t routinely pay attention to news from the BBC at all. But the lack of this being mentioned did make me wonder if it was factored in. That said, some of that language choice is obviously an issue. Especially “children” vs “people under 18”.
That said, if anyone sees something I missed in the github, I am more than happy to correct this comment to reflect my misunderstanding.
No the wording used for the killing of Palestinians is fundamentally completely different. They just “died” while israelis got “brutally indiscriminately slaughtered”