Aletho News

Monitoring group finds UK media guilty of ‘systematic’ dehumanization of Palestinians

The Cradle | April 23, 2026

A British media monitoring group accused major UK media outlets on 23 April of “systematic” anti-Palestine bias in their coverage of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza over the past two years.

NewsCord announced it had analyzed thousands of articles published by BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News in their coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza since 2023.

The group quantified various bias metrics, including “attribution, passive voice, source qualification, humanization, legal framing, and the reporting of documented genocidal statements by Israeli officials.”

NewsCord found systematic patterns of anti-Palestine bias in the reporting of all three news outlets. For example, the BBC names Israel as the perpetrator in just 50 percent of reports of casualties and uses passive voice, which obscures responsibility, in 80 percent of sentences reporting casualties from Israeli attacks.

The Guardian names the perpetrator in just 54 percent of cases.

All three routinely label the Gaza Health Ministry as “Hamas-affiliated” in an effort to undermine the credibility of its casualty and death counts, even though the UN and Israeli military view the ministry’s reporting as credible.

In contrast, the outlets only noted the credibility of the UN in one percent of instances when the international body’s reports are cited.

Across UK media, the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza is rarely mentioned, NewsCord found. This is despite the International Court of Justice issuing provisional measures ordering Israel to halt its military operations to prevent its troops from perpetrating genocide, and despite the findings of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory that Israel has committed genocide.

Rights groups Amnesty International and Israeli-based B’Tselem have also concluded Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza.

Additionally, none of the three UK news outlets have reported on documented genocidal statements by Israeli officials that are cited as evidence of intent in ICJ proceedings, NewsCord added.

Shortly after the genocide began, Netanyahu referred to Palestinians in Gaza as “Amalek,” recalling a story from the Jewish Torah in which God commands the ancient Israelites to eradicate an entire people, including every last woman and child.

The monitoring group also found that Palestinian voices were given far less prominence, as measured by word count, compared with Israeli perspectives, and that detainees were more often humanized only when Israeli.

In December, Drop Site News revealed that BBC editor Raffi Berg has almost complete control of the British broadcaster’s online coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and is ensuring that all events are reported with a pro-Israel bias.

“This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

Pro-Israel bias is not just an issue in the UK media, but in the western media broadly.

A media-analysis report released by Media Bias Meter last November titled “Framing Gaza” presented data showing that major western outlets mention “Israel” far more often than “Palestine” in both headlines and article bodies.

The outlets in question included the New York Times (NYT), BBC, Le Monde, the Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, and AFP.

According to the dataset, NYT uses “Israel” in headlines 1,868 times and “Palestine” only 10 times, a ratio of 187 to 1.

The disproportionate pattern appears across the other outlets, with BBC showing 1,100 uses of “Israel” in headlines and 91 uses of “Palestine,” Le Monde showing 1,087 versus 65, and De Telegraaf showing 952 versus 65.

April 23, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | BBC, Israel, Palestine, The Guardian, UK, Zionism