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.
Seems like the analysis is starting from the hypothesis that the BBC is biased, while a better scientific inquiry is “IS the BBC biased”.
No?
Positing something and validating the theory through research is appropriate scientific inquiry.
It’s obvious to many people that the BBC had a bias, there was no need to ask the question when they could answer the question.
If you disagree, feel free to present a compelling study as to why you think so. That’s how the scientific method works.
Noooooooooo. No.
Everyone and every organization has a bias. Even a “neutral” bias is a bias. Finding out which way their bias leans is good info to figure out.
I fail to see your point. Whenever you have a theory you either have a suspicion of some severity that what you are testing against is the case. Depending on that severity your own process will be biased and being upfront about what you are trying to do is far better practice than trying to hide it by appearing more neutral than you actually are. If anything these researchers are doing everything correct, people can now go ahead and check their process for bias if the suspect so based on the findings, if they had presented themselves as a neutral party some would be more hesitant to do so since the researchers did not display any inherent bias.
It is perfectly fine to start from a biased perspective if you are open about that bias (which is the case here) and don’t try to argue against people if they show that your process was tainted by that bias (remains to be seen on two counts: was this researched biased and if so how would the researchers responds). But having a bias in itself is not inherently wrong, if it were none of modern science would pass that test.