UKLFI Charitable Trust held a webinar on “Trevor Asserson on The Asserson Report” with Natasha Hausdorff as chair, on Wednesday 9 October 2024.
The Asserson Report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war runs to 199 pages with 190 pages of schedules plus 80 megabytes of appendices. It includes detailed analyses by human researchers as well as artificial intelligence. Its publication was reported on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph of 8 September 2024. It concludes that the BBC’s coverage of this war has not complied with the BBC’s legal obligations of accuracy and impartiality. However, veteran BBC Editor, Jeremy Bowen, was quick to dismiss it, describing it on 13 September 2024 as a “deeply flawed document”.
In this webinar, Trevor Asserson, who led the research, will discuss the analyses and conclusions with Natasha Hausdorff. The webinar will also explore what is being done and can be done to ensure that the BBC complies with its legal obligations.
TO VIEW PRESS HERE
More about the speakers:
Trevor Asserson is a leading UK litigation solicitor, who in 2005 set up Asserson Law Offices, a UK law firm based in Tel Aviv. With c. 75 lawyers, it is now the largest international law firm in Israel.
Early in his career Trevor acted for two UK political parties in a claim of bias against the BBC. He founded BBCwatch, a platform scrutinising BBC’s Middle East coverage, and published a number of independent reports exposing BBC bias in the Middle East.
On 9 September 2024 Trevor launched his c200 Page Report titled ‘The Israel-Hamas War and the BBC’ which includes an in-depth analysis of some 9 million words of BBC output in both English and Arabic. The Report combined traditional forensic analysis with analysis by a team of data scientists. It can be viewed here: https://campaignformediastandards.org.uk/#Reports
Natasha Hausdorff is a barrister at 6 Pump Court Chambers and a frequent speaker on International Law. She has a law degree from Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor at Skadden, and subsequently gained an LLM from Tel Aviv University, focussing on public international law and the law of armed conflict.
She clerked for Miriam Naor, President of Israel’s Supreme Court, and was a Fellow at Columbia Law School’s National Security Program. Natasha is legal director of UKLFI Charitable Trust.
In the course of the current conflict, Natasha has been interviewed frequently on television to explain the application of the law of armed conflict. Tweets of her interview by Katya Adler on the BBC News Channel went viral with over 4 million views. Videos of many of her interviews can be viewed HERE.