Multiple employees of the UK-based news agency Reuters spoke out in a report released Aug. 21 about what they see as pro-Israel bias among the company’s editors and management, an Anadolu repot said on Aug. 23.
The latest incident that led to a backlash over Reuters’ biased reporting was when Israel killed Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif earlier this month. Although al-Sharif previously worked for the newswire, even winning a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for his work there, Reuters used the headline “Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader” for their coverage of al-Sharif’s death.
The public backlash was not limited to the billion-viewer audience of the global newswire nor to this incident, as the concern it sparked among some staff at Reuters produced an internal review of bias within their reporting.
An internal study by Reuters journalists analysed 499 reports tagged as “Israel-Palestine” published between Oct. 7 and Nov. 14, 2023 and found a “consistent pattern of assigning more resources to covering stories affecting Israelis as opposed to Palestinians,” according to investigative journalism group Declassified UK.
“A comprehensive internal investigation, conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses of our reporting” took place, according to a Reuters source, which told Declassified UK: “A few weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, several journalists at Reuters recognised that our coverage of the Israel-Gaza war lacked objectivity.”
[Read more on Radiancenews.com]