Declassified researched two years of reporting by seven British media outlets and found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks.
Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.
The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.
For example, one Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’”. The Daily Mail reported in May 2024 of hecklers at a speech by then foreign secretary secretary David Lammy “accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000 from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.”
In fact, British businessman Trevor Chinn has funded Keir Starmer and several senior Labour ministers and was awarded the Israeli medal of honour for his “dedication” to and “love” for Israel.
Of the seven media outlets analysed – BBC articles, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and Times – the BBC and the Express are the most extreme, and no mentions of the phrase Israel lobby, used without speech marks, could be found at all in their publications.
The BBC is failing to mention the Israel lobby while having regular meetings with it. As Declassified recently revealed, the BBC held nine meetings with Jewish groups strongly sympathetic to Israel in the first year of the Gaza genocide.
The Guardian was found to have made only five mentions of an Israel lobby without speech marks, three of which are in comment pieces by columnist Owen Jones.