Pro-Israel lobby crows over BBC's ruling about Jeremy Bowen

Jeremy Bowen, (pictured), Middle East Editor for the BBC, whose diary entries during the Israeli attacks on Gaza earlier this year brought home the truly horrifying nature of events unfolding in the region, has been rapped by the Editorial Standards Committee (ESC), part of the BBC Trust.  

The ESC, which oversees output on the BBC and judges it against the BBC’s charter of impartiality and accuracy, has partially upheld complaints against the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, over a programme broadcast marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war. 

Two complaints were lodged against the BBC News Online article “How 1967 defined the Middle East”, and a further complaint against an episode of ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, broadcast on 12 January 2008, both by Bowen.

The ESC partly upheld the first complaint concerning the online article ‘How 1967 defined the Middle East’, with regard to impartiality and accuracy and the second complaint was upheld on impartiality and partially upheld on accuracy. On the complaint against’ From Our Own Correspondent’, this was not upheld with regard to impartiality and was partially upheld with regard to accuracy.

You can read the full report by the ESC here.

Ironically, during the attacks on Gaza, of the more than 1000 complaints received by the BBC, 65% of complainants accused the corporation of pro Israeli bias.

In their study of the television coverage of the Middle East conflict, ‘Bad News from Israel‘, Professors Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group found that on British television, particularly on BBC1, there was a preponderance of official ‘Israeli perspectives’ and that Israelis were interviewed or reported more than twice as often as Palestinians.

They also found that a large number of statements were broadcast from US politicians, who tended to strongly support Israel. These in turn were interviewed twice as often as politicians from Britain, further adding to anti Palestinian bias on the channel.

An in an article published in The Observer on 20 June 2004, the former BBC Middle East correspondent, Tim Llewellyn, excoriated the BBC’s News Management team saying that: “The [BBC news management] is, by turns, schmoozed and pestered by the Israeli embassy. The pressure by this hyperactive, skilful mission – and by Israel’s many influential and well-organized friends – is unremitting and productive, especially now that accusations of anti-Semitism can be so wildly deployed.”

The consequence, Llewellyn said, was widespread viewer ignorance about the predicament of the Palestinians.

He wrote, “The general BBC and ITN attitude is to bow to the strongest pressure. The Arabs have little clout in Britain, and their governments and supporters have much responsibility to bear for not presenting their side of the story and for abysmal public relations.”

As the ESC publishes its decisions on complaints made against Jeremy Bowen, Muslims must ask themselves how ‘unremitting and productive’ they have been in monitoring media output and lodging complaints against broadcasters that have, in their view, strayed from impartiality in covering events in the Middle East. 

ENGAGE wrote twice to Peter Horrocks, Head of BBC News, during the Gaza conflict, over the BBC’s disproportionate use of Israeli spokespeople in its news broadcasts. Sadly, Mr Horrocks sent a substandard reply to our first letter and failed to reply to our second.

The ESC in its ruling on Bowen acknowledged that the decisions were subject to long delays. At least those complaints were conclusively dealt with. We’re still waiting for a reply.

We’ll be pursuing this further and will keep you posted.

UPDATE: The Independent leader article today states:

‘The decision of the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee to censure the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, for breaching the Corporation’s guidelines on accuracy and impartiality demonstrates a terrible absence of good judgement. Mr Bowen’s work has always been scrupulously unbiased. The BBC Trust needs to learn that accountability does not mean swallowing every complaint uncritically. When a good journalist needs to be robustly defended, it must not be afraid to do so.’

And Robert Fisk, the Independent’s veteran award-winning columnist on the Middle East remarks on the BBC’s Trust’s report calling it ‘pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.’

He writes:

‘The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.
 

‘And this, remember, is the same institution which said that to broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza might upset its “neutrality”. Legless Palestinian children clearly don’t count as much as the BBC’s pompous executives.’

UPDATE 2: Read Antony Lerman on Cif – ‘What did Jeremy Bowen do wrong?’ 

UPDATE 3: Jewish Chronicle story here.