The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has determined that its Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, violated the broadcaster’s ethical guidelines calling for impartiality and accuracy. The finding is likely to confirm charges that the BBC’s news coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is largely biased against Israel.
The March 31 decision by the Editorial Standards Committee (ESC), a unit of the BBC’s top decision-making body, the BBC Trust, comes in response to a formal complaint filed by the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), and a similar complaint filed independently by a member of the U.K.-based Zionist Federation.
The complaint filed by the media watchdog group charged that Bowen’s June 4, 2007 article about the Six-Day War and its aftermath was marred by “serious omissions, exaggerations, and outright anti-Israel bias.” The detailed complaint came before the ESC after the BBC news website and Editorial Complaints Unit defended Bowen’s article.
The BBC Trust had criticized Bowen for at least three instances of vagueness in his wording in his website article, How 1967 Defined the Middle East, which commemorated the 40th anniversary of Israel’s Six Day War. The Trust stated that the phrase “the Israeli generals… had been training to finish the unfinished business of Israel’s independence war of 1948 for most of their careers” was inaccurate, and should have made note of Israel’s capture of eastern parts of Jerusalem. In another instance, the Trust said the phrase describing Zionism’s “innate instinct to push out the frontier” should have been more clearly defined. The Trust furthermore criticized Bowen’s calling Israel’s settlement of land in Judea and Samaria as a defiance “to everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” as too vaguely worded.
In response to the ruling, CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini said that while ESC’s willingness to openly censure Bowen’s reporting is important and encouraging, it is unclear that the BBC will take concrete steps to combat the broadcaster’s chronically biased reporting.
“Acknowledging the glaring problems in this article is a good first step, but it’s only a first step,” he said. “The BBC also needs to consider the wider implications here. Not only did the senior BBC reporter in the Middle East show bias in his reporting, but he also made it clear, while defending his piece before the ESC, that he thinks it’s reasonable to report from the Palestinian perspective and ignore other mainstream narratives.”
Ini said he feels that the ESC findings and, especially, Bowen’s “outrageously deceptive” attempts to defend his report, explain the journalist’s past biased coverage and cast doubt on his suitability as a BBC reporter and editor. “There’s good reason to be skeptical of Mr. Bowen’s reporting,” Ini said, “and by extension, the reporting of BBC reporters who are subordinate to him.”
CAMERA expressed concern that the ESC, despite having ruled that Bowen’s reporting was not impartial, is apparently not calling on the reporter to be objective in future articles. Its ruling states that it is not necessary for Bowen to have given equal space to different views. “All that was required was a clear statement signposting that there were alternative theses subscribed to by respectable historians.”
This assertion is inconsistent with the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, Ini argues. “If Jeremy Bowen consistently promotes only one point of view linked to a controversial subject and fails to relay in any real depth other prominent and reasonable views, the result is biased reporting,” he said. “This is true regardless of whether or not Bowen throws in a sentence ‘signposting’ that other views exist.”