BBC’s Jeremy Bowen breached guidelines on accuracy in Israel reports

A selection of articles on Jeremy Bowen and the BBC

The Telegraph and the Independent have both provided good coverage of the news story about Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, who has been found to have breached the BBC’s guidelines on accurate reporting.

The Telegraph article is headlined BBC’s Jeremy Bowen breached guidelines on accuracy in Israel reports; the Independent ‘s Bowen ‘breached rules on impartiality’.

But the Independent is very critical of the decision. It carries both Robert Fisk’s accusation that the BBC Trust, which made this determination, is capitulating to the Israel lobby (‘How can you trust the cowardly BBC?‘ )and a strong editorial against the decision which, it says, it “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.”