The front page of the Independent picks up on the report of the BBC trust yesterday that the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, had breached guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.
The paper reports that
Bowen was censured for a piece which he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline "Six days that changed the Middle East", attempting to give context to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysing the events of the 1967 Six Day War. The Middle East editor referred to "Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier". He wrote that Israel showed a "defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own" and that its generals felt that they were dealing with "unfinished business", left over from the 1948 War of Independence.
I have much sympathy with Bowen.Reporting on the Middle East is a minefield,a complicated melting pot of rival histories.Bowen does the job well and it appears that his crime is to apportion more of the blame onto Israel.
The corporation has already announced that it will be taking no cation against the senior reporter.
I agree with Robert Fisk who says that
The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.
Bowen simply made the mistake of rubbing up Israel with his version of events,events that most impartial commentators would say were correcr.
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