Jeremy Bowen is the BBC’s International Editor. He’s an extremely well-respected journalist with an immense amount of experience, having covered conflicts, mainly in the Middle East, for most of his long and impressive career. His position, and his status as a household name among those who routinely turn to the BBC for news, mean that his voice carries exceptional weight.
The flagship BBC news programmes turn to Bowen for his analysis of developments in the Middle East, to demystify and explain events in a complex region that most audiences have little background on. When Bowen speaks, millions of people listen. That makes him a load bearing beam in the BBC architecture of impartiality and accuracy.
Unfortunately for the licence fee payer, that beam might have some cracks.
Looking at three appearances across BBC TV and radio between July 17 and July 25, we can examine how Bowen blurs the lines between analysis and opinion within his own ideological framework, and how that clashes with the necessary constraints on BBC reporting, as opposed to a newspaper column or op-ed.
We all exist within our own cultural bubble. Our interpretations of events are filtered through our own pre-existing beliefs and outlook. As Bowen himself argued in 2006:
We all come from somewhere; we all have a prism through which we see the world; we all have an education, and views and experiences. It’s a false objective to be objective.
However, at the BBC, objectivity is in the job description, and this requires an awareness of one’s own biases and cultural backdrop. This week, despite making this very point himself twenty years ago, Bowen inadvertently showed us the cultural sphere in which his opinions ferment. On Radio 4’s Today program on July 17, Bowen used as a source what he called an “extensive and impressive piece of reporting in the Guardian”.
The reporting in question is actually more of an opinion piece, full of speculation and possibilities, some of which have already been proved wrong in the two weeks since it was published, and the paper itself holds a well-established anti-Israel position. The Guardian may be loved and respected among the British liberal middle class, but it could hardly be accused of impartiality. In a second telling slip, on July 25, as evidence for the claim that the Israeli Government is trying to seize more territory in the West Bank, Bowen referred to Haaretz as “the leading Israeli newspaper”.
Haaretz is a niche left-wing outlet which by their own figures only has 6.1% readership share. It seems likely that even they would be surprised to hear themselves described as “the leading Israeli newspaper”.
Bowen’s choices of source and how he elevates them with language like “impressive” and “leading” show us far more about where his own biases lie than they do about the conflict. When we use an appeal to authority we show who we believe holds authority. For Bowen, that is deeply and openly partisan newspapers. This shows us that he is failing to separate his own world view and politics from his reporting, despite his own words:
You have got to be aware of what your own prejudices and principles are and put them to one side in a box.
One key area of that worldview appears to be related to Palestinian agency, or the lack thereof. Bowen’s reporting does not seem to be able to grasp the concept of Palestinians as adults with agency and responsibility over their actions and decisions.
On his 17 July appearance on the Today programme he described Gaza as “an absolute dystopian hellscape”.
He blames the failure to make progress in Gaza on President Trump’s personality:
it has not been happening, not least because President Trump’s attention span is notoriously short and he’s also eviscerated his own state department.
And of course on arbitrary Israeli evil:
just dreadful conditions, children being brought in with bullet wounds. More than 1000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since the ceasefire, some in circumstances that witnesses have reported were much more like executions.
But where is Hamas?
Where is the government of Gaza that began this war of choice when they deliberately invaded their neighbor with the sole intention of causing the most massive military response possible?
Where is the blame for the murderous terrorist organisation that is holding the entire population of Gaza hostage by refusing to accept that they have lost this war, to surrender and to disarm?
Where is the reporting on the dead baby strategy, the process by which Hamas recruits the Western Media into its war effort, ensuring civilian death by embedding in civilian infrastructure and then using the images and stories of those deaths to drive public opinion against Israel?
They merit one mention, where they are framed as the reasonable party, helplessly buffeted by the whims of Israel and the US:
Hamas has been engaging in some talks about disarmament, but frankly, until there is a wider, workable process going somewhere, I think that’s going to, none of these things are going to happen.
Bowen had the same disdain for the Palestinians of the West Bank on July 25:
Essentially, the settlers have been running riot there in the West Bank, and the Government has chosen to let that happen, and there is bound to be and there has already been a pushback from Palestinians who say they’re defending themselves. Of course the Israeli Government says they’re terrorists.
For Bowen, the idea that these Palestinians are terrorists is worthy of derision. They’re just reacting to the actions of the fully responsible and complex Israelis, and, after all, what more could you expect from them? On the other hand, he gives Israelis motives and strategy that he doesn’t ascribe to Palestinians:
There’s been explosions of settler violence which is essentially aimed at ethnic cleansing, because the perpetrators believe the Palestinians have no right to be there and they have to go.
The truth is that INSS has recorded 12,558 Palestinian terrorist attacks in the West Bank since October 7.
It is also true that there have been 84 Israeli fatalities in that time and 675 injured Israelis. While nobody could credibly argue that settler violence is not a real phenomenon, it is also not credible to blame that level of Palestinian violence solely on the victims. The argument that Palestinian violence is just reactive, unplanned and uncontrollable also erases the existence of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or even the Palestinian Authority’s own pay-for-slay program, which creates government-sponsored incentives for Palestinians to choose violence.
For Jews there are no such allowances. In fact, for Bowen, a Jewish presence in the west bank at all (or Judea and Samaria to give it the name it held prior to the Jordanian occupation of 1948) is deemed beyond the pale, as he said on the BBC News Channel on July 21st:
[the British government] will look at the whole issue of banning trade with Jewish settlements on the occupied Palestinian territories. And, you know, the settlements are not simply if you like dormitory communities, some of them have got factories. Some of them have got vineyards. I’ve been to plastics factories, for example, on Jewish settlements, some of the bigger Jewish settlements are like quite big towns… two years ago, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, issued an advisory opinion which said that…Jewish settlements [are] illegal under international law.
Quite apart from the alarming shift from the standard language “Israeli settlements” to “Jewish,”Bowen’s “analysis” gives audiences the impression that it is a settled fact that no Jew should be allowed to live in the West Bank.
However, that is not a fact. It is a hotly contested opinion which erases thousands of years of Jewish history, the Oslo Accords signed by the Palestinian leadership, and, somewhat ironically, it effectively endorses ethnic apartheid.
Bowen has long been accused of bias against Israel, not least from CAMERA of whom he said in 2010:
Last year the BBC Trust, wrongly in my view, found me guilty of some inaccuracies, because of [complaints from] a campaign group in the USA, and in this country, who are the enemies of impartiality. They got through to the BBC Trust. I was found guilty.
More recently he got in hot water over the al-Ahli hospital blast by falsely claiming before the facts became clear that Israel had “flattened the hospital”, and then again by using a “whistleblower” on war crimes in Gaza who was later shown to be a liar. He apparently remains unrepentant on both counts.
There is a line between analysis and opinion, and on the BBC that line must be iron. Analysis presents facts and shows how those facts connect. On the BBC, it cannot be partisan. It must be entirely factual, accurate and impartial. It must be a tool to allow audiences to reach their own conclusions.
Jeremy Bowen is not just a journalist. He is also a public servant, and BBC radio and television is not a Guardian opinion piece. The BBC is not the right forum for offering heavily politicised, carefully cherry picked, deeply biased conclusions born in a very specific political echo chamber.