This is a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman, co-Vice Chair of the UK Zionist Federation

The BBC is a unique institution. It is the largest broadcasting organisation on the planet (with an annual operating expenditure over £4 billion) and it is a public service broadcaster. The former gives it tremendous power. Even in the internet age, more people almost certainly relied on the BBC than on anyone else for their information about the recent Gaza conflict.

The combination of size with 100% public ownership means that the BBC has very clear Editorial Guidelines.

They state: “The BBC’s commitment to accuracy is a core editorial value and fundamental to our reputation… Impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC’s commitment to its audiences.“

As one might expect, the BBC has a formal structure for handling complaints.

It is a three stage structure. The highest stage - for complainants who have been through the first two stages and who are still unhappy - is to appeal to the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust. At that stage the BBC has enormous resources - including for example commissioning external academic studies - which it can deploy into investigating a complaint.

Now to the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East. Many Israel experts have felt over the years that the BBC’s coverage has often been unfair to Israel. Trevor Asserson (a British lawyer who now lives in Jerusalem) did a stack of work to document this some 5-7 years ago.

In November 2003 in response to criticism (from both sides) about its Middle East coverage, the BBC appointed Malcolm Balen as Senior Editorial Adviser on the Middle East.

He wrote a long Report which was supposed to be internal. Reportedly it found anti-Israel bias. A legal case to require the publication of the Report has recently received a favourable judgment in an appeal to the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British parliament - though the BBC is continuing to fight the legal case against publication.

Also in response to criticism the BBC appointed its first Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen.

What happened today was the publication of a landmark decision. The highest level of the BBC’s complaints-handling structure - the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust - has ruled that Jeremy Bowen breached both the guideline on accuracy and that on impartiality.

The decisions were in response to two complainants: Jonathan Turner, a London barrister, and a complainant from CAMERA (the ‘Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America’). Here are brief details:

1: “How 1967 Defined the Middle East” - BBC Website, 4 June 2007

An article “How 1967 Defined the Middle East” by Jeremy Bowen was posted on the BBC Website on 4 June 2007 (it is still there) :

The ESC found that the article breaches the BBC’s guideline on impartiality.

It found that the article breaches the BBC’s guideline on accuracy in three respects:

• It wrongly says of the settlements that Israel is “in defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own.”

• In the imprecise use of the phrase “unfinished business” in the statement “The Israeli generals, hugely self-confident, mainly sabras (native-born Israeli Jews) in their late 30s and early 40s, had been training to finish the unfinished business of Israel’s independence war of 1948 for most of their careers”;

• It wrongly refers to Zionism’s “innate instinct to push out the frontier”.

2: BBC Radio 4 “From Our Own Correspondent” - 12 January 2008 The ESC found that a statement that the Har Homa settlement was considered illegal by the United States breached the BBC’s guideline on accuracy.

The finding that Mr Bowen’s article on the Six Day War breaches the guideline on impartiality is particularly significant, since he has written a book about this episode (”Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East”), which he regards as fundamental to understanding the Middle East. Indeed, that book is frequently cited by the BBC as a defence against complaints about Mr Bowen’s reporting, even though it had already given rise to questions about Mr Bowen’s objectivity - in his submission to the BBC, Mr Turner noted that in July 2005, Professor Efraim Karsh (Head of Mediterranean Studies at Kings College, London) described the book as “rife with standard anti-Israel prejudice, namely, the portrayal of Israel as the source of the ME conflict and the whitewashing of Arab-Palestinian rejection of Israel’s legitimacy and decades of relentless violence against the Jewish state.”

Mr Bowen’s submissions in the complaints procedure only add to concerns. For example, he said: “if Zionism didn’t have ‘an innate instinct to push out the frontier’ it’s hard to make sense of how the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) grew from a handful of immigrants on a few patches of land into the powerful and rich regional superpower Israel has become”. In fact, the yishuv included, inter alia, a very longstanding Jewish majority of the capital city, Jerusalem. And it is difficult to see why Mr Bowen referred in this connection to Israel being “rich”, if not out of prejudice. Israel’s economic success in recent years has been largely based on its high-tech industries which cover only a very small area of the country. In contrast Mr Bowen seems to think that Jews can only become rich by taking other people’s land.

The BBC committed extensive resources to the complaints. Two Editorial Advisers were available to the ESC; moreover they consulted two historians: Sir Martin Gilbert and Avi Shlaim.

The ESC’s findings are therefore serious. They demand urgent and visible action by the BBC to restore public confidence. The BBC should start by publishing the Balen Report, which it has spent 5 years and a reported £200,000 trying to keep under wraps. The Law Lords have ruled that the Report is within the jurisdiction of the Information Commissioner and so there is no justification whatever for the BBC to hand over yet more licence payers’ money to lawyers, in what will inevitably prove a fruitless attempt to prevent transparency.

UPDATE: See Chas Newkey Burden’s guest post on Harry’s Place.