Oliver Kamm makes an attempt to defend Jeremy Bowen in this post. After giving the background to the story he says that,

On all that I have seen, Bowen’s reporting from the Middle East has been informed and scrupulous.

I have no doubt that Bowen is as knowledgeable and informed as anyone else about the situation in the Middle East but the judgment of the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee (ESC) was that in a number of specific instances he deployed that knowledge in a manner that was lacking in impartiality and accuracy. Kamm doesn’t contest the substance of these findings, something an assiduous fact checker such as he would surely have done if it were possible to do so.

The judgment against him is an unwarranted slur on his professionalism and a threat to the notion of objective journalism.

So, why “slur”? What “threat” to objective journalism? This kind of language would be justified in the context of an attack on the ESC’s findings, a demonstration of their unfairness or that they had not taken relevant information into account or something similar. Nothing of the sort is offered.

This issue has nothing to do with the historical or current rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It concerns the responsibility - not even merely the entitlement - of a senior and experienced journalist to provide explanation and context for what he reports on. Objective reporting of international conflict doesn’t mean that you split the difference between the protagonists.

All of this is perfectly correct but, again, it does Bowen no favors. He indeed has a responsibility to provide explanation and context for what he reports on. What he is not entitled to do is to twist the facts to suit his own views on the situation and Kamm offers us no reason to think that Bowen didn’t do this. Furthermore, as a senior and experienced journalist with a publicly-owned broadcaster, the duty to get the facts right weighs even more heavily on Bowen that it does on the common run of hacks.

None of this means that he can’t have an opinion on the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict or even that he ought to keep these views to himself. What he can’t do is use the BBC’s reputation to pass them off as accurate or impartial.

Kamm then goes to give his readers a lengthy disquisition on the depth and breadth of his own support for Israel. Lovely stuff but quite irrelevant to the matter at hand. His attempt to defend Bowen ignores the issues in play and amounts to little more than saying that he regards him as a splendid chap and can’t understand why people are being beastly to him.