NAME: BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen breached the corporation's guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, an official report found today.
Complaints about two pieces by Bowen - one online and another on Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent - were ruled on by the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee.
Three references in the web article broke BBC rules on accuracy, the committee said.
They were the references to 'Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier'; Israel's 'defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own'; and Israeli generals' sense they were dealing with 'unfinished business' left over from the 1948 war of independence.
The Radio 4 broadcast inaccurately claimed the US considered a particular Israeli settlement to be illegal, but had not breached impartiality rules, the report found.
Bowen used the online article, published on the BBC News website on June 4 2007, to put the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict in context by explaining the events of the 1967 Six Day War.
But the committee said the subject was very controversial and Bowen, the author of the 2003 book Six Days - How The 1967 War Shaped The Middle East, should have done more to make clear that there were other views on the matter.
Ruling that the article had breached the rules on impartiality, the committee said: 'Readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war.
'It was not necessary for equal space to be given to the other arguments, but... the existence of alternative theses should have been more clearly signposted.' >>> Daily Mail Reporter | Wednesday, April 15, 2009
