Jeremy Bowen's Hero

He's at it yet again, is the BBC's snottily out-of-control "Middle East editor" Jeremy Bowen, displaying that noisome bias (and ignorance) of his, and getting away with it. See also BBC Watch's post  here

Needless to say, this latest outrageous piece of nonsense from Bowen should be vigorously protested, as, once again, he transgresses his employer's rules and regulations.

Some insight into this egregious BBC man's disgraceful penchant for injecting his own bias into what passes in his mind for analysis can perhaps be discerned from the disclosure on Twitter the other week that veteran, now retiring New York Times reporter John Burns is a journalistic hero of his.

Just consider this credo of Burns to which Bowen admiringly drew attention:

Q [to Burns]. How do you manage to not get mad at the injustices man heaps upon other humans? Especially children and women? Does it ever provoke you to take matters into your own hands and get justice, instead of being a neutral observer? — Mani Subramanian; Boston

A [from Burns]. I’ve always felt that passion is a legitimate — an indispensable — tool for a reporter in the face of the malevolent outrages of war.... Bottom line, I have held stubbornly to the belief that the reporter’s duty is not to be neutral in the face of outrage so much as to be fair, the more so when neutrality has the damnable effect of making unequal things appear equal. Identify the villains, and depict them as the satanic killers they often are? Yes, but never at the cost of obscuring the perpetrators’ accounts in justification, however mendacious, of what they have done. [Emphasis added]

For all that, it would be vain to deny that editors have their own bounden trust to save reporters — not infrequently so, in my case — from the excesses of their passion with the cruel but necessary judgment of the blue pencil. You ask if there has ever come a moment to take matters into my own hands? There have been great reporters who have — Ernest Hemingway would never have claimed to have been neutral in the Spanish Civil War, nor even always fair — but ours has not been an age that favors his kind of swashbuckling commitment. In our time, it has become common for young reporters to give as their moral code, indeed as their reason for choosing the profession, that they aim to create a better world. It is a handsome thing, but one that can foster a missionary complex — a hubris, even — that can favor a blindness to inconvenient facts to the advantage of others.

The ABC's newly-appointed Jerusalem correspondent Sophie McNeill openly confesses to being a reporter with that "missionary complex" (as we saw here)  despite the rules and regulations of her employer (Australia's equivalent of the BBC).

Bowen does not appear to aspire to Ms McNeill's level of proudly biased reportage, but neither is he fair.

And as a result he must be counted among the less than scrupulously objective reporters who have helped to kindle public prejudice against Israel.