BBC’s Bowen says Hamas is ‘good’ source of Gaza casualty figures

That claim that was contradicted by David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, who was running the class alongside Bowen and said the report had in fact concluded that “we are biased against Israel in our coverage”.

Bowen’s comments have been met with condemnation from politicians and a former BBC director of television.

Lord Austin described Bowen’s description of Hamas casualty figures as “very worrying” and another peer, Lord Leigh of Hurley, said the remark was “extraordinary”.

Former BBC executive Danny Cohen told the JC he was “surprised” Bowen had placed such confidence in figures released by Hamas and added: “The corporation does not seem to have taken the time to diligently read the Asserson Report and consider its findings before forming its position.

Palestinian journalist, Rushdi Abualouf, also addressed BBC staff during the workshop on impartiality in warzones (Photo: BBC YouTube)[Missing Credit]

“This is symptomatic of the BBC’s ultra-defensive response to evidence of its anti-Israel bias.”

The latest scandal to engulf BBC’s coverage of the Middle East comes as the culture, media and sport committee is expected to raise the issue of impartiality with the broadcaster when parliament returns next month.

During an “Editorial Policy Masterclass” on “reporting war impartially” last Friday, Bowen said: “While Hamas run the authority there, the fact is that most international organisations believe the figures are pretty accurate and, in previous wars, the figures have been pretty accurate.

“The record is good. They don’t appear to be fabricating them,” the BBC stalwart told his colleagues during the lunchtime session.

However, an analysis by an expert statistician published earlier this year argued that the civilian death toll reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry since the start of the war was “statistically impossible”.

In an article published in March, Professor Abraham Wyner wrote that the official number of Palestinian casualties reported daily by Hamas from October 26 to November 11 was evidently “not real.”

In line with BBC guidelines, Bowen also took issue with using the term “terrorist” to describe Hamas. He said that while the corporation has developed “a bit of a mantra” by telling audiences that Hamas is proscribed in the UK, he agreed with David Jordan, who said the term was “the most overused word in the lexicon”.

Jeremy Bowen (Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images

Bowen added: “That’s why it’s best we don’t use it… When I use the word terrorist, I say the Israelis say these people are terrorists, the Ukrainians say this is Russian terrorism, the Russians say the attacks into Russia if they get permission to use those bigger missiles...

Bowen said that there was “a lot of truth” in the cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Bowen went on to describe the Asserson Report, which found the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in the first few months of the war, as a “deeply flawed document”.

Lord Austin said: “It is very worrying that Jeremy Bowen is describing figures produced by the propaganda arm of a proscribed terrorist organisation as ‘good’.”

The peer criticised Bowen for “reducing the Asserson Report to a smear” and implored both Bowen and the BBC to “consider very carefully the report’s findings and review their practices to prevent these problems in future”.

Former BBC executive Cohen told the JC: “It is hard to know on what basis he believes the figures are correct or why the BBC does not ensure that every discussion of these figures includes the number of Hamas terrorists killed in battle or the fact that there have been a number of challenges to the accuracy of information released by Hamas.”

Lord Leigh of Hurley said of Bowen’s comments: “It seems to me extraordinary that a reputable journalist should be defending Hamas figures on numbers which, given all that has happened there, must be very challenging to compile.

“He fails to recognise that they deny the existence of any fatalities among Hamas terrorists. The BBC need to properly address the Asserson Report rather than just dismiss it.”

Meanwhile, Greg Smith, Tory MP for Buckingham, accused Bowen of an “outrageous response”, adding, “When in a hole, stop digging.”

The Asserson Report found the corporation had repeatedly demonstrated a pattern of bias against Israel. Using a team of lawyers and data scientists, nine million words from the BBC were analysed using artificial intelligence and found the BBC associated Israel with genocide 14 times more than Hamas.

Bowen claimed in his talk that the “methodology… is questionable… AI was used.”

The BBC echoed its international editor’s comments when approached by the JC. The corporation said: “We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context.”

Bowen seemed to agree with the BBC’s position on the report, adding: “We are required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this, despite the highly complex, challenging and polarising nature of the conflict.”

Bowen affirmed the importance of accuracy, emphasising that striving for neutrality is wrong because the truth might not always be neutral: “Searching for some kind of spurious balance is entirely wrong, the truth is the objective.”

Sometimes, the editor continued, the truth lies “somewhere in-between” two sides, but on other occasions, the truth lies on one side “and you have to say it”.

“We’re in the business of truth. If we cannot tell the truth, something has gone very badly wrong and we have failed in our objectives, so I will always try to tell the truth, but sometimes the truth is complicated.”

Addressing claims that the BBC is biased, Bowen said: “In all the reporting that I do, I don’t get shadowy figures from this building telling me what to say, I tell them what I’m going to say…. I’m the only one who writes my script.”

The 64-year-old also claimed that Israel “has a special position as far as Western governments are concerned”.

When discussing governments’ arms contracts with Israel, Bowen suggested it was hypocritical for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to warn Israel without conditions, “which I think renders what they are saying quite hollow, because if you don’t back it up with something, if you don’t attach a cost to it, in a political sense it becomes meaningless”.

Bowen went on to address “asymmetric” war, with “the strong against the weak”.

“Hamas will continue to measure its success through just being able to continue, as they see it, in resisting, whereas Israel has said they [Hamas] have to be eradicated completely, so you have different conceptions of victory too.”

He criticised Israel for barring journalists from Gaza, suggesting “they don’t let us in because they have something to hide clearly”.

In the Gaza war, Bowen added, open-source material has allowed reporters to cover events inside.

Addressing his controversial report on the al-Ahli hospital strike in Gaza on October 17, Bowen admitted, “I made a mistake in my reporting,” but said this had been “unfairly” blown out of proportion.

“You don’t always totally get it right, you make mistakes, especially if you’re working in daily news, you’ve got no time to try to get it right.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion but I did, and it seemed to be a rational conclusion to make, but it wasn’t the correct one.

“That still gets focused on by our opponents, I would say unfairly, because looking at the great mass of reporting in what, in a couple of weeks from now will be a year, I think we’ve done very well.”

Bowen emphasised the importance of using of active and passive language when reporting that people died or were killed. “I really sweat my scripts,” he said.

Media monitoring advocacy group, Camera said: “The BBC knows full well that Hamas deliberately avoids distinguishing between combatants and civilian casualties and that civilians killed by shortfall rockets fired by terrorist organisations are included in the data it provides to the media and to organisations such as the UN, which are in turn quoted by the BBC.”

A BBC spokesperson told the JC: “We will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.

“The most recent research shows that audiences are significantly more likely to turn to the BBC for impartial coverage than to any other provider. Independent research from More in Common found that the highest proportion of people thought BBC coverage of this story was mostly neutral.”