Last night I slowly digested the new Owen Jones report, that claims (unbelievably) that there is a pro-Israel bias at the BBC (here are a few examples that prove the opposite 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). And as a result here is something I never thought I would ever say – that we should perhaps thank Owen Jones for writing what he did. His report on BBC bias may be utter junk, but it inadvertently highlights that identifiable Jews inside the BBC are being bullied and targeted by other BBC staff who hate Israel.

Let me explain.

The Owen Jones death spiral

Ever since the October 7 atrocities, Owen Jones has been falling deeper and deeper into his rabbit hole. As a journalist who started out as a Jeremy Corbyn fanboy, OJ’s standing was badly shaken by the Labour party antisemitism crisis and never truly recovered. Since 2019 he has tried to recreate himself numerous times yet found that the only people willing to listen to him were those that didn’t think that Labour had an antisemitism crisis in the first place. That particular bubble has a habit of forcing participants into a self-radicalisation spiral, and post October 7, Owen Jones became almost completely lost in an anti-Israel conspiratorial world. Dan Hodges recently went as far as describing Owen Jones as ‘being stuck in his death spiral’.

So Owen Jones just wrote an attack piece on the BBC claiming it is full of pro-Israel bias. His attack on the BBC is not new. Back in January, Owen Jones was referencing BBC bias in this conflict, highlighting research by two ‘data specialists’ Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava to show it.

These are the same two data specialists he has utilised for his latest work. Najjar is from Lebanon, a nation involved in the conflict with Israel. You also have to wonder if the ‘researcher’ Jan Lietava is the same person as the ‘photographer’ Jan Lietava who signed an ‘artists for Palestine’ petition in December last year. And the work of those two was merely continuing the argument put together by an academic activist named Holly Jackson. Jackson’s thesis at Columbia was on the ‘Israel lobby’. It seems Owen Jones only has concern for bias if it leans in a particular way.

The Owen Jones hit piece

The Owen Jones report is over 9200 words long. It is split into only four key points.

• The first section is about 13 journalists connected to the BBC who seem to think the BBC should be more pro-Hamas. Jones refers to them as ‘whistleblowers’. They remain anonymous but they are almost certainly BBC Arabic types or other BBC journos who began their careers working for Al Jazeera or stationed in Cairo or Beirut. This covers about 1000 words.
• Then the report focuses on Raffi Berg. A Jewish editor who works on the Middle East pages. Raffi Berg is mentioned 63 times in the report. In the 35 or so paragraphs in which Raffi Berg is explicitly mentioned there are over 3090 words. And that does not include the paragraphs around these mentions which are still all about him. Which means this report is obsessively focused on attacking a Jewish editor.
• A third section uses the death of a man with Downs Syndrome as a case study to highlight bias. More about this later. Contained about 1300 words.
• A final section presents a (very skewed) data analysis of BBC output. Approximately 1900 words.

First things first

The Owen Jones report is junk. Do not for a second think otherwise. If you want to be certain of its ‘junk’ status, consider this. The central thesis of his report is pro-Israel bias at the BBC. And yet he must have been aware that at least two major reports have recently been published (both serious studies -involving large teams and research spanning months -from Trevor Asserson and Danny Cohen) that argued the very opposite. Yet Owen Jones does not even mention them.

It would have been the first port of call for anyone considering a serious counter argument – the need to explain what was flawed in two large reports that argue the exact opposite of what you are claiming yourself. But Owen Jones ignored them completely, as if they do not exist. And this provides absolute proof that Owen Jones had no interest in truth or balance. He has turned up to spin a story. His has created an amateurish hit piece – with one central target – and it is no surprise to find the central target is a Jewish one.

The Owen Jones examples

To show just how bad the academic method in the report is – Owen Jones throws up examples of reporting errors made in the early days of the conflict. He mentions a story of twenty Israeli children tied together that turned out to be false. The fact this has not been corrected is given as evidence of pro-Israel bias. But that is not what bias is – or means. Jones is just cherry picking one factual error to suit his own bias. Did he look for errors the other way? Clearly not, because if he had so wanted – he could have chosen to look at hundreds of examples where the publication of false claims from Hamas strongly support the claim of anti-Israel bias. None of the examples from this mountain of evidence interested him.

It would have been possible to write an entire book about how amateurish and flawed the method is. The fact the BBC must always mention the October 7 atrocities when reporting on the conflict (to add needed context), is the pillar upon which the false claim of bias is created. It means Israeli deaths are always going to be referenced and words like ‘atrocity’ will appear more times than not.

Add that to the fact that mentions of deaths in Gaza will often be related to Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists means language referencing Palestinian deaths would have to reflect that. If these issues were not addressed in the study – and they weren’t – then those omissions make the entire report childish gibberish.  This skew means that an article containing a false claim from Hamas – that uses 1000 words to reference a massacre that never happened, will be considered pro-Israel bias by Owen Jones, because it would reference the October 7 atrocities in a single sentence at the end.

The Owen Jones case study

Just to show how ridiculous the Owen Jones piece is – he highlights a specific case study. It involved a man with Downs Syndrome being mauled by an IDF dog. What Owen Jones fails to mention (isn’t it odd how someone who demands such accuracy from others, is so inept and inaccurate himself), is that the family of the victim were a family of terrorists. In fact, I took a close look at that particular event at the time, and found numerous issues with the story that the Palestinian propaganda machine had put together. The brother – the BBC’s first witness, was an Islamic Jihad propaganda agent. The mother was a widow – and her husband had been buried in Hamas colours. Two of the brothers inside the house were terrorists and arrested at the scene.

Owen Jones is taking this BBC pack of anti-Israel lies – this pro Hamas propaganda piece – and claiming it is pro-Israel simply because he doesn’t like the headline. This is the level of OJ’s investigative work. It isn’t even student journalism. It is third-rate, uninformed, lazy, factually illiterate, and misleading, bunkum.

The morally corrupt need for balance

There is only one thing that the Owen Jones piece successfully highlights. It shows us how bad the situation at the BBC has become for Israel and for BBC’s identifiable Jews. BBC hierarchy have long been able to cover-up the continual deterioration using a well-worn and morally incoherent claim. They suggest that because both sides complain about bias, they can therefore assume that they are balanced and doing things right.

Carry that argument elsewhere and it soon becomes clear how corrupt it is. If they had as many complaints that they went too hard on Peter Sutcliffe as they did that they went too hard on the police chasing him – would that also be evidence they had found the right balance? It is really that stupid. There is no moral equivalence between the radical Islamic terror groups who want to slaughter Jews, and Israelis who do not want to be slaughtered. There is no balance.

The identifiable Jews in the village.

Although Owen Jones may not have the self-awareness or intelligence to understand the fine print of his own hit piece – he inadvertently shines a spotlight straight onto the festering problem that the BBC has. He refers to it as a ‘civil war’ (an internal mob trying to get rid of the few remaining identifiable Jews at the BBC is ethnic cleansing, not a civil war). And all those people complaining about Raffi Berg (and we know they are almost all Islamists working at the BBC) they are agitated into action because there is still a proud Jewish editor employed there. Every single one of those ‘whistleblowing’ employees would not be complaining if the Middle East editor was an ex Al-Jazeera staffer based in Beirut. This has nothing to do with a need for impartiality – and everything to do with Raffi Berg’s Jewish identity.

And there is a flip side to this. All of these people are current or ex-employees of the BBC. They help shape BBC output. No wonder the BBC has an anti-Israel bias. The problem with the BBC suddenly becomes easy to understand. Owen Jones has this upside down. The BBC’s problem is not Raffi Berg – it is all those people who have a problem with him.

Survival

If the BBC seeks to truly survive as a media outlet of international standing, the first thing it has to do is recognise the problem and ringfence its identifiable Jews. There is no disputing now they are under attack from within.  They are probably not the only minority group under attack either – and the BBC needs to protect them all. As a second step the BBC hierarchy needs to look for and identify all those who are seeking the geo-political Islamification of the BBC workplace. Nobody who thinks that the BBC should be more pro-Hamas should ever hold a BBC pen. Only if the powers that be at the BBC take this action – will they save themselves.

Sadly of course, it is far more likely those like Raffi Berg will eventually be forced out of the BBC workplace, than the BBC will ever find the guts to crack down on the pro-Hamas mob who are chasing him.

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