BBC trust raps Bowen over Israel reports

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's veteran Middle East editor, is buttoning up his flak jacket this morning following damning criticism of his news reports about Israel by the BBC Trust.

In a report published on Wednesday, the Trust claimed that Bowen (pictured) had breached the Beeb's guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, citing in particular a piece which he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline 'Six Days that Changed the Middle East', in which he referred to "Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier".

While no disciplinary action will be taken, the decision to censure Bowen has whipped up a storm among old hands at BBC news, some of whom believe the trust, which oversees the corporation, is undermining the credibility of its news by attacking Bowen.

"There's no love lost between staff and the BBC Trust. We see them as a hostile body and they seem to be in competition with [broadcasting regulator] Ofcom to see who can kick us the hardest," a senior BBC journalist told the Independent. "The trust is in a position where it has to be seen to be critical and tough because of the dual regulatory system we have been saddled with, which doesn't work. It doesn't waste any opportunities to kick us if it can do."

These views are echoed to an extent by Greg Dyke, the BBC's former director general, who said it was wrong for the trust to spend months investigating individual reports by journalists that had been compiled under pressure and tight deadlines.

"The problem is that journalism is not an exact science," he said. "I remember Jon Snow [the presenter of Channel 4 News] saying to me that if most of his journalism was put under that degree of scrutiny, then it wouldn't stand up. I think we all know that to be true."

Bowen was also censured for saying that Israel showed a "defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own" and that its generals felt that they were dealing with "unfinished business", left over from the 1948 War of Independence.

The Zionist Federation of Great Britain was quick to respond to the trusts findings, with a spokesman telling the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Bowen's position was "untenable".

The report has angered Robert Fisk, the Independent's veteran Middle East correspondent. He said that, "the BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest. But I am mincing my words. The Trust - how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC - has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed - against all the facts - that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth."