Mick Hartley

No surprise here. From the JC:

The BBC’s veteran international editor Jeremy Bowen claimed terror organisation Hamas is a “good” source of information on Gaza casualty figures during a closed-doors “masterclass” on reporting war impartially, the JC can reveal.

During the session for BBC reporters and editors Bowen also took issue with using the term “terrorist” to describe Hamas….

He also dismissed the recent Asserson Report, which found the corporation had violated its own editorial guidelines on Israel more than 1,500 times since October 7, as a “smear” and wrongly claimed it found that the BBC was “antisemitic”.

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”….

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”.