Israel Matzav: Despite protagonist's death, battle to release Balen report to continue

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Despite protagonist's death, battle to release Balen report to continue

In 2004, a report called the Balen Report was written in response to accusations of bias in the BBC's coverage of Israel. The report was written by by Malcolm Balen, a senior journalist, for Richard Sambrook, then BBC director of news. To date, the Beeb has spent more than £270,000 of taxpayer shillings to prevent the report from seeing the light of day.

The battle against the Beeb was carried on by Steven Sugar, a lawyer who for the last six years has made pursuing the Beeb his personal crusade. Sugar died of cancer recently at the age of 61. His widow is going to carry on his struggle (Hat Tip: CAMERA).

Mr Sugar, a solicitor, first asked the BBC to publish the Balen Report in 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act and refused to accept the BBC’s argument that it was outside the Act’s scope.

The corporation successfully argued in the past that the report should not be released because it was held for “the purposes of journalism, art or literature” and, as such, was exempt. It was commissioned to analyse the BBC’s coverage of Middle East issues and make recommendations for improvement.

Mrs Paveley, a 48-year-old clinical psychologist, was approached by her husband’s lawyers after he died. They explained that the case could only continue if he was represented at court.

“I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to abandon it,” she says. “It would have almost felt like a betrayal to let all his hard work go to waste. He never gave up, so why should I?”

Mrs Paveley said that she and her late husband saw an anti-Israeli bias in the reporting of Orla Guerin, the BBC’s former Middle East correspondent, who was accused of anti-Semitism in 2004 by the Israeli government.

Mrs Paveley said: “Steven thought that reporting should be balanced. As a publicly-funded body, it seems wrong that the BBC is afraid and reluctant to be more transparent.”

Another reporter, Barbara Plett, was found by BBC governors to have “breached the requirements of due impartiality” after she said she cried as a dying Yasser Arafat left the West Bank in 2004.

More recently, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, was also found to have breached rules on accuracy and impartiality in two reports about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

A BBC spokesman said: “If we are not able to pursue our journalism freely and have honest debate and analysis over how we are covering important issues, then how effectively we can serve the public will be diminished.”

A Supreme Court spokesman said: “This is an interesting case which the Justices have decided raises an issue of general public importance.

“It will effectively establish the test for what constitutes a document held for journalistic purposes.”