Alan Rusbridger
The Independent / September 19, 2024
The weekly newspaper has been forced to apologise for publishing fabricated stories. But its refusal to say who owns it – despite the involvement of one of the most senior figures at the BBC – highlights much deeper problems in the British media.
It’s been a tumultuous week at The Jewish Chronicle, which has just put its hands up to publishing – technical term – a load of old cobblers by a freelance writer who might kindly be called a fantasist. Cue mass resignations by a roll call of distinguished columnists and a rather belated mea culpa from the editor.
Elon Perry, who claims to be a British-based Israeli journalist, wrote a number of articles about the war in Gaza, supposedly aided by intelligence sources. On Friday, the newspaper removed his articles online due to it being “not satisfied with some of his claims”.
Heads must roll? Well, at the very least you’d expect the editor, Jake Wallis Simons, to be hauled in front of the paper’s owner to explain himself. But the oddity of The Jewish Chronicle is that no one is allowed to know who the owner actually is.
A consortium of worthies who “rescued” the paper in 2020 either do not know or are not saying, who put up the cash. If Wallis Simons knows, he won’t let on. At the weekend, he merely released a terse statement claiming that his paper “maintains the highest journalistic standards in a highly contested information landscape”.
We’ll revisit that claim in a moment. But the fallout from this unhappy episode will ripple much wider and lap at the august doors of the chair of the BBC and Lord Faulks, the chair of the press regulator Ipso.
Let’s start at the BBC, so often the target of Wallis Simon’s vitriol over its reporting of Israel, deploring its [checks notes] lapses in editorial standards.
With exquisite timing, the day before his own troubles began in earnest, Wallis Simons published an angry piece by an Israeli lawyer, Trevor Asserson, lashing out at the corporation’s management. Heads should roll, thundered Asserson, who has a particular beef with the BBC’s veteran Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen. “Malevolent, biased journalists should be reprimanded … or dismissed,” he wrote. “BBC management needs to take back control”.
To which one might respond: at least we know who they are.
The BBC’s new chair, Samir Shah, has said the BBC’s next far-ranging inquiry into its own standards is almost certain to be a review of its reporting of the war in Gaza. That will be overseen by the five-person editorial guidelines and standard committee.
This is where things get tangled since one of those five is Sir Robbie Gibb, who, in his November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests stated that he was the 100 per cent owner of The Jewish Chronicle. As far as I’m aware, he does not have the funds to be the actual owner of the paper, so we might think of him as the frontman for the funder(s). Whoever they are.
Had Gibb not resigned as a director a month ago it might well have been his unhappy duty to answer for this editorial calamity – though the same alleged fantasist who penned the “wild fabrication” seems to have written other dubious pieces on Gibb’s watch.
How many other articles were also cobblers we cannot know since they have now been deleted, with no explanation or apparent inquiry, from The JC’s website.
Gibb was replaced by Jonathan Kandel, a venture capitalist, as a director of Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd on 12 August. The other director is now Lord [Ian] Austin, who is also one of The JC’s columnists.
Separately, Gibb remains the sole director of The JC Media and Culture Preservation Initiative, a community interest company which had £375k in the bank last December, and which shares a correspondence address with The Jewish Chronicle.
We do know that Elon Perry, the alleged fabulist (real name Eli Ifrah) has made claims about his life – both academic and military – that do not stand up to scrutiny. He says he is innocent and that there is a witch hunt against him. Challenged by a reporter for Channel 13, he raged: “You are a monster, a maniac, a liar. I wish Hamas would kill you.”
Observers of The JC felt this was an accident waiting to happen. Ben Reiff, a London-based reporter for the +972 Israeli website, who exposed the scandal, wrote: “To those familiar with The Jewish Chronicle’s coverage in recent years, revelations that it has published inaccurate and politically motivated reporting will not come as much of a surprise. Following a murky takeover in 2020, the paper’s output and editorial tone – which was already right-wing – has become increasingly sensationalist … But these revelations point to something far deeper than straightforward partisanship and a bit of sloppiness.”
A member of the Gibb-led consortium which bought the title in 2020 told me in April that he felt that Wallis Simons, especially on social media, was “behaving like a political activist, not a journalist”.
“My own view is that it does a disservice to the Jewish community because it consolidates this idea that, you know, the Jewish community abroad is in some way sort of complicit by their silence with the excesses of the IDF.”
Can Gibb, with his patchy track record of oversight and obfuscation at The JC – overseeing ethical and journalistic failings as well as a lack of transparency over ownership – plausibly sit on a panel reviewing the BBC’s coverage of Gaza? You’d think not. Which hands a very hot potato in the lap of Dr Shah.
Did I just write “patchy track record?” But how does that sit with his editor’s proud boast that the paper “maintains the highest journalistic standards in a highly contested information landscape?”
Well. The paper is regulated by Ipso, which stands for the Independent Press Standards Organisation, founded in 2014 after the phone-hacking scandal which led to the Leveson Inquiry. Fun fact: Lee Harpin, for three years a senior reporter at The JC (including the Gibb Years) was referred to as the “Dauphin of phone-hacking” in a recent court judgment involving the Duke of Sussex.
The main difference between the new press regulator and the discredited Press Complaints Commission was the “S” word: it indicated that this new broom would – unlike its predecessor – launch investigations into serious and systemic failings in terms of newsroom standards.
You will be curious to know how many standards investigations this new muscular body has in fact launched in its 10-year life. The answer is: none.
Funnily enough, Ipso refused to agree to a request to investigate The JC in 2022 by a group of nine complainants who had won libel (four cases) or Ipso complaints. In turning them down, Lord Faulks gave as one of his reasons that the paper was in new ownership. This was remarkably trusting of him given that he, like everyone else, had no clue who they were.
But Ipso has been busy investigating a considerable number of individual complaints about the title – 213 in the last five years. Of these, 12 were upheld, 15 were resolved – sometimes with Ipso mediation – and 14 were found not to be in breach after an investigation. The rest were considered outside the Ipso remit or raised no breach.
Prof Brian Cathcart, a veteran hawk on media scrutiny, claimed on X that no Ipso member has a worse record. Ipso declined to comment on this but said it was “ready to intervene where we have concerns about standards issues”.
Ipso could now perform a useful public service by launching its first ever standards investigation. The first witness should be Sir Robbie Gibb, and the first question should be who actually owns The JC.
After that, the Ipso inquiry should call the five columnists who have quit The JC. Jonathan Freedland should be asked to expand on his resignation statement which claimed that “too often The JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic … there can be no real accountability because The JC is owned by a person or people who refuse to reveal themselves”.
The inquiry could also call The JC’s highly respected former contributor, The Economist’s Anshel Pfeffer, who wrote: “I fully support my colleagues and share their concerns.”
Then the inquiry should call another of the journalists who resigned, David Aaronovitch, and ask him to elaborate on his phrase “a monstrous failure of editorial standards”.
And next, it should hear evidence from the Dauphin of hacking, Harpin, who this week wrote a scathing piece about The JC’s editorial standards on his own Substack.
“The rot is deeper and for regular observers and readers of the paper, its direction over the last few years has been tragic to witness,” he wrote.
Harpin said that Gibb “made a habit of calling into the office on print days early after the new owners took control to check up on what stories were topping the news list and offering a view”. According to Harpin, Gibb interviewed candidates for a senior editorial job and appointed Wallis Simons. Harpin also wrote that he was told that the new owners wanted more views “well to the right of the Tory party”.
The inquiry would take note of Sir Robbie’s apparently active role in editorial matters and appointments.
The inquiry might also ask Harpin about his claim that quotes from a controversial group were inserted into his pieces, adding “ I have no idea to this day how the quotes came to appear in my stories.” He left the paper in February 2021 to join Jewish News.
It’s difficult to see how Gibb, while this inquiry was rumbling on, could simultaneously be sitting in judgement on whether the BBC’s coverage of Israel-Gaza has been impeccably impartial and accurate. So maybe Gibb could save Dr Shah any embarrassment by resigning from the editorial guidance and standards committee.
Whether Gibb should remain a BBC director is an interesting question. He was reappointed in the dying days of the Tory government despite the controversy over his alleged role – not denied – in trying to fix who should chair the BBC’s regulator. At the time, the BBC seemed keener to defend Gibb than they have been defending, say, Jeremy Bowen.
Elon Perry’s story may have been a load of old cobblers but it may yet perform a public service. Let’s hope.
Alan Rusbridger is a columnist for The Independent writing on topics including British politics, society, media and the climate crisis
