High Court hears claim Owen Jones cast BBC editor as ‘Israeli stooge’

Owen Jones has been accused of portraying the BBC’s online Middle East editor Raffi Berg as a “rogue journalist and editor” in the opening stage at the High Court of Berg’s libel case.

Berg is suing Jones over a piece he published on Drop Site News, in December 2024. Jones’s 9,000-word article was billed by the site’s Nausicaa Renner as an investigation and “quantitative assessment of how the BBC characterises the siege on Gaza and a review of the background of the people behind the coverage — and, in particular, one editor, Raffi Berg”.

Friday’s first hearing, in front of Mrs Justice Steyn, was a trial of preliminary issues, or TPI, in which both Guardian columnist Jones, as the defendant, and Berg, the claimant, sought to outline each side’s interpretation of the meaning of the article.

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Berg’s barrister, John Stables, told the court that his client clearly came across as “a wrong ‘un”, who had manipulated his role in favour of pro-Israel propaganda. Both Jones and Berg were in court.

“According to this article, what my client is doing is sabotaging the news,” the barrister said.

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But Mr Eardly maintained that Jones had simply been expressing an opinion — gleaned from interviews he carried out with “13 current and former staffers, who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management”.

He wrote that all of the people to whom he spoke had “requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. ‘This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,’ one former BBC journalist said”.

Jones’ barrister told the court that any reader of the article was simply “being presented with a series of opinions”, and that a reader would be left with “impressions” of how the BBC had covered the Gaza war, rather than libelling Berg.

But John Stables, on Berg’s behalf, said that the judge had to decide what a “reasonable” person would conclude after reading the article. It includes the accusation that Berg “micro-managed” his department in such a way as “to ensure that the BBC failed to ensure impartiality” in its Middle East reporting.

Jones had written: “In the weeks after October 7, a number of BBC journalists began venting their intense frustrations in forums like WhatsApp groups, where they collected the “bullshit reasons given for not commissioning stories.” They singled out Berg, one of whom says plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda.”

He also claimed senior BBC staffers had “identified the website, headed by Berg, as the BBC’s most egregious violator of editorial standards on impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict”.

Stables told the court that the article’s “clear purpose was to depict Raffi Berg as an Israeli stooge”. His client believed the article to be severely defamatory.

Now Mrs Justice Steyn, who has reserved judgment, must rule on whether the article has the meaning claimed by Jones, or by Berg. Her ruling, expected in the next couple of weeks, will affect the next stages of the libel suit.