Will the Jewish Chronicle face the music at last?
JVL Introduction
It appears that the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), founded nine years ago as a standards watchdog for UK print media, will soon be obliged to ditch its refusal to investigate persistent offending on the part of the Jewish Chronicle.
Fifteen people whose complaints against the newspaper IPSO has upheld, or whom the JC has admitted libelling, have written to the regulator’s chair Lord Faulks: “We urge you to recommend a standards investigation to your board, and to do so urgently – in weeks rather than months – before more bad journalism is published, more falsehoods are disseminated among readers and more harm is done to innocent people.”
In the short video above, one of the signatories, Tom Suarez, explains IPSO’s contortions as it tried to avoid holding the Jewish Chronicle to account in his case.
Below we publish an article written by Professor Brian Cathcart for Byline Times explaining the wide ramifications of the IPSO/JC affair. Cathcart notes the potential relevance of the fact that: “the Chronicle’s sole registered owner is a powerful figure in media and government circles: Sir Robbie Gibb, former Downing Street director of communications and currently a controversial ministerial appointee on the BBC Board.”
At the bottom of the post we reproduce the text of the letter to IPSO chair Lord Faulks.
NWI
This article was originally published by Byline Times on Mon 31 Jul 2023. Read the original here.
‘Unacceptable’ Jewish Chronicle Puts Sham Press Watchdog IPSO on the Spot
A softly-softly approach to the newspaper’s reckless journalism has failed – now the ‘regulator’ has been challenged to make a landmark choice.
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My first feeling after reading your article with accompanying letter
– which I completely agree with – was FRUSTRATION.
What is IPSO for – its raison d’être ?
So I looked at its Website which included some items under
the heading “Latest News”, one of which was the following:
“IPSO publishes plan to strengthen its value to the public and impact on editorial standards”
I think the plan is worth reading – it is evidently not being followed.
The JC review of Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds was a vicious attack on a respected historian.
If subscription were the only criterion, the JC could be considered insignificant. My guess is, however, that it is important in shaping the attitude of Jewish community representatives onthe BoD.
Some time ago I wrote to the representative of the synagogue I had been brought up in and he named the JC as one of the two papers – the other was The Times – he read.
It is then one significant tooth in the small cog that drives the bigger gear of what the rest of the media calls “the opinion of the Jewish community”. It is in this sense one of the agencies responsible for adding to the near-paranoia of a large part of the synagogue affiliated Jewish population.
Please could we know who the 15 signatories are? I hope Ipso will finally act.
It seems frequently that the JC cares about Israel but not so much about Jews, given how repeatedly it has smeared the so-called ‘wrong sort of Jews’.
More recently IPSO ordered a correction on the JC claim that Iran wanted to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. While it is true Iran has no fondness for western settlers, USA today headlined their profile of the country
“Iran’s Jewish community is the largest in the Mideast outside Israel – and feels safe and respected”
For the purposes of supporting Israel the JC was willing to protend – and not for the first time – that middle-eastern Jews were somehow not real Jews.
Here are links to the USA article & the Press Gazette covering the IPSO critique of the JC.
https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/inside-iran/2018/08/29/iran-jewish-population-islamic-state/886790002/
&
https://pressgazette.co.uk/the-wire/newspaper-corrections-media-mistakes-errors-legal/jewish-chronicle-ipso-iran/
To Amanda Sebestyen:
The names of the 15 signatories were published by Skwawkbox at
https://skwawkbox.org/2023/07/31/15-victims-of-jewish-chronicle-smears-demand-action-from-regulator/
Four friends, all season ticket holders at Bristol City. We shared the driving and we were in our Jewish friend’s car, he used to keep the JC in back pocket of the driver’s seat, where I would pull it out and have a read, this particular day, it was ranting on about the villains of the peace, Hamas, I did cheekily (with plenty of humour) say, “I thought Hamas was a political Party that was voted for and it only came into being because of Israel at the Peace Talks refusing to return to the original borders after the war, I don’t get this Barry, you’re all Arabs, shouldn’t you be getting on without fighting”? My friend replied, “We like to think that we are all Jews”, to which we all laughed. That was nearly 20 years ago. We never spoke about it again. It does show that the JC was a propaganda magazine from way back.
PS There was in fact ANOTHER ‘element’ that came up on my journey – ie this JC article from June last year entitled ‘Goldsmiths to support Jewish academic David Hirsh after ‘unwarranted’ attack from SU President’, which finishes so:
Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS), which has been campaigning for Goldsmiths to investigate the tweets, said that it is “encouraging” that a review has been opened into antisemitism at the university, but strongly criticised the decision not to adopt the IHRA definition in full
The group said in a statement: “It is a damning indictment of where the university still stands when they challenge the [Jewish] community’s chosen definition of antisemitism while embracing without question the full definition of Islamophobia”.
https://www.thejc.com/news/news/goldsmiths-to-support-jewish-academic-david-hirsh-after-'unwarranted'-attack-from-su-president-2AsH061041CFPjmLlK3Ok8