On Alan Rusbridger: champion of an ethical press

Two weeks ago, the universally esteemed former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a piece in Prospect magazine, which he now edits, having served a six-year stint from 2015 to 2021 as head of an Oxbridge college. It is similar in tone and content to what his counterpart, the former News and Current Affairs editor at Channel 4, Dorothy Byrne, said in a BBC Radio 4 programme last year, even quoting similar tropes about offensive Jews.

The article is noteworthy for its built-in biases. Some people Rusbridger names get a free ride: the “admirable” Baronness Sayeeda Warsi, for example, and the “award-winning blogger” Peter Oborne. Former Director of BBC TV Danny Cohen, however, is portrayed as a grey eminence for having founded and collaborated with pro-Israel media pressure groups that will not come clean about their funding.

What Rusbridger’s article alleges, but does not give evidence of, is that pro-Israel stories are “lapped up” by news organisations that “instinctively rally to the Israeli cause or despise the BBC”. That’s interesting because he’s blaming pro-Israel pressure groups for exercising a malign power but also saying that those they have a malign power over are already pre-disposed to run pro-Israel stories. He’s implying that the goups are effective at the same time as saying they don’t need to be.

By contrast with the admirable Warsi and Oborne, Rusbridger names a number of Jews, and speaks ill of them all—either overtly or by innuendo. He begins by quoting the English businessman Gerald Ronson not saying hello politely when they first met in 2006 but of using vulgar language and demanding at once that The Guardian change its approach to Israel. To let us know that Ronson is insidious, Rusbridger introduces background information that Ronson was jailed for crookery, which is true but also a slur of no relevance to the story. He also wonders why the British Board of Deputies, whose then-president accompanied Ronson when they met, would imagine him to be a persuasive advocate.

Rusbridger then refers to a number of what he calls “bland-sounding” media monitoring groups—i.e. supposedly sinister organisations that disguise their pro-Israel agendas behind neutral names and accuse media outlets of anti-Israel bias—and talks of unnamed “distinguished” journalists being cherry-picked to go on PR trips to Israel without their making open declarations of having done so.

He also mocks what he describes as an article of faith “for some—maybe even, many” that the BBC is biased: against the right, against Brexit, against ordinary people, against Israel. None of these is true, he implies.

His next target is David Collier, “a dogged researcher” whom he summarily dismisses on the grounds that Collier previously worked in hospitality and tourism, a high-handed put-down that means that Collier cannot therefore understand, as Rusbridger can, what is required of real journalism. Collier is mocked for having a “dystopian” view of the future of British Jews in the UK and for couching his view in language so hyperbolic as to prove itself unbalanced, speaking for example of an Islamic flag one day flying over Downing Street. Collier has told the Times of Israel that the BBC has an engine room of activist journalists all falling over each other to demonise Israel. For Rusbridger this is so patently alarmist as to require no refutation. Its hysterical tone accuses itself.

Rusbridger then moves on to Trevor Asserson, also not a journalist, whose AI-assisted report on the BBC’s bias against Israel in September 2024 was “seized on”, Rusbridger says, by Danny Cohen. Cohen chairs the “blandly-titled” UK Media Research Council which “employs a number of former Mail on Sunday and Telegraph journalists” but will not reveal its funding. It is this material put out by UKMRC and another outfit, Camera UK, on antisemitism and the “anti-Israel narrative in the media”, which Rusbridger says is “lapped up” by news organisations which instinctively rally to Israel’s cause.

All of this is contrasted with a newly published 188-page report which claims to show that, far from being biased against Israel, the BBC is, in fact, biased towards Israel. Rusbridger notes in passing that the body that conducted it, the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), also has a “bland-sounding” name but he does not, by virtue of that, make similar allegations to those he makes against bland-sounding pro-Israel organisations. He also ridicules the possibility that the report is necessarily biased because it was funded by the controversial and unrepresentative Muslim Council for Britain.

Rusbridger promotes the CfMM report by quoting the endorsement it has received from independent journalist Peter Oborne on X. Oborne approved of it as an “outstanding and thorough examination of BBC coverage”, and one that showed the BBC had much to answer for in its anti-Palestine bias. Rusbridger again quotes David Collier’s over-heated language in attacking the report and Oborne’s comment on it—that one or the other is “risible, inaccurate junk” and “a pile of absolute garbage”—to show that while Collier is passionate, he should not be relied on. Well, he couldn’t be, of course, having formerly been in tourism and hospitality.

Rusbridger acknowledges that the CfMM report had used large language models (LLMs) but isn’t bothered by this; what bothers him is only that those who complained about this didn’t complain that Asserson’s report did the same. That, it appears, is enough to exonerate the CfMM while condemning Asserson: it’s who does the complaining that matters, not what they have to say. That’s interesting, coming from a former Guardian editor. Editorial justice, it seems, no longer needs to be blind.

In his conclusion, Rusbridger claims that the “bland-sounding” pro-Israel groups are “simply” more numerous and better-resourced than “any” bland-sounding pro-Palestine group—an odd grouping of the many with the individual. “They have more willing amplifiers in the mainstream media,” he says, and a pressure group with a counter-narrative will always find it hard to break through a system where established views have taken root.

It is obviously the case that any new message will fight to be heard against an established narrative, but this idea is a bolt-on to his article and not something Rusbridger has argued his way towards. What Rusbridger has also not established is why he gives a level of credence to the CfMM report that he would not give to pro-Israel critiques. He brings nothing to support it other than it was applauded by Peter Oborne, whom he admires but who is wholly one-sided in his reporting on the Middle East conflict, and by the “admirable” Lady Warsi. That is to say, the reader is invited to accept Rusbridger’s reading on the basis wholly of the names—his own, included—who have welcomed it. And none of them would ever use vulgar language that makes them look bad—especially not the angelic Oborne.

Nor does Rusbridger bring any numbers to back up his claim that the pressure groups siding with Israel outnumber those advocating for Palestinians. What he does do is cite, as evidence in favour of the CfMM report, favourable coverage of it in Middle East Eye, a UK-based company which claims to be financially and editorially independent but whose sole director is Jamal Bessasso, a Kuwait‑born Palestinian with Dutch citizenship.

No one is any clearer about who funds MEE than who funds UKMRC, but Rusbridger is not troubled by this. MEE itself says it is independent of any government or movement, and relies on private donors, but does not name them. “Critics” have alleged that its links with Al Jazeera staff, and its ideological alignment, indicate the involvement of Qatar, which in 2017–18 was called on to shut it down. Its stories are also said to show a pro-Hamas narrative. But for Rusbridger, it is a neutral and reliable agent.

Rusbridger does not give a source for Oborne’s approval of the CfMM report in his article but links to Oborne’s much-read website, which is always awash with accusations and couched wholly in the language of accusation. Of the 12 stories that currently appear on the front page of Oborne’s site, one accuses Keir Starmer of “careening” to the “racist right”; another accuses the UK media of agreeing to be stifled by the UK government on a story about British foreign secretary David Lammy meeting Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar; a third accuses Israel of forcing Jordan to go to war with it; a fourth quotes Lady Warsi (a Muslim former co-chairwoman of the Conservative Party) “lacerating Tories on their indifference to Muslims”; a fifth complains of the “unjust portrayal of British Muslims in politics”; a sixth attacks Michael Gove’s “project to demonise Muslims”; and a seventh charges the press of bias in ignoring the problems of pro-Palestinian journalists. Seven out of 12 stories doesn’t entirely suggest a lack of agenda, or even a neutral agenda, but Oborne’s authority is enough to provide a base for Rusbridger’s belief in what the CfMM has to say.

In a magazine article about how things currently stand with both the improprieties of pro-Israel activism in the media and its astonishing power and effectiveness, it is odd that Rusbridger has to reach back to 2006 to start his story off—and it is important to recognise why he does so. Gerald Ronson, wealthy and unapologetic about it, apparently behaved crudely in a meeting with Rusbridger and the memory of it stuck. It also stuck that he was thought by the Board of Deputies (“which is sometimes presented as representing the view of British Jews”) to be a good advocate. That’s a black mark against both. Very handy.

But has no other incident occurred to Rusbridger since then in which a combination of foul Jews and foul language has been foolishly brought to bear to try to influence him? It would appear not, otherwise he would surely have chosen a more recent example. No one quotes a story nearly 20 years old to illustrate the present day unless they’re grasping at straws. Hold that thought.

The case he quotes, from the days when he was the editor of The Guardian, is not just out of date: it’s a cause célèbre, a locus classicus, among a certain audience, and similar to one quoted by Dorothy Byrne who, like Rusbridger, was given an Oxbridge college to head after retiring from her career in the media.

Just over a year ago, Byrne told a Radio 4 podcast about how “a peer of the realm”—“dead now” (and therefore perhaps Lord Janner)—had approached her and said that he and a group of his friends regularly met the BBC, “several times a year”, to discuss Israel, and wanted to meet Byrne and her top executives at Channel 4 to do the same. She refused to meet, she added. “What you probably don’t realise,” commented the host who was interviewing her, was that if any such meeting had gone ahead, there would then have been a “cascade” of information flowing back to hundreds of people in Israel and the Jewish community in the UK, relaying everything that had been said in the meeting. She was wise not to have met, it was agreed.

Some minutes earlier, Byrne had complained about how media pressure groups, “mostly male” (for women are apparently mostly virtuous), “come at you, trying to pick up the slightest little mistake you make” and then, “if they can find you made the smallest error, they say ‘Oh look, that programme was proven to be untrue.’” That rings a bell. The Board of Deputies once ill-advisedly teamed up with Gerald Ronson to try and pressure Rusbridger—and that’s enough to blacken the pro-Israel lobby permanently. Clever ruse.

It is no surprise that advocates for either side in the Middle East conflict try to influence the media; what is offensive is the idea promoted by Byrne and Rusbridger that pro-Israel propaganda is exceptionally nasty, illegitimate and based on falsity. Rusbridger’s contention is that pro-Palestinian propaganda, backed by an Arabia with a population 45 times larger than Israel, and by a Muslim bloc 200 times larger, and by the massed ranks of the academic Humanities, and by the political Left, and much of the Church, is innocent, truthful and reliable, albeit pushed by a weaker agent that is somehow incapable of organising or projecting its voice, and which the mainstream media is predetermined to resist.

Rusbridger’s message about shady pro-Israeli influence grows directly out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and Nazi propaganda, and the conspiracy literature of David Duke and others. It is a horrific example of the Left’s alliance with what would once have been regarded as the Left’s polar opposite. It might be capable of being explained but it is not obvious how it can be challenged. As Rusbridger says of the media he represents, “narratives are constructed and take root. And when someone comes along with a counter-narrative they are ignored. It would be unkind to call it groupthink but there is, at the very least, a lack of balance.”

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