High Court Rules in Favour of Owen Jones in BBC Gaza Libel Case

A High Court judge has ruled in favour of Guardian columnist Owen Jones in a libel case brought against him by a BBC editor.

Raffi Berg, the BBC’s Middle East editor, took legal action in November last year over a report by Jones which laid the blame for the BBC’s biased coverage of the Gaza genocide largely at Berg’s door. 

The high court has now ruled that the article’s argument was acceptable because it expressed an opinion based on a quoted body of material. 

“I am delighted that the high court has ruled in my favour on the key issues in the libel case brought by Raffi Berg,” said Jones. 

“I stand by my journalism and, if Mr Berg decides to continue the libel claim, I look forward to defending my article in court.”

In his article for Drop Site News, Jones accused Berg of sanitising coverage of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. 

“The implication is that my client goes around making decisions that actively favour Israel,” Berg’s barrister told the court at a hearing on Friday. “He is a bent journalist, that’s what the article is saying.”

Berg instructed Mark Lewis of Patron Law, previously a director of UK Lawyers for Israel, as his solicitor.

The case is one of the first in the UK where a journalist from a major national news outlet has sued another. The last notable case was in 2019, when the BBC’s John Ware sued Paddy French, an independent journalist and former current affairs producer at ITV, for describing his Panorama documentary on Labour antisemitism as a “rogue piece of journalism”. A judge awarded Ware £90,000 in damages.

Sophia Sheera is a journalist in Novara Media’s social media team.