Catch 22 x 2

It takes 118 pdf pages for the BBC Trust to deal with Jonathan Turner's complaints against pieces byJeremy Bowen from June 2007 and January 2008; I have no idea how many more complaints Mr Turner may have pending.

The problem with the Trust's quasi-judicial approach is that it is tied to the demand for "clear and precise language" in reporting the Middle East, when language is the subject of nuance and interpretation. Thus they themselves fault Jeremy for failing to deliver precise language when, by another interpretation, they actually wanted him to be imprecise.

One piece by Jeremy said the settlement of land occupied in 1967 was in defiance of ‘everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own’. The Trust said this was loose language, as not ‘everyone’ has that interpretation. So what the Trust wanted him to say was "nearly everyone's intepretation".

Then, elsewhere in this alarming exercise, the Trust try to deal with impartiality questions by seeking expert opinions - part of a continuing misguided belief that an impartial position can be measured and defined by big brains. Expert opinions ? Isn't that the problem in the first place ?

And the eminent opinions they offer are from Martin Gilbert and Avi Shlaim. I have no disagreement with what they say, but others, inevitably, have different views. I quote from Wikipedia (itself often deemed flaky) without further comment.

Israeli historian Benny Morris has described Martin Gilbert as a propagandist who uses overinflated casualty figures in his history of Israel. Another Israeli historian, Tom Segev, writes that Gilbert's coffee-table book The Story of Israel is written with "encyclopedic clarity," but Segev is critical of the absence of figures from Arab sources. Piers Brendon concludes that Gilbert glosses over or altogether omits awkward points.

Avi Shlaim is an Iraqi-born British historian...considered a key member of a group of Israeli scholars known as the New Historians who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel. Shlaim's approach to the study of history is informed by his belief that "The job of the historian is to judge."