Jewish Chronicle

Jewish Chronicle

The Jewish Chronicle (JC) is a London-based Jewish weekly newspaper. Founded in 1841, it is the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the world.

The JC is published every Friday (except on days which are Jewish holidays, when it appears earlier in the week) providing news, views, social, cultural and sports reports, as well as editorials and a spectrum of readers' opinions on the letter page.

Stephen Pollard became editor in November 2008 and editor-at-large in December 2021. He was succeeded as editor by Jake Wallis Simons.

Financial difficulties

In 2018, the newspaper had a loss of about £1.5 million on operating costs of about £4.9 million, following losses in the previous two years. Jonathan Goldstein, chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, organised a consortium of 20 individuals, families and charitable trusts to make donations to the Kessler Foundation to enable its continued support of the newspaper.

In February 2020, the weekly title announced that it would be merging with the Jewish News “to secure the financial future of both newspapers". According to the Electronic Intifada, the group that owns the Jewish Chronicle’s newspaper and website (Kessler Foundation) operates at a loss of more than $2 million per annum, while the Jewish News has liabilities of more than $1.9 million.

In early April 2020 the JC was put into liquidation because of the “dire state of the media industry and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic”. On 24 April 2020, the Middle East Monitor] reported that a consortium headed by former BBC executive and Director of Communications in Downing Street under Theresa May, Sir Robbie Gibb, had bought out the newspaper. The consortium includes a number of pro-Israel figures within the British media and political establishment. Three named by The Guardian are Commissioner for Public Appointments and former chair of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross; ex-Labour MP John Woodcock; and journalist John Ware.

Libel lawsuits

Under its new owners the JC, which was described by Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland as the “beating heart” of the Jewish community, is expected to follow a similar editorial line, even though it has faced a number of controversial libel lawsuits, the cost of which is said to have pushed the newspaper towards financial ruin.

Call for IPSO to act

On 31 July 2023, fifteen victims of the lies and smears by the Jewish Chronicle wrote to the Chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation to demand action against the JC. In an open letter, the group outlined the history of the JC's wrongs and the lack of meaningful action by IPSO, which is run by the papers it is supposed to keep in line:

Dear Lord Faulks,

We are individuals who have experienced the consequences of bad journalism and bad editorial conduct by the Jewish Chronicle. Each one of us has secured a ruling from IPSO against this publication and/or won libel settlements.

We write to you, once again, to urge IPSO to undertake a standards investigation into this publication. We found the decision of the IPSO Board not to order such an investigation in December 2021 disappointing and based on spurious reasoning. Your letter of 23 December 2021 explained that your refusal was in part because of a ‘change of ownership’ in 2020, and ‘new editorial leadership’ in 2021. As you are no doubt aware, that change of ownership appears to have been driven by financial losses largely occasioned by libel payouts resulting from poor journalism. The change of editor in fact took place when its editor of 13 years resigned only 72 hours before IPSO’s meeting to discuss this issue on 14 December 2021.

At that time IPSO had found 33 breaches of the code of conduct by the JC in three years, in which period there had also been four admissions of libel (Appendix 1 contains a table of the most egregious of these breaches). This was in our view a shocking level of non-compliance, equivalent to one breach in every four issues published over the period, yet the IPSO Board considered two training sessions to be sufficient remedy.

We read in the recent review of IPSO by Sir Bill Jeffrey that, in February of this year, IPSO declared that ‘sufficient improvements had occurred in both complaints handling and editorial standards to allow the cessation of active monitoring of standards’ at the Jewish Chronicle. This conclusion is surprising to us given that, between December 2021 and the publication of that report, IPSO had upheld three further complaints against the Jewish Chronicle and the paper had also (to our knowledge) been obliged to take down one further article. These further adjudications are listed in Appendix 2.

Only two months after the IPSO board decided to take no further action against the Jewish Chronicle, and three weeks before the publication of Sir Bill Jeffrey’s report, yet another complaint against that publication was upheld, involving three separate breaches of the code of conduct and a finding that it had behaved unacceptably. To quote paragraph 19 of that adjudication: ‘The committee expressed significant concerns about the newspaper’s conduct prior to the publication and the absence of a published apology as part of the remedial action which had been taken. The committee considered that the publication’s conduct was unacceptable, and their concerns were drawn to the attention of IPSO’s standards department.’

We hope that IPSO will now recognise that the mere provision of training failed to resolve the serious and systemic journalistic and editorial problems at the Jewish Chronicle. Sir Bill Jeffrey wrote that an IPSO standards investigation is only likely to happen if malpractice is egregious and comes out of the blue or if ‘IPSO conclude that their engagement is getting nowhere and a stronger response is needed’. It is surely obvious now that IPSO is getting nowhere with the Jewish Chronicle and that a stronger response is needed.

The Jewish Chronicle shows no signs whatsoever of improvement. Every one of the post-2021 adjudications includes reference to one or more of ‘significant inaccuracy’, ‘significantly misleading’ reporting, and ‘unacceptable’ conduct.

If this continuing record of journalistic failure and malpractice does not amount to a ‘serious and systemic’ breach of IPSO’s code of conduct, we would welcome your comments and clear explanation of what exactly would be required to amount to such a breach. As it is, we feel that IPSO has let us down, and continues to leave itself open to further and justified criticism of inadequacy in the face of overwhelming evidence of journalistic malpractice.

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.

Yours sincerely,

Jo Bird

Sai Brace

Inayat Bunglawalla

John Davies

Gerard Downing

Ibrahim Hewitt

Matthew Holborrow

Peter Gregson

Jenny Lomax

Mizanur Rahman

Kal Ross

Mike Sivier

Tom Suarez

Marc Wadsworth

Audrey White

 

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Document:The sharks circling around Corbyn scent blood	blog post	26 March 2018	Jonathan Cook	The sharks circling around Jeremy Corbyn will not ignore the scent of his bloodied wounds; rather, it will send them into a feeding frenzy. As hard as it is to do when the elites so clearly want him destroyed, Corbyn must find his backbone and start to stand his ground.
Document:Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle?	Article	26 April 2024	Alan Rusbridger	Two years ago, a mysterious consortium came to the rescue of the beleaguered publication—and nobody is really clear about who is behind the scenes. But openness matters, especially when politics is involved

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References

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