Victims of Jewish Chronicle again demand IPSO investigate smear-factory rag

People targeted by smears write to regulator’s chair again after paper admits publishing multiple made-up articles

In July last year, victims of the right-wing Jewish Chronicle who had been targeted for repeated and scurrilous lies about them – including some who had won substantial damages for libel – wrote for a second time to the chair of IPSO to demand a formal standards investigation into the paper’s conduct and ethics. IPSO did not investigate, claiming instead that the Chronicle had made enough improvements. The paper described the complaints over its conduct as ‘attempts to bully [it] into silence’.

Last week, the rag entered another crisis after it was forced to admit it had published a string of articles about Israel’s genocide in Gaza – of course it did not use the word genocide – that were completely made up. Today, ten of the paper’s victims have written again to IPSO’s chair to demand it finally take action:

17 September 2024

Dear Lord Faulks,

We write to you once again to urge IPSO, as a self-styled upholder of journalistic standards, to carry out a formal Standards Investigation into the Jewish Chronicle in response to the ever-growing catalogue of outrages perpetrated by that publication.

We ask you to do this in the hope that you will wish to prevent others from suffering the abuse and misrepresentation we have experienced at the hands of this publication, as fully documented by IPSO itself or admitted in settlement of libel actions.

As you know, we have written to you twice before with the same request, and on both occasions it was rejected. In September last year, following the second of these appeals, you wrote:

‘We are very much alive to the standards issues at the Jewish Chronicle and the effect editorial failings at the publication have had. When we have identified editorial standards concerns at the Jewish Chronicle – or any other publication we regulate -we move swiftly to address them.

An important part of our approach is to work proactively to support editors and journalists to meet our standards. We will continue to act proportionately and flexibly to address editorial standards issues and tailor our approach to the context.’

We note that since that date IPSO has formally found two breaches of the code of conduct by the Jewish Chronicle relating to accuracy, and that it has ‘mediated’ no fewer than four further complaints which have resulted in the Jewish Chronicle taking down or amending material complained of as inaccurate. Once again, in other words, the approach you have adopted has failed.

You cannot be unaware that in recent days a fresh and extremely harmful failure of standards at the paper has been exposed, largely by the work of Israeli journalists. The paper itself has expressed ‘deep regret’ over this and has taken down a substantial volume of reporting.

Though this scandal, involving reports by Elon Perry, may never be the subject of a complaint to IPSO, we urge you not to exploit this as an excuse for further inaction. We believe that the Perry case, which is of global and vital significance, should weigh very heavily in IPSO’s considerations. Like almost all of the 40-odd recorded breaches of the IPSO code by the Jewish Chronicle in the past six years, and like those recent cases labelled as resolved by mediation, this scandal is a failure to take due care over accuracy. IPSO should consider now whether, had it acted effectively and in a timely fashion as we urged both in 2021 and 2023, this might have been averted.

The last time we wrote to you we had to wait two months for a reply. You blamed staffing difficulties. We hope that these have since been resolved and that you will be able to provide a prompt response.

Yours sincerely,

Jo Bird
lnayat Bunglawala
John Davies
Tom Gauterin
Jenny Lennox
Omar Mofeed
Kal Ross
Tom Suarez
Marc Wadsworth
Audrey White

Wirral Green councillor Jo Bird, one of the rag’s Jewish victims, said:

In recent days, fresh and extremely harmful failure of standards at the paper have been exposed. We urge the self-styled upholder of journalistic standards to carry out a formal Standards Investigation into the JC.

Liverpool’s Audrey White, the victim of a litany of lies penned by Starmeroid ‘dauphin of phone-hacking‘ Lee Harpin, told Skwawkbox:

The lies we’ve suffered all helped to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, an honest man, and to doom the country to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths through Boris Johnson’s appalling handling of the pandemic and the austerity we’re still suffering under Keir Starmer. We can see now where those lies started and IPSO must act.

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