This week we saw a minor victory for free speech when the High Court ruled in favour of the Guardian journalist Owen Jones in the Raffi Berg libel case. Jones, best known for his book Chavs – The Demonising of the Working Class back in 2011, launched his career as a man of the left but soon gravitated to the centre to join the prominenti of the mainstream media. He did, however, attract the ire of the Zionists when he accused a BBC journalist of pro-Israeli bias in December 2024.

Jones’s article cited BBC journalists who accused BBC news online editor Raffi Berg of fostering a culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda”. But the court rejected Berg’s lawyers’ core argument that Jones’s reporting presented him as “a rogue journalist and editor who deliberately disregards and breaches the duties of accuracy and impartiality”.

Jones’s piece in Drop Site News quoted BBC staffers saying that Berg “reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images” and “repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity”. Jones said that “facts unfavourable to Israel have been stripped out of Berg’s reports” and that he played a “crucial role” in “conduct that imperils the integrity of the BBC”.

Berg instructed Mark Lewis of Patron Law, previously a director of UK Lawyers for Israel, as his solicitor. His legal team says that Owen’s piece strikes “at the claimant’s professional reputation as a journalist and editor” and has led to “an onslaught of hatred, intimidation and threats”, including death threats.

Nevertheless, the judges ruled that the article by Jones expressed an opinion and indicated the basis for that opinion through examples of Berg’s journalism and editorial role. The ruling is central to determining whether the case is to be pursued. Berg will now need to show that Jones did not genuinely hold the opinion he expressed in his reporting or demonstrate that the opinion is not one an honest person could hold on the basis of any fact that existed at the time of its publication. It will be interesting to see if Berg decides to take this any further…