Fran Unsworth, head of news­gath­er­ing at the BBC, takes issue with Bret Steph­ens. She calls his piece on Alan John­ston for the Wall Street Journal “scur­ril­ous.” I dis­agree. I think snide is a bet­ter word. And it’s shorter.

First, let me put the piece in con­text. Steph­ens is an anglo­phobe and his attack on the BBC has to be seen in the con­text of this anglo­pho­bia. He’s crit­ical of the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment pos­i­tion in the Middle East, and although it’s per­fectly reas­on­able for Bri­tons to cri­ti­cise their gov­ern­ment (Bri­tain is a demo­cracy!) when non-nationals do it, it’s often highly cor­rel­ated with anglo­pho­bia. Mr Steph­ens’ anglo­pho­bia is par­tic­u­larly dis­tress­ing, since he benefited from Brit­ish hos­pit­al­ity and edu­ca­tion at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics.

Still, anglo­pho­bia aside, let’s look at his piece:

Dozens of host­ages were released in Gaza over the week­end, in the wake of a truce called between the war­ring fac­tions of Hamas and Fatah. The BBC’s Alan John­ston, now in his 11th week of cap­tiv­ity, was not among them.

I last saw Mr. John­ston in Janu­ary 2005, the day before Mah­moud Abbas was elec­ted to suc­ceed Yasser Ara­fat as pres­id­ent of the Palestinian Author­ity. Mr. John­ston was by then the only West­ern cor­res­pond­ent liv­ing and work­ing full time in Gaza, although the Strip was still con­sidered a safe des­tin­a­tion for day-tripping for­eign journalists.

He kindly lent me his office to inter­view Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokes­man, and asked whether I was still edit­ing the Jer­u­s­alem Post. He seemed genu­inely obli­vi­ous to the notion that my by-then former asso­ci­ation with an Israeli news­pa­per was not the sort of inform­a­tion I wanted broad­cast to a room­ful of Palestinian stringers.

So John­ston is kind but naïve. Snide 1. Incid­ent­ally, Steph­ens had run the loss-making Eng­lish lan­guage paper as a neo-con mega­phone for Con­rad Black. The strategy had taken the read­er­ship from 36,000 when he joined to 25,000, when he left. Why did Steph­ens take the job? “One of the reas­ons I left the Wall Street Journal for the Post was because I felt the West­ern media was get­ting the story wrong. I do not think Israel is the aggressor here. Inso­far as get­ting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m try­ing to help Israel.”

Janu­ary 2005 was also the last time one could feel remotely optim­istic about an inde­pend­ent Palestinian future. Mr. Abbas had cam­paigned for office prom­ising “clean legal insti­tu­tions so we can be con­sidered a civ­il­ized soci­ety.” He won by an over­whelm­ing mar­gin in an elec­tion Hamas refused to con­test. There had been a sharp decline in Israeli-Palestinian viol­ence, thanks mainly to Israeli coun­terter­ror­ism meas­ures and the secur­ity fence. A Benetton out­let had opened in Ramal­lah, sig­nal­ing bet­ter times ahead.

Steph­ens likes Benetton. He men­tioned it in a pre­vi­ous op-ed piece, where he had argued what “pun­dits and report­ers have striven to deny: that there is a mil­it­ary solu­tion to the con­flict.”

In Gaza things were dif­fer­ent, how­ever, and Mr. John­ston was pres­ci­ent in report­ing on the poten­tial for interne­cine strife: “This internal con­flict between police and the mil­it­ants can­not hap­pen,” one of his stor­ies quotes a Palestinian police chief as say­ing. “It is for­bid­den. We are a single nation.” Yet in 2005 more Palestini­ans were killed by other Palestini­ans than by Israelis. It got worse in 2006, fol­low­ing Israel’s with­drawal from the Gaza Strip and Hamas’s vic­tory in par­lia­ment­ary elec­tions. “The occu­pa­tion was not as bad as the law­less­ness and cor­rup­tion that we are facing now,” Palestinian editor Hafiz Bar­g­houti admit­ted to Mr. John­ston in a widely cited remark.

So Johnston’s report­ing for the BBC was fair and accur­ate.

When Mr. John­ston was kid­napped by per­sons unknown on March 12 — appar­ently dragged at gun­point from his car while on his way home — he became at least the 23rd West­ern journ­al­ist to have been held host­age in Gaza. In most cases the kid­nap­pings rarely las­ted more than a day. Yet in August FOXNews’s Steve Centanni and cam­era­man Olaf Wiig were held for two weeks, phys­ic­ally abused and forced to con­vert to Islam. Plainly mat­ters were get­ting pro­gress­ively worse for foreigners.

A reg­u­lar Fox News con­trib­utor, Steph­ens makes no men­tion of the alleged deal done to secure Centanni and Wiig’s free­dom, and its effect on the secur­ity of journ­al­ists in the area.

So why did the BBC keep Mr. John­ston in place?

One answer is journ­al­istic fidel­ity. Mr. John­ston had been the BBC’s man in Kabul dur­ing the Taliban era; he was used to hard places. His dis­patches about the trav­ails of ordin­ary Gazans brimmed with humane sym­pathy. And any news organ­iz­a­tion would prefer to have its own reporter on the scene than to rely on stringers.

Journ­al­istic fidel­ity — that sounds like a good reason to keep him in place.

Yet the BBC also seemed to oper­ate in the Palestinian Author­ity with a sense of polit­ical impun­ity. Palestinian Inform­a­tion Min­is­ter Mustafa Bar­g­houti described Mr. John­ston as someone who “has done a lot for our cause” — not the sort of endorse­ment one ima­gines the BBC wel­com­ing from an equi­val­ent fig­ure on the Israeli side.

Des­pite Johnston’s report­ing reveal­ing the fis­sures within Gaza, the BBC’s pres­ence was accep­ted by the Palestinian Author­ity. Unless Steph­ens is sug­gest­ing that Barghouti’s endorse­ment implies that John­ston was a Palestinian pro­pa­gand­ist or par­tisan? Snide 2.

Other BBC cor­res­pond­ents were notori­ous for mak­ing their polit­ics known to their view­ers: Bar­bara Plett con­fessed to break­ing into tears when Ara­fat was air­lif­ted to a Parisian hos­pital in Octo­ber 2004;

Plett’s con­fes­sion came not in a news report, but in a pro­gramme that allowed cor­res­pond­ents to air their per­sonal exper­i­ences (you can read a tran­script here). Plett’s tears were, she says, promp­ted by the pathos of ordin­ary Palestini­ans choos­ing to ignore their leader’s jour­ney to die in a Paris hos­pital. Her piece did not leave unmen­tioned Arafat’s “obvi­ous fail­ings — his use of cor­rup­tion, his ambi­val­ence towards viol­ence, his auto­cratic way of rul­ing.” But it still rightly pro­duced an apo­logy from the BBC’s Dir­ector of News, after a listener com­plained. The piece had not observed “due impar­ti­al­ity.”

Orla Guerin treated Israel’s cap­ture of a liv­ing, wired teen­age sui­cide bomber that March as noth­ing more than a PR stunt — “a pic­ture that Israel wants the world to see.”

The Israeli gov­ern­ment accused Guerin of anti-semitism for that report. They also lev­elled cri­ti­cisms at Sky News and the Times. They didn’t cri­ti­cise Guerin for this piece, on Palestini­ans execut­ing “col­lab­or­at­ors.”

Though doubt­lessly sin­cere, these views also con­ferred insti­tu­tional advant­ages for the BBC in terms of access and pro­tec­tion, one reason why the broad­caster might have felt rel­at­ively com­fort­able post­ing Mr. John­ston in a place no other news agency dared to go.

So, it wasn’t journ­al­istic fidel­ity, but insti­tu­tional advant­ages in terms of access and pro­tec­tion that promp­ted the BBC to keep Mr John­ston in Gaza? Snide 3.

By con­trast, report­ers who dis­pleased Palestinian author­it­ies could be made to pay a price. In one notori­ous case in Octo­ber 2000, Italian reporter Ric­cardo Cris­ti­ano of RAI pub­lished a let­ter in a Palestinian news­pa­per insist­ing he had not been the one who had broad­cast images of two Israeli sol­diers being lynched in Ramal­lah. “We respect the journ­al­istic reg­u­la­tions of the Palestinian Author­ity,” he wrote, blam­ing rival Medi­aset for the trans­gres­sion. I had a sim­ilar exper­i­ence when I quoted a Palestinian journ­al­ist describ­ing as “riff-raff” those of his neigh­bors cel­eb­rat­ing the attacks of Sept. 11. Within a day, the journ­al­ist was chided and threatened by Palestinian offi­cials for hav­ing spoken to me. They were keep­ing close tabs.

Is this a con­trast? Snide 4.

Still, whatever the bene­fits of stay­ing on the right side of the Palestinian powers-that-be, they have begun to wane.

What were the bene­fits? An abil­ity to report on the blood-letting between Fatah and Hamas? Snide 5.

For years, the BBC had invari­ably covered Palestinian affairs within the con­text of Israel’s occu­pa­tion — the core truth from which all mani­fest­a­tions of con­flict sup­posedly derived.

Devel­op­ments within Gaza fol­low­ing Israel’s with­drawal showed the hol­low­ness of that analysis.

Like this piece on Gaza? Snide 6. Evid­ence?

Domestic Palestinian polit­ics, it turned out, were shot through with their own dis­con­tents, con­tra­dic­tions and divi­sions, not just between Hamas and Fatah but between scores of clans, gangs, fac­tions and per­son­al­it­ies. Oppos­i­tion to Israel helped in some ways to mute this real­ity, but it could not sup­press it.

Exactly as repor­ted by Alan John­ston, before his kid­nap­ping.

This is the situ­ation — not a new one, but one the for­eign media had for years mostly ignored — in which the drama of Mr. Johnston’s cap­tiv­ity is play­ing out.

What about the ransom­ing of other for­eign journ­al­ists? That’s also part of the con­text.

Ini­tial reports sug­ges­ted he had been kid­napped by the so-called Pop­u­lar Res­ist­ance Com­mit­tee; later an al Qaeda affil­i­ate called the Army of Islam claimed to have killed him. More recently, evid­ence has come to light sug­gest­ing he’s alive and being held by a crim­inal gang based in the south­ern town of Rafah. The Brit­ish gov­ern­ment is reportedly in talks with a rad­ical Islam­ist cleric in their cus­tody, Abu Qatada, whose release the Army of Islam has deman­ded for Mr. Johnston’s free­dom. What the Brit­ish will do, and what effect that might have, remains to be seen.

For now, one can only pray for Mr. Johnston’s safe release. Later, the BBC might ask itself whether its own fail­ures of prudence and judg­ment put its reporter’s life in jeopardy.

Snide 7. John­ston was in Gaza as a volun­teer. His biggest mis­take seems to have been to allow someone to use his office who would seize the con­nec­tion as an oppor­tun­ity to sling mud at him whilst in cap­tiv­ity.

The BBC’s Paul Adams has said of his col­league that it was “his job to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament.”

For that act of solid­ar­ity one hopes a ter­rible price will not be paid.

Snide 8. Report­ing from Gaza is not simply an attempt to doc­u­ment what hap­pens there. It is an act of solid­ar­ity, a tak­ing of sides.

So the piece has more snide than a Dr Seuss story. Now I don’t really know if Bret Steph­ens is anglo­phobic and I don’t much care.

I do know that under­stand­ing the world’s troubles need more report­ing like Johnston’s and fewer columns like his.