Talk about starting off the Jewish new year on a sour note. The BBC scheduled its Mideast editor, Jeremy Bowen, to have a Q&A with readers on Twitter — during Rosh HaShanah.
And blogger Daphne Anson doesn’t buy Bowen’s unapologetic weak answer that the timing “could’ve been better.”
Nobody would be cynical enough to suggest that this was an opportunity for Bowen to plug the book he’s just written on the so-called Arab Spring.
And nobody would be cynical enough to suggest that despite Al Beeb’s bend-over-backwards attempts at inclusiveness and accommodation of all sorts of minority groups a much-touted-by-the-BBC question and answer session on Twitter regarding the Middle East with the pally title “Ask Jeremy” took place on the first day of Rosh Hashana in order to evade pesky Jewish questioners.
Anson also notes that the issue of scheduling — and at least one other question which Bowen ignored — were left out of the Beeb’s writeup of the Q&A:
A happy new year from the Beeb, indeed.
