- Peter Barron
- 13 Dec 07, 10:28 AM
Last night on Newsnight, Dean Godson of the think tank accused me personally (watch it here) of making a "disastrous editorial misjudgement" and of "appalling stewardship of Newsnight". I think I should respond to that.
Mr Godson was responding to Richard Watson's investigation (watch it here) into Policy Exchange's recent report - entitled "" - which accused several leading mosques of selling extremist literature.
In October Newsnight had been due to run an exclusive report on the findings and Policy Exchange had given us the receipts to corroborate their claim that a quarter of the 100 mosques their researchers had visited were selling hate literature.
On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson came to me and said he had a problem. He had put the claim and shown a receipt to one of the mosques mentioned in the report - The in London. They had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt was not theirs.
We decided to look at the rest of the receipts and quickly identified five of the 25 which looked suspicious. They appeared to have been created on a home computer, rather than printed professionally as you would expect. The printed names and addresses of some of the mosques contained simple errors and two of the receipts purportedly from different mosques appeared to have been written by the same hand.
I spoke to Policy Exchange to try to clear up these discrepancies but in the end I decided not to run the report. This is not because I "bottled" it as Mr Godson suggests, but because I did not have the necessary level of confidence in the evidence presented.
In the days that followed we focused further on the five receipts about which we had concerns and eventually asked a forensic scientist to analyse them. This is what we found.
1. In all five cases the mosques involved said the receipts did not belong to them.
2. The expert analysis showed that all five had been printed on an inkjet printer - suggesting they were created on a PC.
3. The analysis found "strong evidence" that two of the receipts were written by the same person.
4. The analysis found that one of the receipts had been written out while resting on another receipt said to be from a mosque 40 miles away.
Mr Godson says he stands by his report 100%. I also stand by our report 100%. I don't think we can both be right.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
As part of the celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of www.bbc.co.uk, Mike Smartt, founding editor of the أغر؟´«أ½ News website, writes here on the أغر؟´«أ½ Internet blog about some of the background to the site.
- Alistair Burnett
- 13 Dec 07, 09:02 AM
What to do about Kosovo? The Serbian province that is populated overwhelmingly by Albanians who want nothing to do with Serbia, but which Serbs regard as the heartland of their culture and nationhood.
This is a question that we have been tracking on The World Tonight for the past two years (most recently this Monday which you can listen to here) since international efforts to push for a solution intensified. It is also a question that is now preoccupying the European Union - as it periodically preoccupied the Great Powers in the last two centuries along with Serbians and Albanians as well as the Ottoman Turks, of course, who ruled the place for several hundred years.
UN-sponsored talks between the Serbian government and Albanian leaders earlier this week and Kosovo is now saying it will go ahead and declare independence anyway. This presents a problem for the European Union because the EU is divided over whether to recognise the independence of Kosovo if that is not sanctioned by the UN Security Council - and that is unlikely given Russia is opposed to any solution to the Kosovo problem that is not agreed to by both the Serbs and the Albanians. As the Serbs are offering wide autonomy and the Albanians - backed by the United States - are demanded nothing but independence, a solution sanctioned by the Security Council that satisfies international law doesn't seem possible at this stage.
EU foreign ministers met again earlier this week in another attempt to agree a common approach. Ahead of the meeting, several ministers were making very optimistic noises that they were basically all agreed - except for Cyprus - that a unilateral Kosovo declaration of independence should be recognised despite Serbian and Russian opposition. The briefings to journalists ahead of the meeting were that the last countries which were unhappy with this policy - Spain, Greece, Romania and Slovakia - had come round because they were putting EU unity in the face of Russian pressure ahead of their objections to independence for Kosovo which are largely based on the precedent it could set for their own minority regions who may want to follow suit.
This seemed a bit odd given that both Slovakian and Romanian ministers, for example, have been quoted over recent days saying they would probably not be able to recognise Kosovo. So we've been asking for interviews with the foreign ministers from these countries, but to no avail, not one would come to the microphone. We also waited for a statement from the EU foreign ministers after their meeting. One arrived in my inbox on the situation in Lebanon and another on the Middle East peace process, but nothing on Kosovo.
Now we are being told EU leaders will discuss the issue at their summit starting today in Brussels. Maybe they will announce an agreement, but we are not holding our breath as it seems they are further away from an agreed position than they are suggesting.
So what should we report to listeners? When ministers and officials won't do interviews it makes for far less interesting radio and so we have the choice of getting one of our correspondents to do an interview in which they tell the audience what they are being told behind the scenes and then assess how reliable this is - in other words to describe the spin - which in my view is a technique subject to the law of diminishing returns - or we don't do the story at all at that moment. It would be interesting to know what you think the best approach is.
In the meantime, our reporter, Ray Furlong will be in Brussels trying to get that interview. Wish him luck.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
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