- Mark Popescu
- 17 Dec 07, 03:14 PM
My first duty as a أغر؟´«أ½ TV journalist is straightforward - to tell viewers the most significant news from Britain and around the world. At its simplest, we cover events and announcements as they happen and offer additional context and intelligent analysis. But there are also important trends that have the power to change the way we live - but which are not yet marked as news "events".
How much time should a news programme give to covering these big themes?
Four or five years ago, climate change was something talked about by environmentalists and climate scientists - it was not part of the main news agenda. But we were in at the beginning with our reports on its impact across the globe. Now there's an emerging debate about a complex but related subject - . Can we continue to consume food - refrigerated and transported from around the globe at a time when we should be reducing our carbon emissions? And what about the impact of using corn to produce bio-fuel? It is directly leading to an increase in the price of food here and potentially could lead to food shortages in other countries.
Two weeks ago, in the first of our 'Mad about Food' series, Jeremy Cooke gave a graphic visual account of the when he watched buckets of prime cod being thrown dead back into the sea because the quotas for this particular fish were exhausted. Ministers here and in the European Union agreed the rules needed to change.
This week the British consumer will spend a record amount on food in the run up to Christmas and we'll be carrying a series of reports exploring emerging issues around food sustainability.
Supermarkets deliver huge choice, convenience and often low prices - it's where the majority of us choose to buy our food. We'll be reporting on some of the local food initiatives but also the overall environmental impact of the sourcing, transportation and refrigeration of the food industry. But we won't ignore the positive results of the international trade for emerging markets like Kenya - where deals with British supermarkets lead to employment and economic development.
A report from AC Neilson today says consumers here are increasingly concerned about where their food comes from and how far it has travelled. The supermarkets we have spoken to tell us they are well aware of the trend, and some of the biggest have given us unique access to the work they are doing to ensure they find the most sustainable sources of food.
We'll be carrying a range of reports from around Britain on the work being done to grow food efficiently and ensure it travels as short a distance as possible from field to plate.
Further afield we'll be reporting from Chile on how the demand from fresh cherries all year round has led to the growth of a new food chain and we'll be finding out why a major fish producer says it makes economic sense to send prawns on a journey around the world before they return to be sold in supermarkets a few miles from where they were caught.
Mark Popescu is editor of daytime news
- Peter Barron
- 17 Dec 07, 10:00 AM
The Daily Telegraph's Charles Moore criticising Newsnight for our coverage of the Policy Exchange story. Today the paper has published our account of what happened - you can read an unedited version here.
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Charles Moore's attack on Newsnight's investigation into a report by Policy Exchange is a distortion of the truth and does him no credit. Newsnight has regularly investigated Islamic extremism in Britain. In October we planned to broadcast the findings of the report entitled "The Hijacking of British Islam" which said that hate literature was available for sale in 26 of the 100 British mosques they surveyed. Policy Exchange offered the report to Newsnight and to corroborate their claims provided a bundle of receipts proving where the books had been bought.
On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson told me he had approached one of the accused mosques and shown them the receipt. They denied selling the literature and said the receipt was not genuine. I asked to see all the receipts and we quickly identified five or six which looked suspicious - not "one or two" as Mr Moore suggests. They appeared to have been created and printed on a PC, they included mistakes such as incorrect addresses, and two of them - purportedly from different mosques - appeared to have been filled in with the same handwriting.
Mr Moore says the right thing to have done at this point would have been to "broadcast Policy Exchange's findings at once, allowing the mosques to have their say". I disagree. I concluded it would be wholly wrong to give such prominence to the report without resolving these doubts.
That day we tried to clear up the discrepancies. I spoke, in a conference call with Policy Exchange, to one (not two) of the researchers involved in gathering the receipts. I also spoke to the project coordinator. It has not subsequently been possible to speak to any of the researchers. The conversation did not reassure me, nor have Policy Exchange's subsequent explanations for how the discrepancies might have occurred.
Mr Moore is misleadingly selective about the forensic analyst's findings. Her clear conclusion is that there is "strong evidence" that two receipts from separate mosques were written by the same person and that "the possibility of more than one person being responsible is unlikely."
Mr Moore accuses us of chasing a "small story" and says we chose, in effect, to side with extremists. Newsnight does not side with anyone. We simply took care to check the evidence Policy Exchange gave us to support their report's very serious accusations. Our report acknowledged that extreme literature is available in some of the mosques. But Newsnight checked five receipts and in all five there were serious doubts about authenticity. In my book that's a story.
Mr Moore blusters, but barely deals with the question of authenticity. Will he answer this? Given that Policy Exchange's report was based on the testimony of the researchers who provided the receipts, does he, and Policy Exchange, think all of the receipts are genuine?
Peter Barron
Editor, Newsnight
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
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