Here is Policy Exchange chairman Charles Moore using his Telegraph column to attack Newsnight editor Peter Barron in round 2 of the popular Think Tank vs. BBC battle. Moore, a former editor of the Spectator, the Sunday and the Daily Telegraph does not do himself any favours, as you can see.
Over the summer, Policy Exchange produced the most comprehensive report so far on the extent to which extremist literature is available in British mosques and Islamic institutions. It is called The Hijacking of British Islam. [pdf]
Muslim undercover researchers visited nearly 100 mosques. In 26 of them, they found extremist material — titles such as Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell (for answering their husbands back), virulent insults of Jews and homosexuals, puritanical attacks on moderate Muslims, calls for the complete rejection of Western society etc.
It was a big story, and as I shall make clear, none of Newsnight’s claims this week has diminished its dimensions.
This is an unpromising start.
Policy Exchange had originally offered it to Newsnight exclusively.
Newsnight’s people were enthusiastic, but on the late afternoon of the intended broadcast, they suddenly changed their tune.
Policy Exchange had offered them many of the receipts it had collected from mosques as evidence of purchase; now they said that they had shown the receipts to mosques and that there were doubts about the authenticity of one or two of them.
Given that the report was being published that night, the obvious thing for Newsnight to do was to broadcast Policy Exchange’s findings at once, allowing the mosques to have their say about the receipts.
There was no need for Newsnight to claim “ownership” of the report. Instead, the editor, Peter Barron, decided to run nothing. His decision meant the Policy Exchange report was not touched by the BBC at all.
What is extraordinary is that Policy Exchange went ahead and published it. Extraordinary, too, that they did not subsequently alert newspapers that had run the story to the serious questions over their own research.
Barron writes:
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.
As you can see below, Newsnight hardly avoids such stories:
Moore continues:
Mr Barron’s judgment of the Policy Exchange report came under attack from colleagues [any names Charles?]: his flawed methodology — the original decision not to broadcast — had lost the entire corporation an important story.
Mr Barron decided to try to prove himself right. In the private sector, there is something called “vanity publishing,” where people pay for their own works to be published.
Mr Barron’s vanity broadcasting was, of course, at the expense of the licence-fee payer. He put the crew of the flagship on to investigating Policy Exchange’s receipts. For six weeks, they turned on the staff of Policy Exchange, who had come to them in good faith in the first place, and treated them like criminals.
The receipts that Policy Exchange had lent to them were impounded, and copies were distributed to others without permission.
They were subjected to complicated forensic tests. One of these, allegedly the most damning, was completed over a week before Wednesday’s broadcast, but withheld from Policy Exchange.
Although there was no screaming news urgency about the item, a courier carrying the test results sat outside the offices of Policy Exchange’s lawyers on Wednesday evening with the message that the think-tank could see the results only if it agreed, before seeing them, that it would go on air that night to answer Newsnight’s charges.
…
Of course, any allegations about receipts are, in principle, a serious matter for a think-tank.
Policy Exchange bases its work on evidence, and so its evidence must be sound. The BBC did not give the think-tank the chance to investigate its complicated allegations properly. Policy Exchange will now do so.
One comment on Moore’s column sums it all up:
If Policy Exchange did fake the receipts, then they are solely to blame for turning themselves into the story and obscuring the issue they were investigating…
And BBC correspondent Richard Watson (apparently) adds his own comment below:
We have never argued that there is no problem with the dissemination of extremist literature in Britain. I have broadcast many reports on this subject for Newsnight. But if some researchers have fabricated even a minority of receipts then what reliance should the public place on the testimony of the research team?
It is Moore, not Barron, who should be considering his position.
