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.