adrian monck

Policy Exchange vs. Newsnight

Do you remember when leftist extremism was going to bring Britain to its knees? Soviet money funnelled in to support pro-Russian groups. Revolutionary Communists fought Socialist Workers. Trotskyists vied with Euro-Communists. Trades Unions were being over run by capitalist-haters who wanted to invite the Red Army to park its T-72s in Parliament Square.

Now Islamism has replaced Socialism as the ideological threat du jour, and Saudi not Soviet money is at the root of propaganda. Plus ça change, you might think. Except that traditionally in journalism you need a bit of evidence to go bandying around such claims.

So what then to make of this confrontation between BBC Newsnight ed Peter Barron (Disclosure: a former ITN colleague) and Dean Godson, neo-con op-ed manufacturer and think-tanker?

Barron posts:

Last night on Newsnight, Dean Godson of the think tank Policy Exchange accused me personally 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 into Policy Exchange’s recent report – entitled “The Hijacking of British Islam” – 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 Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre 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.

And Policy Exchange?

POLICY EXCHANGE AND BBC NEWSNIGHT

Policy Exchange stands by its report The Hijacking of British Islam and the Muslim researchers who took considerable risks to enable its compilation. The report is the most comprehensive and authoritative study to date into the availability of extremist literature within UK Islamic institutions.

During the course of a year-long investigation, our researchers were able to obtain extremist material, some of it anti-Semitic, misogynistic, separatist and homophobic, from a quarter of the representative sample of mosques and places of Islamic instruction. Three-quarters of the nearly 100 institutions were conversely found to be nothing other than perfectly reputable centres of Muslim worship and learning.

The Newsnight package broadcast on Wednesday 12th December 2007 arose from an extraordinary set of circumstances. In mid-October, Policy Exchange and Newsnight negotiated an exclusive deal on the release of the report, prior to its being made available to other media organisations.

At all times, Policy Exchange acted in good faith, even volunteering to Newsnight receipts obtained in the course of the investigation to corroborate the fact that the various extremist books were indeed procured from the particular institutions identified in the report. The receipts are not, however, mentioned in the report and the report’s findings do not rely upon their existence. The report relies instead on the testimony of our Muslim research team. Contrary to the programme’s claims, when Newsnight raised concerns about some of the receipts, Policy Exchange facilitated discussions between Newsnight and two of our researchers.

Several mosques and places of Islamic instruction were mentioned in Newsnight’s film. None of these institutions has been able to demonstrate convincingly that extremist literature could not have been procured on their premises. Indeed, several of them openly propagate extremist literature and are intimately linked to extremist ideologues.

In such circumstances, it is strange that the national BBC network made an editorial decision to ignore our report in October. Rather than taking up the critically important issues for community cohesion raised, Newsnight has chosen to broadcast a package about receipts. We can only speculate as to the programme makers’ agenda.

The executive of Policy Exchange will meet on Thursday 13th to discuss legal action against the BBC.

The Policy Exchange report was written by Denis MacEoin. I guess you can only speculate as to his agenda too, but he is at least allowed to have one.

Still Policy Exchange don’t exactly have much of a case arguing that Barron ignored their research because only a bit of it was dodgy.

What was he supposed to do? If the evidence is tainted, the testimony is tainted. Policy Exchange should have pulled the report and conducted their research again.

Moral 1: If Newsnight were better funded, it might be able to initiate its own enquiries into the selling of hate literature in mosques, instead of having to check other people’s work. This is what cost-cutting is all about.

Moral 2: If Policy Exchange wasn’t so obsessed with making column inches and scoring political points they wouldn’t release reports that their potential collaborators had identified serious issues with. They should have pulled it and checked it out.

It was foolhardy, and next time they trot something out, I would expect it to get some very, very heavy scrutiny.

Adrian Monck

3 responses to “Policy Exchange vs. Newsnight”

  1. The debate surrounding Policy Exchange’s controversial report goes far beyond a few suspicious reciepts right to the dubious intentions, malicious motives and audacious approach of a so-called research body for pushing their agenda by all means fair and foul. Rather than blaming Newsnight of sidetracking, Dean Godson should come up with verifiable proofs to establish why this and other Policy Exchange reports should be considered neutral and objective and how it is helpful for community cohesion?

    Godson’s underlying motives are clear from his article is The Times: “During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article702053.ece

    What Godson didn’t mention is that Encounter, is an Anglo-American magazine co-founded by Irving Kristol. Not until 1967 would it be revealed that Encounter and its parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were funded by the CIA as part of the programme of covert action that has become known as the cultural cold war. In fact there is reason to believe that Cold War methods of psychological warfare are already shaping the debate about Islam and the war on terror in Britain. Dean Godson himself may be one the most successful practitioners. Certainly, he comes from a family with long experience of what the CIA calls “covert action”. http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/4309/8/

    Dean Godson has a long history with neoconservatism, starting out as assistant to John Lehman, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century and Conrad Black. Bringing the ideas of neo-conservatism to the UK, Godson has compared Britain’s ‘late-imperial defeatism’ with America’s ‘self-confident liberal interventionism.’
    Of all books, Dean Godson’s favourite is the one by his brother Roy, Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards, Counter-Intelligence and Covert Operations, which among other thing looks at how to spread disinformation through the media.
    http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2007/05/dean_godson.html

    There are good reasons to be concerned about Dean Godson’s role to influence public and private perceptions about Muslims in Britain. He has made no secret of his own advocacy of “political warfare.” It is clear from the historical precedents that he cites, and the methodology that his brother describes, that deception and covert manipulation are an integral part of “political warfare.”

    Journalism influenced by this covert action approach clearly invites scepticism. There is likely to be a hidden agenda, in line with Roy Godson’s injunction that: “to be effective, covert propaganda must be co-ordinated with overall policy. It serves little purpose to dabble in the trade unless there are important strategic goals to be achieved.”

     There are also likely to be unverifiable claims that should be treated with caution. http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/4309/8/

    Godson has worked as chief editorial writer at The Telegraph and Special Assistant to Conrad Black. Does this indicate a tendency to be in company of those working with fake receipts?
    Lastly, imagine writing a monograph on Islam in Australia: Democratic bipartisanship in action including interviews with prominent players in law enforcement and politics but without interviewing a single Muslim, and launching the monograph thousands of miles away in London with none other than Dean Godson! http://madhabirfy.blogspot.com/2007/09/middle-eastern-gerard-henderson.html

    If anyone has ever wondered who would be more appropriate to talk about “community” and “cohesion” none could better disqualify himself from such a responsibility than Godson exemplifying an exact opposite of those terms.

  2. It’s worth noting that Dean Godson’s brother Roy is a leading expert on psychological warfare who was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair. Roy’s book Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards includes a discussion of the role of forgery in ‘political warfare.’
    I think it’s fair to ask whether the ‘political warfare’ that Dean has advocated in his newspaper columns involves the same methods.
    http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/4309/8/