{"id":745,"date":"2007-12-13T05:25:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-13T11:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=745"},"modified":"2007-12-13T05:25:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-13T11:25:00","slug":"policy-exchange-vs-newsnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/12\/policy-exchange-vs-newsnight\/","title":{"rendered":"Policy Exchange vs. Newsnight"},"content":{"rendered":"

D<\/span>o 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<\/span> to park its T-72<\/a>s in Parliament Square.<\/p>\n

Now Islamism<\/span> has replaced Socialism<\/span> as the ideological threat du jour<\/span>, and Saudi not Soviet money is at the root of propaganda. Plus \u00e7a change<\/span>, you might think. Except that traditionally in journalism you need a bit of evidence to go bandying around such claims.<\/p>\n

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

Barron posts<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Last night on Newsnight<\/span>, Dean Godson of the think tank Policy Exchange<\/a> accused me personally of making a \u201cdisastrous editorial misjudgement\u201d and of \u201cappalling stewardship of Newsnight<\/span>\u201d. I think I should respond to that.<\/p>\n

Mr Godson was responding to Richard Watson\u2019s investigation into Policy Exchange\u2019s recent report – entitled \u201cThe Hijacking of British Islam<\/a>\u201d – which accused several leading mosques of selling extremist literature.<\/p>\n

In October Newsnight<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in London. They had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt was not theirs.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbottled\u201d it as Mr Godson suggests, but because I did not have the necessary level of confidence in the evidence presented.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

1. <\/b>In all five cases the mosques involved said the receipts did not belong to them.<\/p>\n

2. <\/b>The expert analysis showed that all five had been printed on an inkjet printer – suggesting they were created on a PC.<\/p>\n

3. <\/b>The analysis found \u201cstrong evidence\u201d that two of the receipts were written by the same person.<\/p>\n

4. <\/b>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.<\/p>\n

Mr Godson says he stands by his report 100%. I also stand by our report 100%. I don\u2019t think we can both be right.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And Policy Exchange?<\/p>\n

POLICY EXCHANGE AND BBC NEWSNIGHT<\/span><\/p>\n

Policy Exchange stands by its report The Hijacking of British Islam<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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\u2019s findings do not rely upon their existence. The report relies instead on the testimony of our Muslim research team. Contrary to the programme\u2019s claims, when Newsnight<\/span> raised concerns about some of the receipts, Policy Exchange facilitated discussions between Newsnight<\/span> and two of our researchers.<\/p>\n

Several mosques and places of Islamic instruction were mentioned in Newsnight<\/span>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/span> has chosen to broadcast a package about receipts. We can only speculate as to the programme makers\u2019 agenda.<\/p>\n

The executive of Policy Exchange will meet on Thursday 13th to discuss legal action against the BBC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Policy Exchange report was written by Denis MacEoin<\/span><\/a>. I guess you can only speculate as to his agenda too, but he is at least allowed to have one.<\/p>\n

Still Policy Exchange don\u2019t exactly have much of a case arguing that Barron ignored their research because only a bit of it was dodgy.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Moral 1: If Newsnight <\/span>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\u2019s work. This is what cost-cutting is all about.<\/p>\n

Moral 2: If Policy Exchange wasn\u2019t so obsessed with making column inches and scoring political points they wouldn\u2019t release reports that their potential collaborators had identified serious issues with. They should have pulled it and checked it out.<\/p>\n

It was foolhardy, and next time they trot something out, I would expect it to get some very, very heavy scrutiny.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-bbc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}