Panorama Doesn’t Understand the Drama

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under What's New |

So last night it was Panorama. Quite a night Monday, with Dispatches on C4, Q and A on RTE and Pano on the Beeb.

Panorama’s story was torture by British troops in iraq. Introduced by Jeremey Vine with words to the effect “if what we’re saying in this programme is true”…. what? When did someone do current affairs with that kind of caveat. In’t old days you had to be sure what you were saying really was true or you didn’t broadcast.

Not an auspicious start. And the programme itself had me in mind of Ross Kemp’s Afghanistan series. Kemp went to Afghanistan and lived with the soldiers there for a few weeks, went into battle with them too. Kemp paints an entirely different picture of soldierly life - in particular he reminds you that these are often boys of 18 and 19 risking their lives. Contrast that with John Sweeney who looks ready to hang anyone who doubts him.

I have problems with both approaches but generally sense that the journalistic standards on Panorama are still too low. The programme relied on what it called “reconstructions” to tell the story. But reconstructions they were not. Reconstructions have a forensic use. You try to piece together some of what happened, fill in some of the gaps with a little evidence and a bit of guesswork, and see does the overall pattern have credibility. These Panorama sequences were mini-dramatisations designed to fill a hole in the programme’s footage.

There’s a real big diffeence between the two. The first forensic, the second covering up weaknesses in available filmed evidence. An editor should know that difference.

Three years ago I made a film where we drew attention to the number of rapes of German civilians by American and British troops during World War II. My purpose was to bring some balance into the debate about Russian rapes of German women. I regret in retrospect not forcing us, our team, to reveal that in fact rapes though common were less per head of population than they would have been in peaceful civilian times. In other words soldiers, despite being deprived of female company and in spite of being in brutish conditions, did it less. I suspect some of that sense of balance is needed in the Panorama offices.

At the end of the programme though we began to hear the real story. It seems that some of the bodies of men who had been in British custody might have been mutilated. Now that is a real story, the one I guess Panorama were really after.

Meanwhile over on C4 Dispatches had Andrew Gilligan looking at airport security. Gilligan is the man who claimed Tony Blair sexed up a document to justify war in Iraq. I think it is wrong of journalists to tittilate with important information so wasn’t a strong supporter of Gilligan.

Here he had an explosives expert show how mixing a few 100 ml liquids could create a bomb. Because one can take 100 ml bottles through airport security therefore it is still possible to blow planes out of the sky. Gilligan referenced two liquids used. I am sure I saw three being used. The explosives expert had a 330 ml bottle and it was full.

There is a desultory truth in here. If you have five terrorists all carrying 3 x 100 ml bottles through security then you get a litre and a half of explosives. Ten gives you three litres and so on. The point is terrorists are generally weakened by numbers. Two terrorists equals the chance of intelligence leaking out. Four at least doubles it.

But how could Dispatches go hunting down British Intelligence when the spooks appear to have done a reasonable job all round, in the sense that no planes into or out of London have been blown up despite the possibility of bringing little bottles onto them?

Here again, I sensed what we saw on the screen was a non-starter as a story, or rather it probably started with a controversial claim or two that caught the editor’s attention bit got binned as the programme evolved. Gilligan had a stab at airport security - shouldn’t they be looking for people behaving oddly rather than checking suitcases? Yes but that story was already told some years back.

The result with both programmes was unsatisfactory, a story that didn’t really stand up to a balanced judgment. That’s actually quite bad - B minus territory. The reason these weaknesses slip by is that there is a general disinterest in factual programmes. Worse, a disinterest in what constitutes fact.

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