Latest entry
- Richard Sambrook
- 7 Mar 07, 12:27 PM
We've launched the report of the International News Safety Institute into the deaths of journalists around the world. Killing the Messenger: The Deadly Price of News has been 18 months' work involving regional inquiries in Asia, the Middle East, North and South America, and Europe. It was launched on World Press Freedom Day in 2005 when I was asked to chair it. The School of Journalism at Cardiff University has worked with us to analyse all the available data on the deaths of journalists and support staff going back ten years. The headlines:
• More than a thousand have been killed - an average of two a week.
• Only one in four is killed in armed conflict - the majority are local journalists working on stories in their own countries.
• More than 670 of them have been murdered - and the majority of killers are never identified or brought to justice.
• There is a widespread culture of impunity in many countries where killing a journalist is risk-free.
In addition, the report makes a number of recommendations for greater safety and for taking the issue out to the international community for them to understand the impact on free speech and economic and democratic development. When a journalist is killed we all hear and see a little less.
A PDF of the report is available here (warning it's over 100 pages long).
Richard Sambrook is director, Global News
Recent entries
Daily Mail: Leader column says that "more and more restrictions are being placed on the freedom of the press", with reference to the recent developments in the cash-for-honours inquiry. (link)
- Jamie Donald
- 6 Mar 07, 04:21 PM
I wondered if we were broadcasting nonsense on The Daily Politics this morning. I woke to learn from the Guardian that police were investigating whether Lord Levy, the prime minister's fundraiser, had urged Ruth Turner, the prime minister's director of external relations, to modify information that might have been of interest to Scotland Yard's cash for honours inquiry.
Was this not the story that for three days the BBC had been referring to but not allowed to report? Could we not on the programme today at last put some bones and flesh on the story?
I then decided I couldn't. The BBC's senior legal and management teams had some very clear advice. Of course we could say that the Guardian had printed a story, but if we reported the content we would fall foul of the very strict injunction on the BBC. The advice was also not to connect the Guardian story with the BBC story for fear of falling foul of the same injunction.
Unfortunately we couldn't explain the terms of our own injunctions. And it would be better not to report that the BBC was, that morning, asking for our injunction to be lifted or varied.
So we said what I thought we could. James Landale told Andrew Neil on air that the Guardian had a jolly good story which it had printed, but that he couldn't tell us about. And then he told Andrew the BBC had a separate jolly good story involving Ruth Turner and Lord Levy. And er... that was it, because of all the legal complications. Then James called the whole thing Kafkaesque. My hero.
There were two more turns of the knife. Had you been watching Sky News when James and Andrew were talking, you would have seen Sky merrily reporting the full details of the Guardian allegations, discussing them with all and sundry, and reporting the just released and robust denials from Lord Levy.
And to top it off, the injunction against the BBC was lifted just as we came off air, allowing Nick Robinson suddenly to report in full his story from Friday on News 24... about 12 hours after the Guardian.
Had I got this completely wrong? Maybe. Did the viewers understand what on earth we were on about? I suspect not. So should we have mentioned the story on the programme at all, given the limitations? Debatable, but I thought so. Was it a great day for the programme? You decide. But hats off to the Guardian.
Jamie Donald is editor of live political programmes
- Peter Rippon
- 6 Mar 07, 10:23 AM
Did Iranian President Ahmadinejad say Israel should be wiped off the map? There is a body of opinion who argue he did not, and he has been misquoted. The BBC does attribute the quote to him so I thought it might be useful to set out why.
President Ahmadinejad made the remark at a conference. The comment was picked up and translated from the Farsi by the BBC's Monitoring Service. Those who challenge the 'wiped off the map' translation argue other translations would be more accurate, among them:
"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time".
They argue the President was merely repeating a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini. They also point out that when subsequently asked about the quote President Ahmadinejad said he had not been advocating practical military action against Israel and that he was saying Israel has no legitimacy as a state.
So why do we continue to use it? The BBC's experts at the Monitoring advise "there is no direct translation into English of the Farsi phrase used by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Therefore there a number of possible ways of rendering the Farsi original into English. However, in the context of the whole passage we believe our original interpretation is an accurate reflection of the words."
At the end of last year after a complaint from a viewer that Andrew Marr had used the phrase "wiped off the face of the map", the position was investigated by the BBC Governors' Complaints Committee (before it was replaced by the BBC Trust). The judgement reads in part:
"The Committee carefully considered the wording of the translation of the speech from a number of sources, including translations from BBC Monitoring and from the Middle East Research Institute in Washington. The Committee also reflected on how the speech had been translated in British newspapers and on Al Jazeera Online. The Committee noted the inherent problem with accuracy in translations. It noted that all the translations varied to a greater or lesser degree, and it was difficult to decide which, if any, was the most accurate. None of the various translations provided any evidence for the charge that Andrew Marr had misrepresented what the Iranian President had said.
The Committee felt that the language used by the Iranian President was highly emotive by its nature and had been recognised as such in the international condemnation of what he had said. Andrew Marr had done nothing more than highlight this in his introduction. The Committee was also clear that neither the language nor the tone used by Andrew Marr could be considered as showing bias."
Peter Rippon is editor of PM and Broadcasting House
Financial Times: Reports on BBC Worldwide’s plans to increase revenue by inviting other UK broadcasters to use its new iPlayer as an alternative to Apple's iTunes for downloading audio and video. (link)
The Guardian: “BBC Worldwide's annual sales show for buyers from around the world reflects the broadcaster's need to make a profit from exporting its programmes to close the gap in funding after the recent licence fee settlement.” (link)
On this week's Newswatch, the programme which discusses viewers' complaints about BBC TV News, Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environmental analyst, discusses how the subject of climate change is reported and Breakfast editor David Kermode defends this year’s Oscar coverage. You can watch the programme by clicking here.
- Peter Barron
- 5 Mar 07, 02:37 PM
Michael Crick's piece about the strange disappearance from circulation of the photograph of David Cameron as a member of the Bullingdon Club and the discovery of the uncropped picture of Tony Blair's rude student gesticulation provoked a big reaction from viewers.
Many thought we were wrong to delve into their youthful indiscretions, but that was not really what the item was about. It was about the suppression of photographs which could have proved embarrassing for our political leaders.
The issue is airbrushing from history - a big feature in Orwell and Stalin - and surely one for Newsnight.
Interestingly, it's not at all clear who has done the suppressing in these cases. The photographic company who own the copyright on the Cameron picture are adamant they weren't leant on, but made the decision for commercial reasons. The Conservative party say they didn't ask for it to be withdrawn, though they admit they thought about it when they feared Labour would use it in an election poster.
The unexpurgated picture of Tony Blair has been around for years, but apparently no-one has ever published it. Indeed one version I've seen has the offending gesture blacked out. How odd.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
The Times: Reports that police are seeking to gag the media until the cash-for-honours inquiry is over after the attorney general took out an injunction against the BBC to stop it broadcasting a report about the investigation. (link)
Daily Telegraph: “There was widespread support last night for Jonathan Ross's claim that the BBC employs most black people only in low paid jobs.” (link)
The Independent: News presenter Nicholas Owen who joins News 24 later this month on “My Life in the Media”. (link)
The Guardian: Interview with Newsnight’s Ethical Man, aka reporter Justin Rowlatt who’s spent the last year leading an ethical lifestyle. (link)
The Guardian: “The BBC has struck a partnership deal with IBM to develop "web 3.0" technology.” (link)
- Richard Porter
- 2 Mar 07, 04:43 PM
So how did the BBC report that Building 7 at the World Trade Centre had collapsed around half an hour before it did so? My earlier posting on the subject has attracted a lot of interest so we've been doing more investigating within the BBC to put together the sequence of events.
Five and a half years have passed so it's quite difficult to answer every outstanding question. But we do know quite a bit more than we did on Tuesday, as a result of checking the BBC archives and what other media were doing at the time. I've also read through some of the reports published after 9/11 to help put together the sequence of events.
Back to 11 September itself. The Twin Towers had collapsed. Other buildings were known to be damaged. Building 7 was on fire. But this was also a very confusing picture - remember we had started the day with reports that a light aircraft had struck the first tower, and at one stage there was talk of ten hijacked jets in the air. It's in the nature of rolling news that events unfold in front of you and confusion turns to clarity. It's important to remember that context when looking more closely at what happened between about 4.10pm (EDT) and 5.20pm when Building 7 finally collapsed.
CNN's chronology of events published at the time confirms they reported the building on fire and a clip from a CNN bulletin, widely available on the web, hears from a reporter at about 4.15pm EDT, 9.15pm in the UK, who says: "We're getting information that one of the other buildings... Building 7... is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing... now we're told there is a fire there and that the building may collapse as well."
Other American networks were broadcasting similar reports at this time and the reports from FEMA and NIST both make it clear the building was on fire during the course of the day.
One senior fire officer was quoted in a subsequent interview as saying there was a "bulge" in the building and he was "pretty sure it was going to collapse". During this time, our staff were talking directly to the emergency services and monitoring local and national media… and there was a fairly consistent picture being painted of Building 7 in danger of collapse. Producers in London would have been monitoring the news agency wires - the Associated Press, Reuters, etc - and although we don't routinely keep an archive of agency reports, we're sure they would have been reporting the same as the local media.
At 4.27pm, a BBC reporter, Greg Barrow, who is in New York, appears on our radio news channel, BBC Radio Five Live, and says: "We are hearing reports from local media that another building may have caught light and is in danger of collapse." He then responds to a follow-up question by saying "I'm not sure if it has yet collapsed but the report we have is talking about Building 7."
At 4.53pm, on the same radio station, the programme's presenter, Fi Glover says "25 minutes ago we had reports from Greg Barrow that another large building has collapsed just over an hour ago."
At 4.54pm, the BBC's domestic television news channel, BBC News 24, reports the same thing. Presenter Gavin Esler says: "We're now being told that yet another enormous building has collapsed... it is the 47-storey Salomon Brothers building."
And then at 4.57pm on BBC World (according to the clips available on the web) presenter Phil Hayton says: "We've got some news just coming in actually that the Salomon brothers building in NY right in the heart of Manhattan has also collapsed."
Because three BBC channels were saying this in quick succession, I am inclined to believe that one or more of the news agencies was reporting this, or at least reporting someone saying this.
At 5pm, News 24 repeated the news in its top-of-the-hour headlines sequence and then at about 5.10pm (again according to the clips on the web), Phil Hayton on BBC World says "More on the latest building collapse in NY - you might have heard I was talking a few moments ago about the Salomon building collapsing and indeed it has... it seems this wasn't the result of a new attack but because the building had been weakened during this morning's attack."
Some of the respondents to my earlier blog have suggested this must mean he had inside knowledge - that not only did he know the building had collapsed, he knew why.
Well in one sense that's true - for about an hour, it had been reported that the building was on fire and in danger of collapse. But he did qualify it by saying "it seems" and once again I think there's a danger of reading too much into what I believe was a presenter merely summarising what everyone had been saying during the previous hour.
Of course, with hindsight we now know that our live shot showed the building still standing in the background. But again I point to that confusing and chaotic situation on the ground - the CNN reporter who had talked about the building "either collapsed or is collapsing" also had it clearly in shot behind him, but he acknowledged he couldn't see very clearly from where he was standing. As we know, the building did collapse at 5.20pm, with the first pictures of that being broadcast on News 24 at about 5.35pm.
So that's what we know we reported. To me it paints a consistent (and reasonably conclusive) picture.
I should also mention the missing tapes. As you'll see from the details above, the absence of the BBC World tapes hasn't made much difference to our ability to look back at what happened. We have all the tapes of other BBC channels (and I now know that quite a few of you have your own copies of BBC World, which is an interesting discovery... ).
Some of you find it hard to believe we didn't keep the BBC World tapes... but we had several streams of news output running simultaneously on the day, both on radio and television as well as online and we have kept all the tapes from BBC News 24 and Radio Five Live, as well as all the BBC One bulletins. Obviously I wish we'd kept hold of the World tapes alongside all the others, but we didn't... and I don't know whether they were destroyed or mislaid. But as a result of this week's events, I have asked our archivists to get hold of copies of our original material from the organisations which do have them.
And just to be clear, the BBC policy is to keep every minute of news channel output for 90 days (in line with the Broadcasting Act in the UK). After that we are obliged to keep a representative sample - and we interpret that to mean roughly one third of all our output. We also keep a large amount of individual items (such as packaged reports or "rushes" - ie original unedited material), which we use for operational reasons - such as when we come to broadcast fresh stories on the subject. We do not lack a historical record of the event.
I've spent most of the week investigating this issue, but this is where we have to end the story. I know there are many out there who won't believe our version of events, or will raise further questions. But there was no conspiracy in the BBC's reporting of the events. Nobody told us what to say. There's no conspiracy involving missing tapes. There's no story here.
Richard Porter is head of news, BBC World
- Steve Herrmann
- 2 Mar 07, 03:40 PM
Yesterday's exercise was a bit of a revelation.
I asked you (blog readers) about the blogs vs diaries question, while Mark Mardell also asked the same question of his diary readers. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise, but opinion divided very clearly, with the blog readers agreeing on the merits of this format, and Mark’s regular diary readers urging him to stick with the diary.
Some of you (Richard, Kendrick, and Jonathan) made the extremely sensible point that we can combine the best of both worlds and get the blog advantages (RSS, easy updating, item permalinks etc) along with longer format, considered writing - if that’s what we want to do.
Paul is right when he says the tone of the content is completely independent of the software used (at least I think he is – is he?).
Your comments on the issue of interaction (how much we do or don’t engage with comments and follow them up, or whether there is tumbleweed blowing through) are another interesting issue.
Mark Mardell’s diary, in common with some of our other features and columns on the site, do carry a comment form and we publish a small range of responses on the story page itself. We don’t tend to then respond to the responses because by that time we are all busy working on the next feature or diary piece. So to that extent they are less interactive than a blog.
But as some have pointed out, this blog doesn’t behave very typically - there’s more than one author, and all those who write in it are also responsible for and busy with lots of other editorial output - the blog is just one bit of their line of communication with you, the audience, so there’s less follow-up comment.
I’m not sure how much of an issue that is, but I think it is probably just the nature of this particular forum. But in any case, there's a lot of illuminating thought in your responses which I will factor in as we proceed - so thank you.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
The Herald: Reports that Jack McConnell has criticised a BBC documentary which claimed that money sent to Malawi by the Scottish Executive to tackle poverty was being mis-spent. (link)
The Guardian: “The BBC has confirmed a deal with YouTube to make programming available via a number of branded channels, including supplying an ad-funded BBC News clips service.” (link)
- Sue Nix
- 1 Mar 07, 04:15 PM
BBC viewers - and listeners - led the way yesterday and helped shape our coverage as never before.
It all started with an unusually high number of calls mid-morning to BBC Cambridgeshire from people saying they were having big problems with their cars, which prompted our Cambridge TV producer to call some other local radio stations. They were getting similar calls. She tipped off News 24, and our reporter Nicola Pearson began to make her own inquiries. It was clear that the story was growing.
Around 2.30pm, we put out the first flash on the story and presenter Jon Sopel asked viewers to text us on 61124 if they'd had car trouble.
The next few minutes were extraordinary. Within seconds the first few messages were starting to come in and then as we began to read some out, there was an absolute torrent of texts - all reporting the same symptoms: spluttering engines; cars losing power; breaking down, etc.
It seemed as though the problem was affecting a much wider area than we'd thought. By now, our producers were ringing garages and experts - they confirmed that not only was there a serious problem, but that garages were running out of the parts needed to deal with it.
The texts were coming in faster than we'd ever seen before - we rang back some of our texters and put them on the air, which prompted yet more texts and e-mails. We started to throw out other news, and by 3.30 it was clear we had a major story which would lead the bulletins.
We asked the supermarkets for their response, phoned yet more experts to try and find out what the problem was, and how our viewers could fix it, and we put up a map showing the areas over Britain that viewers were texting us from.
For the first time, the top story on News 24 was genuinely “Your News" - so thanks!
PS. In the last 24 hours we've already received more than 4,000 e-mails on this.
Sue Nix is afternoon editor of BBC News 24
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