Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight, has responded

to the question I asked yesterday (see post below) as follows:

The piece you are referring to was made by the independent film-maker Jamie Campbell. The BBC has said it was not good practice to reorder the sequences, but that the overall sense of the piece was not significantly changed. I am convinced there was no intention to deceive the viewer and that the ordering of the two sequences was done to assist the flow of the film rather than to change its sense.

But it is clear from our viewers’ response to Robbie Gibb’s blog that they were unhappy with this and we accept that.

…which is a wishy-washy sort of answer to the long unanswered question about why were the sequences switched around in the first place. Peter points out that the public reaction, both here at Biased BBC and on Robbie Gibb’s original non-confessional ‘confessional’ post, Putting things in order, was ‘unhappy’ – just a touch of understatement!

The blame for Newsnight’s ‘dodgy editing’ episode appears to be being placed squarely on the shoulders of ‘independent film-maker Jamie Campbell’, though I’m not convinced that the buck necessarily stops with him alone.

Let us hope that should ‘independent film-maker Jamie Campbell’ ever darken our tellytaxed screens once more that a tight leash is kept on him, especially in the editing suite, and that he’s learnt a useful lesson about telling the truth and being seen to tell the truth.