John Sweeney spends 8 days undercover in North Korea.
BBC News head of programmes Ceri Thomas said: “This is an important piece of public interest journalism.” Asked whether that justified putting student lives at risk, he replied: “We think it does.”
This is John Sweeney trying to defend his actions (and failing):
North Korea is….‘A state that is more like Hitler’s Germany than any other state in the world, It is extraordinarily scary, dark and evil….. We maintain all of the students were aware of the risk.’
BBC Panorama breached safety guidelines by sending undercover team into North Korea using LSE students, internal report finds
A controversial BBC Panorama programme which sent an undercover team into North Korea, pretending to be a group of LSE students, has breached a number of editorial guidelines.
A report by the corporation’s Trust said the BBC failed to ensure the students were aware of the risks involved in the trip.
Although the Trust believed there was a ‘strong public interest’ in the broadcast, it said the BBC ‘failed to consider a number of important issues and risks, and failed to deal with them appropriately’.
In its report published today, the Trust’s editorial standards committee said: ‘The provision of information to the students who took part in the trip was insufficient and inadequate, and meant the daughter of the complainant did not possess the knowledge necessary to give informed consent.’
The BBC accepts the Trust’s decision but….‘ it said that at the time the programme was being made, it believed they were being treated ‘fairly’.’
So…it doesn’t accept the decision then.
I would have thought it completely obvious that you should not exploit non-BBC staff in this manner and take such risks with a state that you acknowledge is ‘ more like Hitler’s Germany than any other state in the world.’
What did we learn from Sweeney’s little indulgence in the Public interest?….not a lot.
I agree North Korea is like Hitlers Germany….It’s an authoritarian Socialist state, the operative word there being “Socialist”.
The greatest victory that the left have ever procured since the end of the second world war, is to have Hitlers brand of “National” Socialists branded as “far right”, when they don’t share one iota of “brotherhood” with any other right wing party known to mankind today…..
Only Socialists advocated genocide in the nineteenth and twentieth Century, of which Hitler was a culpable monster…
As was Stalin and Mao, and Pol Pot….Indeed all good Socialists together…
Speaking of Hitler, did anyone watch the cringe worthy BBC news at ten tonight, where the idiot John Simpson was blubbering inanely of how the West was appeasing Putin quite readily?…..
So…..A want to be dictator is annexing part of another Country under the pretext, that the Russian speaking elements of the Crimea/Ukraine wish to return to their beloved mother Russia…
I see a president where-by this has happened before…I’m thinking the 1930s……I’m thinking Austria and Czechoslovakia…..I’m thinking of pitifully weak Western governments rolling over backwards as not to offend the oppressor…
Isn’t it sad how history repeats itself…..And what is sadder still is we let it happen…
Or to put it another way !
A democratically elected president holds a referendum amongst people who speak his countries language and feel part of it. The vast majority respond that they want to leave the country they were arbitrarily attached to and their wishes have been acceded to.
Meanwhile the unelected dictators of the EU who cannot be removed and have no accountability what so ever puff their chests out and make unimpressive threatening noises. They know that Russia is capable of doing far more damage to the EU countries than we could do to them, but they care nothing at all for the people they are supposed to represent. Just so long as their big egos aren’t dented, they’d sell the lot of us down the river.
This is democracy in action! The people have got what they wanted, and doesn’t the anti democratic EU and its apparatchiks hate it!
It’s not the Russians living in a dictatorship, it’s us !
London School of Economics and Political Science? Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s alma mater. Boycotter of Israeli products.
The students probably came back convinced that North Korea is the economic model for Britain.
Dangerous for the students? Would they be missed?
‘The BBC accepts the Trust’s decision but….’
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I know that this may be paraphrasing, but the whole thing does again smack of the blob compartmentalising so anonymity prevails and actual accountability becomes an illusion.
Whenever I see even critics pass on BBC PR that conjures quaint notions of ‘the BBC’ talking about ‘the BBC’ as if the two are distinct, it all gets quite surreal.
well this story it come down to the hypocrisy of the left and the likes of george galloway.i am not sap or weakling,but i shed a tear when i read about the starvation and torture and mass murder of women and children at the hands of these dirty evil north korean regime communist bastards,but what really gets my goat up is where is george galloway and the left protesting outside the north korean embassy.where are you galloway calling for the boycott of the north korean regime,where are the left,you are silent,oh.i have just remembered,you are to busy demonising and persecuting the people of the only democrisy in the middle east called isreal.
Is the same LSE known to one & all as the Libyan School of Economics?