I realize the Boston bomb has drowned out most other news but even so the lack of any comment concerning the BBC Panarama programme on North Korea leaves me to assume that it was, as I suspected it would be, a complete waste of time and effort. Given that the students whose university trip acted as a cover for John Sweeney, a BBC reporter, to act as a professor whilst simultaneously conducting an illegal (by North Korean standards) filming operation were, if the highly sensitive Korean authorities had discovered it, in risk of severe penalties including prison, one wonders whose turn it was for the brain cells in what passes for BBC management. Equally, it is easy to imagine the mouth-foaming that would have ensued in BBC bulletins if it had become known that MI6 had used a similar trip for the same purpose. The BBC would have been shocked, I tell you, shocked! As it was, Sky News managed it all much more simply by simply contacting a British tour guide in North Korea and via her handheld 'phone-camera-thingie' conducted an interview whilst the lady obligingly filmed all around her location.
Max Hastings in The Mail sums up the stupidity of this stunt and its utter worthlessness:
The BBC’s defence, that this was ‘an important piece of public interest journalism’, does not stand serious scrutiny. The Panorama crew had not shot footage of North Korea’s secret missile plants, its concentration camps or even the pizza parlour where the country’s Young Leader buys his dinners.
Nor had they interviewed the country’s politburo.
There was no terrific scoop. The only prize of Sweeney’s gamble was footage of a grey, ghastly country where personal liberty is extinct and the economy has almost ceased to function. Of course, we knew that already.
Hastings suggests wholesale sackings amongst the BBC bureaucrats but I would rather ship them all off to North Korea!
