How to survive a hoodwinking: More from the BBC

There are many reasons to be concerned about the Report of the Editorial Review into the BBC documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” conducted and signed by Peter Johnston, the BBC’s Director of Editorial Complaints & Reviews, and published today.
My main concern has to do with Johnston’s failure to raise the right questions about the use of a 13-year-old narrator.

The Review focuses, in this respect, only on the fact that the identity of the boy’s father—a member of the Hamas-run Gaza government—was not revealed to the BBC by the programme’s independent production company, and was thus knowingly intended to be concealed from the audience. This, says Johnston, was a breach of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, and specifically a breach of Guideline 3.3.17 on Accuracy, which deals with misleading audiences.

The issue of the use of the boy is looked at in detail in Sections 75 to 80, where the question is asked whether he was capable of reflecting a balanced editorial view in his narration. Here, Johnston says “I do not find that the decision to use the child Narrator was itself a breach of the Editorial Guidelines”; it was only inappropriate “in light of the information we now know about the Narrator’s family and background”.

That’s nonsense. The idea that the question of the boy’s family was the only problem reveals an astonishing lapse of judgement by Johnston and by those who were earlier tasked with asking questions about the programme and signing it off as safe to transmit.

What Johnston should have noted, and taken strong objection to, was the wish to hoodwink viewers by having the boy read a script written for him by the producers and passed off as his own. Amazingly, Johnston admits to having no problem with the “creative device to take viewers into the world of a child” even though the use of such a device was fraudulent. It gave the impression that the child was leading the programme’s editorial content when he was in fact nothing more than a stooge.

The audience will have ended up thinking it now knew what Gaza was like through the eyes of a child, when it had in fact been fed the opinions of the producers through the boy’s mouthpiece.

The production company required the boy to say things he could not have known, provide context he wasn’t equipped to provide, and talk with a level of editorial maturity that a 13-year-old could not have been capable of. By any standard, that amounts to a whopping act of deception.

All that Johnston queried, in this context, was whether the child’s narrative could embrace contrary opinions including a wholly notional right of reply.

In short, the findings of the Report are partial, lacking in breadth, and consequentially self-excusing. This has been obvious ever since the moment the issue became public knowledge, and yet no attempt has been made, in the time that has passed since then, to take this additional issue on board.