“The Mayor and Our Money”, the Panorama documentary on Lutfur Rahman’s administration in Tower Hamlets that was broadcast this evening (being carefully timed to damage Lutfur’s reputation in the run-up to the mayoral election in May) failed to pin any charges of financial or political corruption on Lutfur, despite advance publicity suggesting otherwise. What we got instead was unsubstantiated smears and innuendo. This was much as expected, given that the reporter was John Ware, whose shoddy journalistic methods have previously been exposed by media analysts.

Readers of Islamophobia Watch will probably remember that Ware was responsible for the notorious 2005 Panorama programme attacking the Muslim Council of Britain, entitled “A Question of Leadership”. In a detailed analysis of this documentary in Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, Julian Petley accuses Ware of engaging in “smear journalism, an odious form of journalism that either lacks the proof for the points it wishes to make, or the courage to say what it means and face the legal consequences, or both. This is exactly the kind of journalism one expects from the tabloid press (for which Ware, entirely unsurprisingly, once worked), but to find it in full flower on what is supposed to be the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme is surely quite unacceptable.”

Petley concludes: “‘A Question of Leadership’ can be described as a classic example of thesis-driven journalism. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of reportage, but problems arise when it tips over into tendentiousness, when one has the distinct impression that the journalist is grinding an axe, that they’ve gone out to find the facts to fit – as opposed to test – their thesis, and that nothing they discover will sway them from the view with which they set out in the first place. This is the distinct impression left by this particular edition of Panorama….”

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