BBC and North Korea

THE BBC's Panorama programme has been no stranger to controversy in its sixty years on air. Now it is accused of using a group of students from the London School of Economics as cover for the programme's presenter John Sweeney and his camera crew who posed as their professors on a visit to North Korea. Educational visits are one of the few ways of getting access to North Korea. Three of the ten students have said they were not adequately briefed on the risks they were taking in deceiving the notoriously secretive North Koreans. The BBC says they were fully informed.

Whatever the outcome of this dispute there is another question that arises. Was the BBC justified in undertaking this programme when the chances of it unearthing anything newsworthy about North Korea's current threats to South Korea, Japan and the United States were so small? John Sweeney's report on Monday evening was one-third familiar scenes of the Army's serried ranks and of standard tourist attractions, another third of interviews with experts on North Korea filmed outside the country and the balance of Sweeney walking aimlessly around Pyongyang and making cryptic comments on what he saw. On this showing Panorama is a shadow of its former investigative self when Richard Dimbleby and Robin Day were in charge. It still has the old Monday night slot, but that's about all.