THE London School of Economics has demanded the BBC withdraw tonight’s Panorama programme attacking North Korea and describing it as a fascist state.
Complaining of ‘serious damage’ to its reputation, the LSE said Panorama reporter John Sweeney posed as one of its PhD students on a university society trip in order to film undercover in the country.
LSE director, Professor Craig Calhoun, accused the corporation of ‘lies and deception from the outset’.
In an email sent to LSE students and staff, the university said: ‘It is LSE’s view that the students were not given enough information to enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger if the subterfuge had been uncovered prior to their departure from North Korea.
‘While this particular trip was run in the name of a student society, the nature of LSE’s teaching and research means that aspects of North Korea are legitimate objects of study in several of our academic disciplines.
‘The BBC’s actions may do serious damage to LSE’s reputation for academic integrity and may have seriously compromised the future ability of LSE students and staff to undertake legitimate study of North Korea, and very possibly of other countries where suspicion of independent academic work runs high.’
The email said the LSE was ‘fully supportive of the principle of investigative journalism in the public interest’ but could not condone the use of its name, or the use of its students, ‘as cover for such activities’.
The LSE added that two other people working for the BBC also went on the trip, complaining: ‘At no point prior to the trip was it made clear to the students that a BBC team of three had planned to use the trip as cover for a major documentary to be shown on Panorama.’
The LSE informed students and staff that BBC director general Lord Hall refused its request to withdraw the programme and ‘issue a full apology to LSE for the actions of BBC staff in using the school and its good reputation as a means of deception.’
LSE student union newspaper the Beaver quotes LSE Students’ Union general secretary Alex Peters-Day as saying: ‘it was not the BBC’s place to make decisions on behalf of the students on the trip, nor was it the BBC’s place to put at risk all those within the school.’
A student who went on the trip, wishing to remain anonymous, told the Beaver that: ‘we were not made aware of the presence of several BBC journalists at the time of the flight to Pyongyang. We were led to believe that John Sweeney was a history professor, although it was later implied that he was not a professor at the LSE.’
The student trip was organised through the Korean Friendship Association (KFA).
Reporter Sweeney described North Korea as a ‘Nazi state’ that practiced the ‘most extreme form of censorship’.
The BBC would not have undertaken such subterfuge without the support of the British government and its secret service agencies who are interested in mounting a war-fever against North Korea by all means possible.
The BBC has told the LSE that it is going ahead with the programme, and that it knew that it was putting the students at risk.
