INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM: the activity of news reporters trying to discover information which is of public interest but which someone might be keeping hidden
— Cambridge Dictionary

Panorama has been going since 1953 and, in a multi-channel environment, when the pressures on the mainstream channels to consign serious programming to non-peak viewing hours are intense, the continued existence of the programme in peak-time is a tribute to the BBC’s commitment to its journalism. According to the programme’s unofficial biographer, former Panorama reporter Richard Lindley, its mission used to be “...to explore and explain the world we live in, week in, week out”. This it did through straight reportage, analysis and landmark interviews. But an investigative TV show it was not.

Significantly, the words “investigative journalism” occur just three times in Lindley’s 400-page tome. One of the references is to a 1979 incident when a Panorama team filmed an IRA roadblock at Carrickmore in Northern Ireland – a sequence that didn’t make it on air but did succeed in offending Mrs Thatcher and led to the sacking of a Panorama editor. The other two references are to a programme called Maggie’s Militant Tendency, an attempt to link some of Mrs Thatcher’s right-wing supporters in Parliament to past neonazi political activity. The programme caused a political storm, and also led to an expensive out-of-court libel settlement for the BBC, described by Lindley as “an extraordinary humiliation”. But these two programmes were exceptions. For most of Panorama’s 54-year history it was not seen as one of television’s major investigative strands. ITV’s World in Action and This Week, now both sadly defunct, were – as is Channel 4’s Dispatches,which still bravely flies the flag for investigative journalism on British TV.

So we come to the Panorama of today: after years wasting away in the Sunday night television doldrums, it was relaunched in January last year – a relaunch described by its new presenter Jeremy Vine as “the biggest media event of 2007”. Hubris again. That it was not the biggest is unarguable, but to what extent has Panorama lived up to its own billing as an “investigative show”?

A good starting point

In 2007, 51 Panorama programmes were broadcast, a regularity of appearance in marked contrast to the recent past, which saw 36 programmes broadcast in 2006 and just 32 the preceding year. For this research the programmes were divided into four categories:

■ Substantive investigations – programmes involving revelatory investigation into a matter of public importance that has either not yet entered the public domain, or an investigation into a current issue that throws significant new light on to the subject. Examples of such programmes last year included investigations into the London bombers, the Saudi arms scandal, peopletraffickers and the shortage of midwives in the health service.

■ Populist investigations – programmes that might utilise the techniques of investigative journalism, and involve significant revelation, but whose subject matter raises no substantive issues of public policy. Examples of these in 2007 included programmes about Scientology, Bob Woolmer’s “murder”, dog-fighting, and a British woman married to a Mafia boss.

■ News backgrounders – programmes looking at a current issue and providing additional information that, while enlightening, cannot be judged to be significantly so new to add substantially to public understanding. Examples included programmes about the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Barack Obama, Alan Johnston’s kidnapping, and British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

■ Self-referential – the occasional reprise of recent Panorama hits.

Panorama 2007
Substantive investigations	14
Populist investigations	8
News backgrounders	28
Self-referential	1
TOTAL	51

Using these categories, the research identified only 14 of Panorama’s programmes in 2007 as falling within the substantive investigative category. Eight were classified as populist investigations, 28 as news backgrounders and one as self-referential. (The full categorisation can be found in the appendix to this article)

These raw figures suggest that programme’s claim to be “an investigative show” is weak. A minority of its editions were investigative and of these, more than a third were judged to be essentially “populist”. And its investigative impetus looked like it ran out of steam in the second half of the year. Of the 14 programmes identified as “substantive”, six were broadcast between January and April – an average of 1.5 a month; and only eight in the remaining eight months up until December – an average of just one a month.

To compound the problem, some of Panorama’s investigations went sadly awry. John Sweeney’s investigation into Scientology, that “revealed” it was more a cult than a religion, was a shocker. It was a shocker, firstly, because of the sheer unoriginality of the subject-matter; secondly because of Sweeney’s now infamous on-camera rant, which he himself has described as making him look like “an exploding tomato”; and shocking because of some of the “techniques” that Sweeney and his team apparently used, if we are to believe a series of allegations made in a slickly-produced DVD distributed by the Scientologists. The DVD appeared to show, among other things, Sweeney knocking on a locked back door of a Scientology building to give the impression that the Scientologists were refusing to speak to him, although how much credibility one gives to such a DVD is questionable.

Other programmes also went adrift. An investigation into two IVF clinics in London is currently the subject of a libel action, with Panorama in a weakened position following the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s decision publicly to back away from some of the allegations made in the programme. A programme about the death of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer “proved” that not only had he been strangled, but also poisoned. Alas, a note on the Panorama website now says: “Since the transmission of this programme, Jamaican police have attributed the death of Bob Woolmer to natural causes.” And an “investigation” into the alleged dangers of WiFi attracted almost universal criticism. David Gregory, the BBC’s own science and environment correspondent, said of it: “I can’t believe such a biased and scientifically incoherent piece of TV made it to the air,” and a note on the programme’s website reads: “The BBC’s Editorial Complaint Unit has upheld complaints against this edition of Panorama.”

Maximising the audience

Former Panorama reporter Tom Mangold believes it does not: “Why in heaven’s name must Panorama be judged by its audience size rather than the quality of its content?” he recently wrote in The Independent. “What is public service broadcasting about if it fails to make available serious, sensible, responsible, informative (and, yes, entertaining where possible) television journalism at a peak time for those who want more than a hundred-word upsums on their mobile phones about the major issues of our time?”

And John Ware, a senior Panorama reporter who is still with the programme, has been equally scathing about the programme’s current approach to investigative journalism, being quoted in The Guardian as saying: “The overwhelming impression we’ve had... is that BBC1 is about entertainment and that the benchmark for current affairs would be undercover stuff. It’s not very challenging to strap on a camera and go and work in a hospital and tell people how dirty it is.” Panorama editor Sandy Smith rejects the view that the programme has gone downmarket. He recently told The Guardian: “We haven’t done Tesco, we haven’t done house prices, we haven’t done obesity – those are the things you would do if you wanted to compete with Tonight with Trevor McDonald. I have never read or had conversations with audience planners or other soothsayers who would have told me what I should be commissioning to put more bums on seats. And I think that’s blindingly obvious from my story list.”

But the assumption that Panorama sees winning larger audiences as a prime role is not based just on the gossip of former reporters, but is enshrined in its own mission statement. This declares that it aims “to deliver impact either in terms of audience size or in take-up by the wider media” – in other words, getting bigger audiences and getting noticed by other media. This is a significant statement in that it makes clear that impacting on viewers and the media is a priority, but that making an impact on public policy is not. (This obsession with attention-grabbing headlines was probably responsible for the unseemly practice of BBC News, on Sunday evenings, regularly running Panorama promos as if they were substantive news items – a practice the BBC has now said it will abandon.)

Overall, the verdict on the role of Panorama as an investigative programme is mixed. Certainly it is still undertaking some serious investigations. In the series under review they have run a number of firstclass investigations. These have included programmes about the behaviour of British troops in Iraq, the poor state of the RAF’s Nimrod aircraft, and MI5’s failure to identify London terrorists. But, equally, many of its investigations appear to be based on finding popular subjects and presenting the results in ways that put almost as much emphasis on production values as on editorial content, or raise fundamental questions about the programme’s editorial approach. And the fact remains that the majority of its programmes are neither investigative, nor are they seeking to do what Panorama once did so well – in the words of Tom Mangold “...to spend time, energy, money and true reporting talent to cover, in real depth, the big, strategic, vital issues of the day, whatever the [audience] figures”.

A longer version of this article will be appear in Investigative Journalism, edited by Hugo de Burgh and published by Routledge in May.

APPENDIX — CLASSIFICATIONS