The first I knew something had gone seriously awry with the West Midlands Police investigation into the Dispatches programme “Undercover Mosque” was when Matt Baker, Channel 4’s communications chief, made the trip down from the third floor to loom over my workstation. He brandished a two-page letter: “The police are accusing ‘Undercover Mosque’ of faking evidence.” The BBC had already rung to say they were planning to run with the story. I glanced up at a bank of monitors blinking mutely in the middle distance. I could just make out a BBC News 24 strap reporting that Channel 4 was at the centre of a new fakery row. I scanned the letter while puzzling how the BBC had the story so quickly. Addressed to Channel 4 Chief Executive Andy Duncan, the letter was from Assistant Chief Constable Anil Patani, the ACC in charge of security and cohesion at West Midlands Police (WMP), and had arrived without any prior warning earlier that morning. One paragraph jumped out:

“The investigation concentrated on comments made in Birmingham Mosques that could constitute an offence. These comments were transcribed. It appears from the transcription that some of these comments have been:
a) Edited together to change their meaning.
b) Broadcast out of context.”

The letter went on to say the police were referring the programme to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, to assess whether it was put together with due regard to fairness, impartiality and accuracy. It was clear the descending media would be arriving with only one story on their mind – the virus of TV fakery had infected another victim and this time it had spread to current affairs.

It had all begun on January 15 last year. Dispatches, Channel 4’s flagship current affairs strand, broadcast an investigation entitled “Undercover Mosque”, which exposed extremism among some speakers in English mosques. The findings were incendiary: respected Muslim preachers espousing abhorrent and extreme views, including vicious rants against women and young girls, tirades about “Kaffirs” (a derogatory term for non- Muslims) and praise for Osama bin Laden, were filmed by an undercover reporter.

It was a controversial film that, when broadcast, was attacked and praised in equal measure. I was prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was a chain of events sparked by the WMP letter that would involve fighting a gruelling complaint to Ofcom, being branded a liar in public and pilloried as Islamophobic, briefly occupying the exalted position of front-runner for TV fakery (the baton relinquished, with relief I am sure, by BBC1’s Peter Fincham and production company RDF’s Stephen Lambert) and becoming part of the focus of a police investigation that could have led to charges under the Public Order Act.

Secretly-recorded footage

After the programme was broadcast, West Midlands Police announced they were to investigate the extreme views and comments made in the film. The police applied for a production order under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act – a mechanism that allows them to detail before a court the specifics of material they wish to obtain. The broadcaster knows – as do the police – that it is rare for a judge to reject a reasonably-drafted production order. But here, the police request was not reasonably drafted. The West Midlands Police were seeking from Channel 4 and the producers disclosure of all the material relating to the making of the programme, a wholly unnecessary request since the vast majority of that material, which may have played a key role at some point in the production, was not included in the finished programme. But the WMP were determined to get everything.

External criminal lawyers hired to help handle the situation for us were overseen by Jan Tomalin, controller of Legal and Compliance at C4 and the lawyer who had been one of the driving forces behind getting “Undercover Mosque” to air. After considerable negotiation with the Crown Prosecution Service and West Midlands Police it was agreed to focus the production order on material relating to three individuals featured in the DVDs and secretly filmed during the investigation. We agreed to hand over a vastly reduced amount of journalistic material relating to the film than was first asked for. It still amounted to 56 hours of video material. During discussions about releasing the material it was made clear to the WMP that legal advice we had obtained prior to broadcast had advised that, while the film contained many clearly-expressed abhorrent views, those professing those views were not breaking any laws.

It was mid-February; the Dispatches season was in full swing. I left our lawyers to continue the relationship with the West Midlands Police. I forgot about “Undercover Mosque”. Over the summer, communication with the WMP started to dry up. The criminal lawyer we had hired to manage the situation had idly remarked that his calls were not being returned. I had thought nothing of it at the time. Perhaps the police were writing up their findings? I was busy and it did not occur to me that the police were not returning calls for one very good reason: they were no longer investigating extremism in mosques and had secretly turned their attention from the extremists featured in the film to the broadcasters. The letter to Andy Duncan from Patani confirmed this. Some months into their investigation, they had changed tack.

Patani’s letter went on to say the CPS did not think there was enough evidence to bring charges against any person featured in the programme, and continued: “In addition, West Midlands Police and the CPS then considered potential offences that may have been committed by those involved in the production and broadcast of the programme, specifically offences in relation to stirring up racial hatred.” The CPS had reviewed the “available” evidence and had concluded that a “realistic prospect of a conviction was unlikely”. So without any consultation, Channel 4, Dispatches and the journalists and filmmakers from a small independent television company had become suspects, it seemed, for producing a piece of difficult and challenging journalism. A letter to Ofcom, sent the previous day on behalf of the WMP chief constable, outlined the complaint: the programme had been “subject to such an intensity of editing that those featured in the broadcast programme had been misrepresented”. Patani wrote in that letter: “It has become clear from comparing the original material to that which was broadcast that sections of speech have been edited in such a manner to change its nature and context... The Chief Constable’s concerns are that the broadcasting of this material in a form so altered from that originally delivered by the speaker is sufficient to undermine community cohesion and creates an unfair, unjust and inaccurate perception of both the speaker and sections of the Muslim community...” So the WMP and the CPS thought their investigation had thrown up something serious and, of course, eminently newsworthy: fakery. ‘Completely distorted’

The BBC were out of the traps quickly with the story because the West Midlands Police had issued a press release at around the same time Channel 4 was receiving the letter detailing the referral to Ofcom. In the release, CPS lawyer Bethan David was named as the person who had reviewed the 56 hours of footage obtained under the production order. She was quoted as saying: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying. The CPS has demonstrated that it will not hesitate to prosecute those responsible for criminal incitement. But in this case we have been dealing with a heavily edited programme, apparently taking out of context aspects of speeches which in their totality could never have provided a realistic prospect of any convictions.”

Patani’s and David’s allegations were very general, and no credible supporting evidence was produced. It was hard not to suspect that having spent considerable sums of public money and police time on a criminal investigation they were told from the outset was likely to return nothing, the police had looked for a way to save face. Referring the programme to the regulator in the hope of taking credit if Ofcom found against the makers and Channel 4 must have seemed a good bet. The unusual nature of the WMP claims guaranteed media attention. TV fakery was a big issue and newspapers were on full alert for stories of alleged malpractice. TV had obliged with a seemingly endless supply of cock-ups, cover-ups and phone-in scandals. My own channel had plenty of recent form. Racism on Celebrity Big Brother had hogged the headlines in January; the journalism in the iconoclastic The Great Global Warming Scandal had been called into question; and Bear Grylls’s apparent penchant for luxury hotels rather than the great outdoors and Gordon Ramsey’s shortcomings as a spear fisherman had made headlines. “Undercover Mosque” was being fitted for the same jacket.

Having released their press statement, the police and CPS went to ground. Where were ACC Patani and Bethan David? Certainly not available for interview. Where was the supporting documentation to back up their claims? That should have sent a signal to some of the pack of journalists assigned to the story and who were forming outside the building. This story was not all it appeared.

A meeting of senior Channel 4 executives was convened. I was asked straight out: “Have we got this right?” I looked across at Jan Tomalin, who had overseen “Undercover Mosque” to air with me eight months previously, and simultaneously we offered what I am sure must have sounded like a rather strangled “Yes”. “Undercover Mosque” had been a difficult film to make and been the subject of many intense editorial discussions and finely-judged legal calls. Although it was 20 Dispatches ago, both Jan and I had lived its production history and so knew it to be totally solid. The meeting broke up with agreement that the Channel would go on the front foot to defend our journalism. A series of simple messages for journalists was agreed: the film revealed appalling and abhorrent attitudes which were filmed, and spoke for themselves; the film was edited fairly to reflect the sentiments expressed by the preachers; none of those speakers highlighted by the West Midlands Police had actually complained to the regulator at the time of broadcast about being misrepresented.

Within an hour of reading Patani’s letter I walked out of the building to begin a round of radio, TV and press interviews defending the programme and its makers, ending up with a punch-drunk appearance on the James Whale radio show some 12 hours later. Throughout the day it shocked me that so many journalists had allowed the story to be written for them. The West Midlands Police and CPS’s allegations were taken at face value. While some hacks I spoke to privately expressed their concerns at the vagueness of the press release and the lack of evidence, their packages and clips were reductive and simplistic. As late as that night’s BBC Ten O’Clock News, media correspondent Nick Higham was using the word “fakery”, despite a day of denials. It was not lost on me that I was being accused of broadcasting a story that lacked journalistic rigour by journalists who were guilty of doing the same over “Undercover Mosque”.

The other effect of the WMP press release was to embolden the subjects of the programme now to emerge – eight months after broadcast – to make a series of damaging and untrue claims about their treatment at the hands of Dispatches. One Birmingham-based preacher, Abu Usamah, who had not complained when featured in the original broadcast, popped up live on Channel 4 News. Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy read back Usamah’s comments from the programme. He agreed they were his words and that he stood by the sentiments. It was just that Dispatches had taken him “out of context”. Usamah told the local Birmingham papers he had been vindicated thanks to the police and that he was contemplating legal action against Channel 4.

Reputations were tarnished

The corrected transcript was sent to Ofcom along with the West Midlands Police DVD compilation. If the inability of the police to get some basic translations right wasn’t damaging enough to their case, their total misunderstanding of the way television programmes are put together beggared belief. The other main plank of their complaint was that comments had been “edited together to change their meaning”. The key point the WMP and the CPS had failed to understand about editing is the huge trouble taken to ensure that no individual has his or her words taken out of context or have their known views and position distorted so as to cause unfairness or mislead the audience. The police officers who investigated “Undercover Mosque” appeared to think that an internal edit, which may not be noticeable to the viewer, is improper and misleading. Game over. Not quite. WMP came back with a second document entitled “Possible distortions” – a clear step back from the claims made in the first document. The original allegations were now qualified and hedged with caveats to such an extent as to render them almost meaningless: it now only “appeared” that the editing “potentially distorted... meaning”. For four months Jan Tomalin had tirelessly marshalled Channel 4’s defence. Almost single-handedly, she had brilliantly dealt with the multiple attacks on the programme. She was now able to compile and deliver to Ofcom the most devastating attack on the WMP complaint. All we could do now was wait.

The tip-off came late one November evening. Ofcom had reached its decision and a public statement was imminent. As well as adjudicating the complaint from the West Midlands Police, the regulator was at the same time going to deal with 364 individual viewer-complaints about the programme. It was also going to publish rulings on two other substantial complaints, one from the Islamic Cultural Centre and London Central Mosque and another from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I was pondering my own fate in the event should things go badly when the adjudications were released. On the 364 viewer-complaints received after broadcast, Ofcom found Channel 4 not to be in breach of the code and said there appeared to be evidence that the complaints were part of a campaign. The Saudi Government and Regent’s Park mosque fared no better. Both their complaints were dismissed. I was then handed the 11-page adjudication on “Undercover Mosque” and the WMP. I tried to start reading it in an orderly manner but scrambled to the result. There I found three little words: “Not in breach”. Nine months after “Undercover Mosque” was broadcast, four months since the programme was the subject of a police ambush, Ofcom had thrown out the case put by the country’s second largest police force. It was an emotional moment.

There was to be one last – and bitter – surprise. “Undercover Mosque” had been given a ringing endorsement from Ofcom, Channel 4 and the producers at Hardcash no longer stood accused of being fakers and twisters, but we were no longer news. I sat at my workstation and waited for the phone to ring. The Channel 4 press office issued a suitably upbeat statement. The BBC, who’d sent an expensive satellite truck over to London SW1 to demand I answer WMP’s allegations last August, appeared to have lost their A-Z. My boss emailed a senior BBC news executive to say I was in the office, wearing a suit and waiting to be interviewed. He replied, offering his congratulations but saying that “Undercover Mosque” was not a news priority. I mused out loud that only a finding against the programme would have demanded their precious truck’s return to our building. Exoneration may not be big news and the BBC may well have had good reason to target resources at other stories. But in August they set the agenda by “going big” with the story. Others noticed and took their lead. The same was happening again, only in reverse.

Victory for free speech

Before I left the office that night I logged on to the West Midlands Police website. I couldn’t find mention of the Ofcom result, but I did see their original August press release that kicked the whole thing off, sitting there with all the discredited and baseless allegations intact. As I write, it’s still there. And we are still waiting for a very public apology that might repair the enormous damage done to the Channel, the producers and the journalistic team’s reputation.