By Ian Burrell
London - The head of news at the BBC on Wednesday admitted difficulties in accurately reporting the war, as one of his senior correspondents accused corporation colleagues of distorting the truth.
Richard Sambrook, the BBC's director of news, went before the cameras after widespread inaccurate reports of events in the war zone by the print and electronic media.
"Nobody, including the media, has the full picture of what's going on," he said.
| 'You're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't' |
"Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information. We're all trying to work out this jigsaw and what the overall picture is."
Sambrook spoke out after the British media widely reported premature coalition claims last week that the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr had been captured. Reports of a major public uprising in Basra last Tuesday were also overstated.
Sambrook told BBC Breakfast that the problems of verifying facts were particularly acute with rolling television news.
"The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't," he said.
The BBC defence correspondent Paul Adams, who is based at United States central command in Qatar, has accused his colleagues of exaggerating the losses suffered by the coalition forces.
| 'We think we get the balance right most of the time but we know we don't always' |
In a memo to BBC executives Roger Mosey and Stephen Mitchell, Adams said: "I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties'. This is simply not true."
The correspondent went on to accuse other BBC staff of having an unrealistic view of the nature of war.
"Who dreamt up the line that the coalition are achieving 'small victories at a very high price?' The truth is exactly the opposite," he said. "The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected."
On Thursday a BBC spokesperson described the Gulf conflict as "an immensely complicated and difficult story".
"We think we get (the balance) right most of the time but we know we don't always," she said.
The spokesperson said the memo was an "internal" document and she could not confirm its contents.
"This is the kind of debate about editorial tone that's going on in newsrooms all over the world," she said.
Thank you. I hate excerpted posts unless they absolutely necessary. This is a keeper. It's the press admitting something they almost never admit. I do not want to lose it.