Trust rules report into treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder failed to meet standards of accuracy
Read full BBC Trust ruling on Panorama's What Next for Craig?
The BBC is to broadcast an on-air correction and apology after the BBC Trust ruled that a Panorama report into the treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) failed to meet the expected standards of accuracy and impartiality.
In its ruling today, the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee (ESC) ordered the corporation's management to broadcast the correction and apology at the beginning or end of Panorama in its Monday night BBC1 slot, 'due to the serious nature of the breaches' of editorial standards.
The ESC said the edition of Panorama in question, What Next for Craig?, broadcast on 12 November 2007, fell below the 'highest standards' expected of BBC1's flagship current affairs show.
'The ESC expects the highest standards from Panorama as BBC1's flagship current affairs programme, and this programme failed to reach those standards. Due to the serious nature of the breaches the ESC will apologise to the complainant on behalf of the BBC and require the broadcast of a correction,' the committee added.
The ESC also said the edition of Panorama should not be sold to other broadcasters or repeated by the BBC and gave management five working days to remove from the corporation's website any material from What Next for Craig? that was found to be in breach of editorial guidelines.
A complainant who had already dealt with BBC management's editorial complaints unit procedure appealed to the ESC, arguing that Panorama's report was 'seriously inaccurate and unbalanced in the way it dealt with the issue of how ADHD should be treated' and 'was likely to cause serious harm to children' with the condition.
The complainant, who first wrote to the BBC raising concerns about the programme the day after it was broadcast in November 2007, also raised issues about the way the corporation dealt with him. The ESC said decisions on this aspect of his complaint 'will be made separately'.
Panorama was not in breach of BBC editorial guidelines on harm and offence or children, but there were serious breaches on accuracy and impartiality, the ESC concluded.
On accuracy, the committee ruled that 'the programme failed to accurately report the findings of a three-year follow-up study in the USA to the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA)'.
The programme-makers should have included the views of other authors of this report and not just those of professor Pelham, according to the ESC.
Panorama also 'distorted some of the known facts in its presentation of the findings' of the study and failed to report them in context.
The BBC then failed to acknowledge 'a serious factual error' in the programme, although the ESC concluded that Panorama's production team 'did not deliberately produce a programme that they knew to be inaccurate'.
On impartiality, the ESC found 'that the programme failed to meet the requirements of impartiality in that the programme makers were not fair and open-minded when examining the evidence and weighing all the material facts, nor were they even-handed in their approach to the subject'.
Panorama's audience should also have been told there was a wider range of views on the treatment of ADHD that those expressed by Pelham, the committee added.
A BBC News spokeswoman said: 'BBC News will, of course, comply with the requirements of the BBC Trust. The trust did not conclude that the programme makers deliberately produced a programme they knew to be inaccurate. It has not questioned the integrity of the programme team but found that they had either misunderstood the underlying material that the team had in its possession, or had chosen just one interpretation of it and failed to place it in context.
'Two further complaints of material being used that might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of children and of not protecting the welfare of the children featured in the programme were not upheld.'
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