British broadcaster ITV News has been censured by watchdog Ofcom over a report about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The report, broadcast in March last year, had reported that the Prime Minister had said his belief in God played an important part in deciding to go to war, the Independent reported.
Based on an interview with Michael Parkinson, it said Blair prayed over the decision before embarking on military action. The complainants said Blair’s comments had been wrongly interpreted.
In the interview, veteran TV host Parkinson asked: “So you would pray to God whenever you make a decision like that?” Blair replied: “Well I... I don’t want to go into... this side of this but it’s ... Yeah I, you, you...but you of course, it’s... you, you struggle with your own conscience about it because people’s lives are affected.”
Complainants to Ofcom said he had done no such thing on the programme, aired last March, and claimed ITV’s interpretation could be inflammatory and provoke racial and religious tensions, a report in the Guardian said. The assertion was disputed because of the indeterminate nature of the exchange between Parkinson and Blair. During the key passage, they talked over one another and punctuated their conversation with various deviations, interventions and stock phrases.
ITV, the Independent said, maintained that the answer was sufficiently clear for them to conclude that faith in God had played a part in the decision to go to war
The broadcaster admitted some aspects of its reporting of the story had been “wrong” and that its chief political correspondent, Daisy Sampson, should have been “clearer” and made it obvious that the prime minister’s comments were open to interpretation. But it maintained that the broad thrust of the story was correct, the Guardian said.
Earlier in the interview, Blair said God would judge his decision, saying: “That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that, well, if I think you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people.” After Parkinson asked him to clarify, Blair said: “By other people, by, if you believe in God, it’s made by God as well.”
Ofcom, which received 10 complaints about the bulletins, said: “Taken together, the only statements that are clear are that Blair struggled with his own conscience about the decision to go to war and that he believes history and God will make the judgment on whether he was right.
“He clearly did not wish to be drawn on the question of whether he prayed before taking the decision. His full answer may be open to interpretation but... there can be no certainty that the words ‘yeah’ and ‘of course’ referred directly to the questions posed by Michael Parkinson. It may be that they were merely punctuation in Blair’s thought process, as he considered how to answer the question.”
Ofcom said ITV News reported as fact its interpretation of the interview, when the conversation was ambiguous and ruled that ITV was in breach of the requirement for reporting news with due accuracy.
