Stand up for Channel 4 and press freedom

Channel 4 is not everyone’s favourite TV station, but the way it is being treated by the West Midlands Police and the CPS is disgraceful and represents an existential threat to freedom of expression in this country. Just to recap, last week West Midlands Police and the CPS issued an extraordinary joint statement criticising the editing of Channel 4’s Undercover Mosque documentary and stating that they had investigated Channel 4 for stirring up racial hatred grounds but concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. The CPS charged that the programme had “completely distorted what the speakers were saying” while West Midlands Police went even further, referring the programme to Ofcom.

What is amazing about this is that no one disputes that every word in the film was said and said by the person shown on the screen: there was no TV fakery here. Also those people featured in the programme were offered a right of reply, a right they didn’t take up. 

The actions of West Midlands Police and the CPS are revealing of a mindset that believes the problem is not extremism but people revealing it; the extent to which Channel 4 was not trying to stir up racial hatred—or even be sensationalist—is demonstrated by the fact that it had genuinely moderate Muslims appear on the programme to explain why the views being shown were not representative of Islam.

So what on earth are West Midlands Police and the CPS doing acting as television critics? And on what grounds are they claiming that remarks such as “Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a Phd, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient. She may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. It takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man” were “completely distorted”?

It is hard not to think—as Kevin Sutcliffe, Deputy Head of News and Current Affairs for Channel 4, argued at a Policy Exchange meeting on this topic today—that the police are trying to silence challenging journalism. Certainly, the effect of their intervention will be to have a chilling effect on documentary makers.

Paul Goodman, the new Tory spokesman in the Commons on community cohesion, is doing sterling work on this issue and has written to those involved and various government ministers demanding an explanation. The pressure must be kept on the West Midlands Police and the CPS, who have up to now refused to justify their actions in public. If they are allowed to get away with behaving in this manner, we’ll be on a slippery slope to a world in which the police get to decide what news and information the public is allowed to have. 

ps You can watch the original programme here.