Jennings: time for a snifter
Critics of the timing of the BBC’s Panorama expose have asked if the programme couldn’t have been broadcast earlier?
There was a brief, self-induced delay before the report was ready for air, Andrew Jennings, the reporter, has admitted. When he saw Fifa’s dirty secrets for the first time, instead of wading through the documents, he celebrated by getting drunk.
Jennings told the Radio 4 Media Show programme that he had been on Fifa’s tail for nearly ten years since uncovering the “stench of corruption” arising from bribes channelled through the International Sports and Leisure company.
But it was only two months ago that a whistleblower summoned Jennings and produced a sheaf of papers from a briefcase, asking him the immortal question: “Is this what you’ve been waiting for?”.
Jennings and his producer couldn’t believe their eyes: “Instead of sitting down to go through it we got drunk. We went through the papers the next day.”
Should the BBC have held the programme until after the vote? Jennings said: “You can’t do that. One of the very senior BBC bosses descended from the stratosphere and said ‘I’m not going to sit on a story’. You can’t look the licence-fee payer in the eye and say ‘I can’t tell you what I know’.”
Did Panorama lose the bid, as some Fifa committee members have claimed? “We could never have lost anything because England were never going to get anything.”
Jennings, a veteran scourge of Fifa, said he was “really disappointed” with the media response to his scoop. It was known in August that Panorama was planning a Fifa programme.
He said: “When I worked for newspapers, someone like Kelvin Mackenzie, he would have stood in front of his newsroom and said, ‘What are those pointy-heads at Panorama doing? Go get the story. And if you can’t get it, don’t come back.’ That was right.”
Jennings believes that newspaper sports journalists shy away from the hard yards required to nail an organisation like Fifa through investigative reporting. He criticised “this laziness of waiting for Panorama” before last week’s report.
He called UK sports news journalists “the worst in the world”, accusing them of looking after their sources and accepting PR briefings instead of trying to beat him to his story.
But Ashling O’Connor, The Times’ Sports News Correspondent, told the Media Show that she had published 339 articles since August, the last occasion that Jennings had updated his blog.
British journalists had asked awkward questions throughout the bid process but staff writers didn’t have the luxury of spending ten years on one story.
Mihir Bose, the former BBC Sports Editor, defended the BBC’s decision to screen Panorama on the eve of the vote but said the edition wasn’t particularly good and hadn’t revealed very much that was new.
Will Panorama viewers have to wait for England’s 2030 World Cup bid for Jennings’ next appearance on screen?
