BBC news chief admits problems of accuracy

The BBC's director of news acknowledged yesterday that there were difficulties in reporting the war accurately. His admission was made after a senior correspondent accused colleagues at the BBC of distorting the truth.

Richard Sambrook was responding to concern over 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.

"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."

Mr Sambrook spoke out after the media widely reported premature Allied claims last week that the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr had been captured. Reports of a popular uprising in Basra were also overstated.

Mr Sambrook told the BBC's Breakfast programme 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's defence correspondent, Paul Adams, who is based at US Central Command in Qatar, has accused his colleagues of exaggerating the losses suffered by the coalition forces. In a memo to the 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."

He went on to accuse other BBC staff of having an unrealistic view of the nature of war. "Who dreamed 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."

A spokeswoman could not confirm the contents of the memo butthe BBC said Adams was a "respected correspondent'' and that his comments would be "taken on board''.

The spokeswoman said that the implication by The Sun that the BBC's coverage of the Iraq conflict had been "biased'' against the war was unfair. "If we had diminished the impact of British casualties, we would have been thumped by them for doing that,'' she said.

In Tuesday's edition of The Sun, its opinionated columnist Richard Littlejohn claimed that the BBC's radio station Five Live did not give over enough air time to pro-war opinions.

Littlejohn said: "The BBC's idea of 'balance' these days reflects the world view of The Guradianistas who work there."

He added that the latest opinion polls by YouGov showed that 56 per cent of people were in favour of the war, with 37 per cent opposed. But the columnist complained that the few pro-war voices heard on the radio station were "greeted with ridicule and disbelief".