The BBC has defended itself against accusations that it "grossly misrepresented" Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation during a Panorama investigation into alleged computer hacking.
In increasingly heated exchanges, the BBC said it had revealed the "biggest Murdoch hacking scandal of all" during the programme, which claimed a News Corp subsidiary employed computer hackers to undermine the business of Sky's chief TV rival in Britain, ONdigital.
News Corp's chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said the BBC had used "manipulated and mischaracterised emails" in order to support its claim. Programme insiders said that News Corp critics of the show appeared to have misunderstood what appeared on the screens of 1.8 million viewers.
The BBC said: "We stand by the Panorama investigation," which went out after being approved by the director of news, Helen Boaden. The director general, Mark Thompson, was briefed on the contents of the programme, but is not thought to have seen it before transmission in case he would need to rule on a complaint made against it.
Carey's overnight attack on the corporation was supported by a hostile three-page letter to Panorama from the chairman of the company at the heart of the controversy and three pugilistic tweets from Rupert Murdoch, who accused "every competitor and enemy" – although none were named – of "piling on with lies and libels".
The News Corp chief executive may also have been taking direct aim against the chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, when he said that his company's enemies had many different agendas, of which the worst were "old toffs and rightwingers who still want last century's status quo with their monopolies".
But even if Murdoch was not criticising the former Hong Kong governor, with whom there was once a falling out over a planned memoir, there was every sign that News Corp was weighing up a head on confrontation with the BBC. News Corp sources privately complained on Thursday that the BBC News was slow in covering its complaint. Nothing was published on its website until the mid afternoon.
A letter from Abe Peled, the executive chairman of NDS, the one time News Corp subsidiary accused of employing computer hacking to undermine the business of ON or ITV Digital, said that Panorama had "manipulated" two emails "without checking their authenticity with us". This demonstrated "a flagrant disregard to the BBC's broadcasting code, misleading viewers and inciting widespread misreporting".
Peled's letter focused on an email highlighted in the programme sent by Ray Adams, NDS's former head of security, to colleagues, which said: "I'm sure you must have had the July key" and then attached encryption keys that could be used to crack the ITV Digital system "in case you don't". The NDS chairman, attaching a screen shot from the programme, said Panorama had omitted a critical ">" designation "showing that NDS was merely internally forwarding material that had been sent to it" and was not "promoting or facilitating piracy".
Panorama, though, disputed that assertion, saying it had made no such claim. The email described was used for a different purpose in the programme, to contradict a claim by Adams that he had never seen ONdigital codes. Adams, interviewed covertly, had said: "I never ever had the ONdigital codes" – but in the next scene Panorama used the email to show that Adams "did have the codes," in the words of the programme voiceover.
Peled also complained that a second email sent to Adams was shown on air by Panorama as "evidence of NDS's encouragement of piracy associated with the thoic.com website". Peled said the email was "sent from an undercover agent" to NDS, and was therefore "further proof" that NDS was collecting information in the fight against pay-TV piracy.
However, Panorama sources said the programme did not draw the inference Peled described in his letter. The programme did not represent the email as coming from inside the company; the voiceover simply said that a hacker from the thoic website was sending an email to Ray Adams to keep the NDS executive "up to date". The second email, displayed immediately after the first, was intended in the context of the programme to dispute Adams's assertion that he had never seen ONdigital codes.
The NDS complaint letter did not refer to or criticise Panorama's star interviewee, Lee Gibling, a former hacker who ran the thoic.com website, and who alleged that NDS "delivered the actual software" to his pirate website that could be used to hack the ONdigital code "with prior instructions that it should go to the widest community". Gibling later said thoic's goal was to "keep with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke".
Peled said that he "looked forward" to the BBC's "swift response and resolution" of his complaint. The BBC said: "Nothing in the correspondence undermines the evidence presented in the programme."