John Sweeney has been working on an item about Scientology for the BBC show Panorama.

It sounds like he hasn't had an easy time of it:

... Start asking questions and you see a different face of Scientology.

While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

And in the course of interviewing one scientologist, he lost it:

Top Scientologist Tommy "Don't mention the word cult" Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder.

If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe.

I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss, the Director-General of the BBC.

I lost my voice, but not my mind.

Now, here's the Scientology YouTube clip of Sweeney losing it.

And here's the BBC's defence.

The AP story notes:

A church spokesman denied that Sweeney apologized, and said the organization was putting its own documentary about the dispute on the Internet. ...

(Church of Scientology spokesman Mike) Rinder said it was not the first time that the church had made its own recordings of reporters doing stories about it.

Sweeney refused an invitation to visit the church's headquarters in Florida, Rinder said.

"When we found that he was refusing to literally come inside the building, it was at that point that we went, 'OK we better document this,''' Rinder said.

Update

Here's a posting from the BBC's The Editors blog.

The BBC reports that the United States is taking a position on a climate change statement by the G8 that, in my reading, puts the U.S. at odds with the recent IPCC report on mitigating climate change.

From the BBC:

Hidden Camera Jihad is a pastiche of popular US TV shows

An Iraqi satellite TV channel has started to air Hidden Camera Jihad, a video compilation of attacks on US-led coalition forces in Iraq that has appeared on internet message boards since late 2006.

Al-Zawraa TV, which is known for airing videos of attacks by insurgent groups on US forces, recently started airing the programme as part of the channel's staple output of insurgent clips, patriotic songs urging jihad, or holy war, against "occupier forces", and documentary films often of a pro-Sunni, anti-Shia and anti-US slant.

The programme, purportedly produced by the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), is a pastiche of the style of hidden camera TV shows popular in the US, editing together insurgent-shot clips of attacks on coalition troops complete with a laughter track, sound effects and mocking English-language captions.

The Wall Street Journal is considered by analysts to be only marginally profitable. That makes it a millstone around the neck of Dow Jones & Company., and that's making it easier for a shark like like News Corp. to come circling around.