but elizabeth williams thought it was given too much time. bbc breakfast editor richard frediani told us, it wasn t just breakfast that covered the post office scandal extensively this week. that was true of most bbc outlets, and indeed the media in general. but why did it take a tv drama to bring the issue to such prominence? even one as powerful as this. tthey say money somehow gone missing from this branch, which it hasn t, and i have to pay it back, which i won t. so i say, prove it. prove that i m wrong and you re right. show me the figures . but they can t or won t do that. so now they want to close me down to shut me up because they don t want everyone knowing what i know. which is? that the fancy new computer system that they ve spent an arm and a leg on is faulty. chris williams emailed us to say, it has taken an itv drama and an anonymous viewer had the same concern. well, ifjournalism has been found wanting here, and we ll be exploring that question in a moment,
well, no, not really. and it s notjust subpostmasters, it s post office managers . and what s the story here ? well, they re saying they were put in prison and they weren t guilty of any crimes, but some of them did plead guilty . and it s just quite a difficult, knotty story to tell. and whilst there was growing public awareness of how serious this story was, i think through journalism, it took something huge. it took the resources of itv to commission a drama, which isn t cheap, across prime time television at 9pm every evening on the week when no one is going out. do you think it reflects a failure in british journalism that it took the drama to draw people s attention to it fully? i think there s a very proud history of docu dramas, dramas based on fact, and dramas based on the work ofjournalists which which have resonated with the public. cathy come home by ken loach, of course, is a famous example. jimmy mcgovern s hillsborough was another one as well, which resonated with the
that hasn t been seen byjournalism because there was literally nothing to film when i got hold of this story first, there was literally people who had experiences that you could interview them about and buildings that you could film. there was nothing that actually spoke in pictures of what had happened to them. so that s why the drama landed, because it s suddenly brought this to life in a way that there wasn t any documentary footage about what was going on in these people s lives before. one of the interesting things is the anger about the behaviour of people in senior positions at the post office and around them. and it s interesting, there were very few interviews over the years with anyone from the post office about the horizon it concerns as the story did begin to gather more and more coverage. is that a failure of news media, that there wasn t more work done? that is an absolute failure ofjournalism. and i ve said that on the record. we consistently tried to get an interview wi