The BBC has had a difficult few months, with scandal after scandal hitting home at a time when it is financially strapped. This week, the Panorama team was facing criticism for involving university students in an investigation of rogue state North Korea.

The London School of Economics (LSE) attacked the corporation, even going so far as to request it to pull the programme. Panorama reporter John Sweeney, it had emerged, had posed as a professor at the institute to gain access to North Korea by piggybacking on an LSE student visit. Journalists are forbidden to enter the country. Sweeney spent eight days undercover there to make the show, and claimed that the students he travelled with were told he was a journalist. However, he admitted that the LSE was not informed.

LSE Students’ Union general secretary Ms Alex Peters-Day claimed that the BBC had used the students “as a human shield … For us, this is a matter of student welfare – students were lied to, they weren’t able to give their consent.”

In response, Sweeney told Radio 4: “What the LSE is saying we dispute. I can’t talk for those students – they are grown-up, they are brave and good people … All of those students could have dobbed me in. They didn’t. The majority of these students support this programme.”

The LSE has since said that the event not only endangered the students on the trip, but threatened all the future research undertaken in the university’s name.

The importance of investigating North Korea – which Sweeney himself described as a “Nazi state” – should not be underestimated. But doing so while potentially putting university students at risk has triggered yet another scandal that the BBC could do without.