A journalist of fifty years standing offers a personal and independent assessment of the often troubled relationship between public figures and the British news media.
My aim is to try to monitor events and issues affecting the ethics of journalism and the latest developments in the rapidly-changing world of press, television, radio and the Internet.
Expect too an insight into the black arts of media manipulation. So spin-doctors, Beware!
Perhaps it was always going to be only a matter of time before an online insurgency combined with direct action forced the government to retreat on a key employment issue and in the process comprehensively upstage the trade union movement.
In the face of a hostile campaign which succeeded in alarming and embarrassing major employers of young people such as Tesco, Burger King, Waterstones, TK Maxx and the Arcadia group, the Minister of State for Employment Chris Grayling had no alternative but to execute a swift U-turn.
Campaigning to stop the removal of social security benefits from 16-24 year olds who dropped out of a voluntary work experience scheme was a cause which union leaders should have championed from the start but their pitiful record in recruiting youngsters employed in fast food, retailing and other service sector jobs had left the field wide open to the political activists behind groups like the Right to Work campaign.
By trying so belatedly to climb aboard the civil disobedience band wagon, Len McCluskey, general secretary of Britain’s largest union Unite, only underlined the dramatic upstaging of the union movement by a host of direct action groups which use the internet, social networking, messaging and the like to put the frighteners on major employers.
Their online campaigning – for example by accusing Tesco of taking advantage of “slave labour” – was an illustration of the way the front line for industrial action has been transformed by the ability of activists to mobilise support, whether for a Twitter campaign against Tesco or a protest sit-in at McDonald’s in Whitehall.
Government proposals for a statutory register of lobbyists met criticism from all sides when the Hansard Society provided a platform for the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, Mark Harper. Lobbyists, charities and campaigners rounded on the defects and inadequacies of what they predicted would become nothing more than a meaningless list of names.
Harper did his best to defend what he said would be an “ongoing register” of “who is lobbying for whom” which would provide a public record of lobbyists, consultancies, law firms, charities etc and would catch “anyone who does anything which could be described as lobbying.”
There would be sanctions (perhaps civil or criminal) for lobbyists who did not comply by signing up to the register but the government was determined to keep its proposals – currently open for consultation until 30 April – proportionate to the problem; there was no intention of creating a statutory code of conduct for lobbyists or establishing a regulator to oversee the industry.
Harper made a swift exit before the Hansard Society opened up the issue for debate (29.2.2012) but if he had remained he would have heard his proposals being roundly derided.
Any reporter who has ever had to work in competition with the Sun has at last had confirmed what we have always suspected: the Sun’s unerring success in delivering exclusive stories was not always down journalistic initiative but all too often was the result of being able to offer folding money to reward contacts.
As Sue Akers gave her evidence to the Leveson Inquiry (27.2.2012) replaying in my mind were the many occasions when a disclosure by the Sun made my own story redundant; all my efforts were suddenly overtaken by sensational inside information.
In her evidence, the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of phone-hacking inquiries, described how the Metropolitan Police had discovered that the Sun had established a network of corrupt officials in public life; how, for example, over several years one contact was paid in excess of £80,000; and how one of nine arrested Sun journalists received £150,000 in cash to reimburse sources, a number of whom were public officials.
Many is the time I have had to follow up a Sun exclusive and marvelled at the paper’s ability to prize out information from what appeared to me and other rival journalists to be an impenetrable wall of silence.
No wonder Rupert Murdoch was so anxious to beat the gun with the launch of the Sun on Sunday (26.2.2012) and therefore pre-empt the first day of Police evidence to the Leveson Inquiry; nor was it a surprise that the paper should have set out in such detail its commitment in future to its journalists maintaining the highest “ethical behaviour.”
Rather overlooked in Trevor Kavanagh’s anguished protest over the way the Metropolitan Police treated Sun journalists like members of “an organised crime gang” was his frank, but perhaps inadvertent, admission that paying cash for stories had become a way of life for the editorial executives of the Murdoch press.
Kavanagh asserted – without a shred of evidence – that it was “a standard procedure as long as newspapers have existed, here and abroad” – that sometimes “money changes hands” when journalists acquire information.
As a family member of what are now four generations of journalists I would like to rebut the claims of Kavanagh and the rest of the “greatest legends in Fleet Street” on whose behalf he purports to speak: there are thousands of British journalists who have never ever paid for stories in the way Sun’s former political commentator suggests.
Obviously Kavanagh & Co just do not understand that the way Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers monetised the gathering of stories and information has demeaned the great traditions of British journalism. And, it may come as a surprise to the “greatest legends of Fleet Street” that likewise newspapers in many other democratic countries do not engage in the trade of buying up stories for cash.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the sleazy trade which the News of the World encouraged under its former editor Andy Coulson were the advertisements which appeared every Sunday urging readers to earn “a wedge of wonga” by selling camera phone photos of celebrities misbehaving.
Perhaps Kavanagh and his Fleet Street “legends” would like to compare and contrast the News of the World’s 2004 guidance on what to snap with the codes of conduct of the National Union of Journalists and the Press Complaints Commission.
The actor Hugh Grant – dubbed the “Poster Boy” of the Hacked Off campaign by Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail – is confident the most important work of the Leveson Inquiry has yet to come. He considers that an investigation into possible corruption between press and police and the extent of collusion between media proprietors and politicians is of far greater significance than the hacking of celebrities’ phones.
Unknown to the producers of Radio 4’s Today programme when Grant’s pre-recorded interview was being broadcast (11.2.2012), the Metropolitan Police had already begun arresting another five of the Sun’s leading journalists as part of Operation Elveden, its investigation into alleged illegal payments to police officers and other public officials.
The sheer number of arrests from the staff of both the Sun and former News of the World – along with the earlier arrests of other former News International executives such as Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson – has ramped up yet again the possibility of extensive collateral damage to the Prime Minister David Cameron and other Conservative ministers in the coalition government.
Fearing no doubt that he might be asked on the Andrew Marr Show (12.2.2012) about the awkward questions which politicians might face when they have to appear before the Leveson Inquiry, Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, looked visibly relaxed when Marr confined himself to questions about the regulation of the press.
Hunt turned in a confident performance insisting that the consensus which was emerging over the need for a much tougher industry-led system of press regulation vindicated the Prime Minister’s decision to establish the Leveson Inquiry in the wake of the revelations about the hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Later Hunt told the World This Weekend (12.2.2012) that he wanted to see a “modern regulatory system” which allowed newspapers to be successful and profitable in the internet age. But the Secretary of State was not asked – and did not proffer – any kind of assurance that the UK’s system for controlling media ownership would be free from political interference by the government of the day.
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