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!
After fifty years as a reporter and then broadcasters there is no doubt in my mind as to who were my two most intransigent interviewees: the Reverend Ian Paisley and Arthur Scargill.
In the 1970s, as a correspondent reporting the Northern Ireland Troubles, I frequently interviewed Paisley, especially during the two week strike organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council which brought down the 1974 power-sharing assembly and executive. Paisley had championed the mobilisation of Protestant power station workers to bring Northern Ireland to a halt.
A decade later I faced an equally defiant– but eventually unsuccessful – Arthur Scargill as he led the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984-5 strike against pit closures.
I could not help thinking of Paisley, lying in the Ulster Hospital being treated for a heart problem, as I listened to Scargill speaking in Birmingham at a rallyto commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Saltley Gates on February 10, 1972.
The Battle of Saltley Gates, outside the Saltley coke depot, was a demonstration of the power of the flying picket, the industrial muscle which Scargill mobilised to a devastating effect and which proved so strong that the then Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath was forced to concede a 27 per cent pay increase for the mineworkers.
One of my first assignments with the BBC was reporting the rota power cuts of 1972 and their alarming impact was a foretaste of the disruption that Northern Ireland faced in 1974.
Four decades later Scargill told the rally to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Saltley demonstration that although he was older he was just as determined, ready and willing to lead a “British spring” to bring down capitalism and create a fairer system of socialism.
There was little comfort for Lord Justice Leveson and the prospects for his inquiry into media ethics at the launch of a new book The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial. A panel of journalists and former editors thought the judge was probably misguided in believing that he could provide lasting solutions.
Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, recalled that there had already been three major inquiries into press standards since the World War II and the pattern would probably continue.
“Lord Justice Leveson says he wants his inquiry to be the end of it, not just a footnote for academics. But perhaps we have to go through this exercise every decade or so...because there is an argument that the press should be drinking in the last chance saloon all the time; that’s where journalists should always be.”
Satchwell’s hope that the press would not be cowed by the “beefed-up form of regulation” which the judge had in mind was shared by the other panellists on the Media Society’s platform at the Coventry University London Campus (7.2.2012)
But there was considerable concern about the effectiveness of the inquiry. Paul Connew, an ex-deputy editor of the News of the World and former editor of the Sunday Mirror, said the proceedings had become a pantomime because the witnesses being called by the judge could not answer crucial questions because of pending inquiries by the Metropolitan Police into phone hacking.
The role of newspapers like the Sun in offering “implacable support” for Tony Blair’s backing of the American-led invasion of Iraq was cited at the Leveson Inquiry as an example of how the Murdoch press was required to reflect the political views of its proprietor.
Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, told Lord Justice Leveson (6.2.2012) that he valued his “total freedom” as an editor – unlike the editors of The Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World who had to follow the “strong views” which Rupert Murdoch communicated to them.
Dacre claimed that Blair, as Prime Minister, would have been unable to commit the use of British forces in the Iraq War “without the implacable support provided by the Murdoch newspapers...and that came from Murdoch himself.”
Evidence which backed up Dacre’s claim – although not referred to at the inquiry – was obtained by the Glasgow Media Group in October 2008 as a result of requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Extracts from telephone conversations between Murdoch and Blair revealed the depth of Murdoch’s commitment to support the British Prime Minister.
Blanket coverage of the withdrawal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood was another graphic illustration of the dominant position of financial news in today’s 24/7 media environment. But for once there was – at least to begin with – a level playing field.
By using a government website to make the declaration that the Honours Forfeiture Committee had made its decision, Downing Street circumvented the anonymous briefings which drive so much of the financial news agenda.
A statement was posted on the Cabinet Office’s website at 5pm (31.1.2012) stating that it would be announced in the London Gazette that the knighthood conferred on Goodwin had been “cancelled and annulled”. The scale and severity of his actions as chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland made it an exceptional case; he had brought the “honours system into disrepute.”
Headlines on the front pages of next day’s national newspapers denounced Goodwin in the lurid terms which have dogged him for the last four years – a level of abuse which has placed “Fred the Shred” on a par with the former mineworkers’ president Arthur Scargill who was turned into a similar hate figure thirty years ago.
From the very moment Goodwin was forced to resign in 2008 after RBS had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, he was subjected to a sustained campaign of press abuse, the kind of blanket character assassination not seen since the 1980s when the trade union leaders who stood out against Margaret Thatcher had their reputations trashed by the tabloids.
Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, gave an assurance to the Leveson Inquiry (1.2.2012) that it would speed up its investigation into whether it has sufficient power to provide protection against media companies exercising too much political influence.
Ed Richards, Ofcom’s chief executive, told Lord Justice Leveson that if given another chance to look again at News Corporation’s aborted bid for total control of BSkyB it would have placed more emphasis on the “risk to the democratic process.”
Ofcom’s evidence gets to the heart of one of the key challenges for the Inquiry: should there be fresh restrictions on the concentration of media power? Campaigners for greater media plurality say that News Corporation’s level of media ownership in Britain – 39 per cent of BSkyB together with three national newspapers (The Times, Sunday Times and Sun) – is too large and should be reduced.
In his evidence to the inquiry Richards acknowledged that the absence of the power to make recommendations on the impact of media concentration on the democratic process became an issue during the investigations it conducted into News Corporation’s bid to take full control of BSkyB.
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