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!
Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power resulted in an economic revolution in the United Kingdom...and also changed the face of the British news media. So successful was she in defeating the trade union movements and in privatising the nationalised industries that a band of reporters who had once ruled the roost ended up writing themselves out of the script.
The Lost Tribe: Whatever Happened to Fleet Street’s Industrial Correspondents? is the title of the book I published in 2011 charting the demise of the journalists who had hogged the headlines for decades but who then disappeared almost without trace from the reportage of daily news.
Their downfall was not simply the result of the dramatic decline in the number of all-out strikes but also the corresponding and spectacular growth of the City of London and the emerging dominance of financial news.
Margaret Thatcher’s step-by-step assault on trade union power and the break-up of loss-making nationalised industries had terrible consequences for Britain’s industrial heartlands: empty factories, mass redundancies and an unemployment rate that topped three million left terrible scars, not least in the mining communities ravaged by pit closures.
Union membership topped twelve million in the final year of the Wilson-Callaghan government but it was the prolonged strike action of the so-called “winter of discontent” in 1978-79 which paved the way for Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory.
A failure to avoid an ill-judged photo-opportunity – or an inability to exploit unexpected mishaps – is often a pointer to the chances of eventual success in British politics.
David Miliband’s inept appearance at the 2008 Labour Party conference – walking along holding up a banana in his hand – was instantly captured by photographers and was an image which came back to haunt him.
Indeed the former Labour Foreign Secretary – now to be the new chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, a leading American humanitarian charity – never seemed entirely at home in the cut-and-thrust of the cruel interface between British politics and an unforgiving news media.
Today’s politicians, as demonstrated so colourfully by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, have to always have an eye on how their every move in public is likely to interpreted – or misinterpreted – by the tabloid press.
David Miliband’s goofy photo-opportunity was a political car crash. It provided the most unforgettable, and much reproduced, image of the 2008 party conference season and came to symbolise his lack of a killer instinct.
When the chips had been down earlier that summer, when Gordon Brown was floundering as Labour Prime Minister, Miliband fluffed his chance to launch a bid for the Labour leadership; he showed he was no Michael Heseltine, more of a Michael Portillo
A Budget leak by the London Evening Standard – listing on Twitter the key changes to be made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne – has lifted the lid on the lengths to which successive governments have gone in manipulating the presentation of financial announcements.
By mistakenly tweeting its own front page splash on the Budget twenty minutes before the Chancellor had even started his speech, the Evening Standard inadvertently confirmed the extent of the collusion between the Treasury and selected political correspondents.
Why, might one ask, would a Chancellor want his officials to give exclusive details of his Budget in advance to an evening newspaper in London?
The answer is simple: the Evening Standard presents the City of London’s financial markets – and the rest of the news media – with the first considered impression of the announcements in the Chancellor’s red Budget box.
No spin doctor would dare to under estimate the potential impact of the Evening Standard’s front page; after all this is the first serious assessment of the Chancellor’s announcements.
By mid afternoon on Budget days, within an hour or so of the speech, copies of the Evening Standard are landing on the London news desks of national newspapers and radio and televisions newsrooms. An image of the front page might well be reproduced in the early evening news bulletins – and if all the Treasury briefings have gone to plan – the thumbs up from the Evening Standard will, so the government hopes, have a positive influence on other journalists.
Chris Huhne’s downfall had a thread running through it which connected him to the disgrace of a long-line of post-war politicians. In almost every case it was the work of journalists which was responsible for initially exposing their misdemeanours or sexual infidelities yet those involved seemed to have believed mistakenly that they could somehow outwit the ability of Britain’s national newspapers to hold the powerful to account.
Whether it was John Profumo, John Stonehouse, David Mellor, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken or John Prescott, they had all learned how to use – and to even manipulate – the news media yet in the end they could not keep the journalists at bay.
Often because of their prominent positions in public life or their acquaintance with newspaper proprietors, editors and broadcasting executives, politicians believe they have established some kind of protection against the worst excesses of the tabloid press.
They tend to become overconfident; they sometimes make the mistake of threatening to go over the heads of reporters direct to the editor or worst of all, try to play one newspaper or news outlet off against another -- a sure fire way of encouraging Tony Blair’s “feral beasts” to take even greater risks.
Investigative journalism – across both the press and broadcasting – will almost certainly suffer as a result of the Leveson Inquiry and the introduction of a new regulatory regime. Most speakers at the launch of a new book – After Leveson? The future of British Journalism – feared the worst.
Perhaps the clearest warning of the obstacles that would be placed in the way of investigative journalism came from Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs at Channel Four Television, who gave a vivid description of the way “multi-billion pound organisations and evil regimes” used “tiers of incredibly expensive lawyers” to thwart Channel Four’s investigations.
She said that any new regulatory regime for the press would be scrutinised by lawyers to find new ways to frustrate and curb newspaper investigations.
Her concern was echoed by Mick Hume of the Free Speech Network and the investigative journalist Paul Lashmar. But Evan Harris, Associate Director of Hacked Off, the group campaigning for the introduction of the Leveson recommendations, disagreed and insisted that Leveson had not proposed any alterations to the existing regulatory code of the Press Complaints Commission.
The future prospects for investigative journalism dominated much of the debate at the Media Society event to launch After Leveson? (26.2.2013)
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