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!
The death at the age of 97 of the veteran BBC space and aviation correspondent Reginald Turnill is a timely reminder of a by-gone age in Fleet Street. Turnill, a fifteen year old school boy, joined the Press Association news agency in1930 as a reporter’s telephonist. After five years as a copytaker he was promoted to reporter – and seventy years later he was still just as busy writing and broadcasting.
I had the good fortune to come to know and respect Turnill at several points in my career: in the early 1960s, again in the 1980s and as recently as 2011 when he reflected on his days as an industrial correspondent with both the Press Association and the BBC and contributed to my book The Lost Tribe: Whatever Happened to Fleet Street’s Industrial Correspondents?
My first encounter with Turnill was in 1962 when, after seeing him at work as the BBC’s aviation correspondent, I decided that I too wanted to become a broadcaster. Two decades later he encouraged me in my own writing after reading articles I had written for The Listener. Turnill’s advice was invaluable: he told me to always keep my BBC scripts because they were a reliable source of information which could not be bettered by newspaper cuttings.
Turnill put his own advice to good use and his many articles and books on manned space flight and the development of aircraft such as Concorde are a testimony to the legendary accuracy of his reporting – an accuracy which had been instilled in him from his early years copy taking and performing the menial fact-checking tasks which were then demanded of reporters.
Like Turnill I was an early school leaver, starting out as a magazine editorial assistant at the age of 17; and just Turnill was forced by the BBC, against his will, to retire at the age of sixty, so too was I in 2002. In recent years I renewed my contact with Turnill at receptions organised by the Journalists' Charity, of which he was a long-standing member and of which I am a past chairman of the trustees.
I reproduce “Advice from Reg”, my contribution to a collection of tributes to some of the best-known names in journalism, which was published by The Journalist's Handbook in January 2002:
When faced by the cut and thrust of a noisy House of Commons chamber, cabinet ministers can find it difficult to execute a government U-turn without incurring political damage and a bruised reputation.
Michael Gove’s about turn over his plan to scrap the GCSE school exam system was billed in advance as a humiliating retreat. But the Secretary of State for Education managed to deliver a text book display of humility (7.2.2013) which took the sting out of what might otherwise have been a painful appearance before MPs.
Given the live transmission of parliamentary proceedings on radio, television and now the internet – and the inevitable trailing of most announcements in advance – political commentators and pundits have increasingly had to fall back on analysing the performance of a minister rather than the content of his or her statement.
Journalists are quick to rate an apology. Was it a trite “I’m sorry” with no indication of what precisely the minister was apologising for? Did a grudging, belligerent admission follow a previous attempt to “bury bad news?” Was the minister just passing the buck, blaming everyone else?
Corporate public relations executives for the likes of Starbucks, Amazon and Google are waiting anxiously to discover what fresh humiliation might be in store in the backlash which has followed the revelations about off-shore schemes used to limit their liability to UK corporation tax.
Ever since top directors suffered the indignity last November of being pilloried as tax avoiders at a hearing of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the tax affairs of leading US multi-nationals have become a hot topic for debate.
An indication of the government’s course of action is unlikely before the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne delivers his Budget next month (20.3.2013) but MPs have the ability to sustain their assault rather than rest of their laurels.
A chance encounter with Margaret Hodge, the fiery chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, did not suggest the corporate pr world has much to be concerned about. To my surprise she seemed to be indicating that the committee had adopted a wait-and-see position rather than keeping up the momentum by recalling the directors for another parliamentary grilling.
Among the seventy or so broken pledges which were to be slipped out “without any fanfare” on a Whitehall website was the coalition government’s unfulfilled pledge to reduce the number of politically-appointed special advisers.
The revelation that David Cameron’s closest advisers were in precisely the same mind-set as the spin doctors who worked for Tony Blair a decade earlier was a powerful reminder of a continuing obsession with media manipulation.
A Downing Street discussion paper giving advice on how to avoid the publication of “unhelpful stories” and “unfavourable copy” mirrored Jo Moore’s infamous edict after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre that “it’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”.
Clearly the presentation of the coalition’s mid-term review had been a cause of considerable anxiety within the Prime Minister’s office and the restricted advice notice says that while it was possible to explain why some promises had not been proceeded with, this did not apply to “some of the abandoned pledges e.g. numbers of special advisers.”
What is perhaps so ironic about this classic illustration of the spin doctors’ compulsion to want to “bury bad news” is that the adviser responsible for publicising the gaffe should, like David Cameron, have been one of the notorious “Patten’s Pups” from the Conservative Party’s ultimately victorious campaign in the 1992 general election.
While all the post-Leveson skirmishing has been about newspaper editors trying to stitch up a deal with the government on press regulation, there is other unfinished business from the Leveson Inquiry which will require attention in the Prime Minister’s New Year in tray.
Although woefully inadequate, the judge did make a series of recommendations designed to strengthen the Ministerial Code and to ensure greater transparency in future about meetings between politicians and media owners, editors and senior executives.
In the wake of the outrage over the phone hacking scandal in July 2011, David Cameron did ask ministers publish a quarterly declaration of all such meetings – ‘regardless of the nature of the meeting.’
But the Prime Minister and his colleagues made a mockery of the need for greater transparency because except for identifying who, when and where they met the lists gave no hint of the purpose or the outcome of their deliberations. Cameron used the catch-all term ‘general discussion’ alongside eight of his entries for meetings with Rupert or James Murdoch and other News International executives.
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