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!
Scrapbooks, letters and other personal papers belonging to the late Clement Jones, former editor of the Express and Star, are being donated by Nicholas Jones to Wolverhampton Archives. The collection reveals how seventy years ago the challenge of reporting events in war-torn Bilston by a conscientious objector helped launch the career of a celebrated Wolverhampton journalist. His reports of the famous war-time parliamentary by-election in Bilston in September 1944 attracted the attention of Lord Beaverbrook - but Jones turned down the offer of a job on the Daily Express
Bilston in the mid 1940s was unquestionably at the heart of the Black Country: smoke particles were falling at the rate of nearly 1,400 tons per year per square mile over the whole town.
This was just one of the telling war-time statistics unearthed by my father Clement Jones, then an idealistic young journalist, who became the Express and Star’s Bilston reporter in June 1943 and whose reports highlighted what must have been some of the worst living conditions in the West Midlands
The pall of smoke from steel works and factories was so bad – and prevailing winds deposited so much soot, dust and grime on nearby houses – that Bilston became the setting in May 1944 for what Jones reported was a “unique” investigation into atmospheric pollution and the most comprehensive survey of its kind conducted anywhere in the country.
Gauges and dishes were placed around the town. Deposits were collected every two days and by using six different instruments Bilston’s salvage officer Eric Sheldon was able to weigh them to an accuracy of one-tenth of a milligramme.
Jones described how any local housewife would have agreed immediately that the air of Bilston was dirty: if she went to the best room in the house she would be able to “draw her finger over the polished surfaces to show the grime and dust deposited from the air.”
Newspaper editors are being urged by the shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman to stop being so defensive and instead “lay their cards on the table” by revealing precisely what mechanism they would accept for handling complaints against the press and for providing the public with a right of redress.
Ms Harman is calling on the government to be equally forthright in taking steps at once to impose new restraints on media ownership to ensure that proprietors face a “fit and proper person” test before the regulator Ofcom considers any future take-over bids.
Her pleas for immediate action were echoed by speakers supporting the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Campaign at an all day conference – Taking on the Media Barons – which was held in London at the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress (17.3.2012).
Several groups, including the CPBF and the Co-ordinating Committee for Media Reform, urged the mobilisation of a concerted campaign to secure a 15 per cent cap on the future market share to be held by any media proprietor.
Earlier, in opening the conference, Ms Harman indicated that Labour preferred to await the outcome of both the Leveson Inquiry and an Ofcom review before taking a view on the future balance of media ownership but she made it clear the party leadership was determined to secure far lower limits and a sizeable reduction in Rupert Murdoch’s holdings in press and television.
Ms Harman told the conference she could not ignore the Labour Party’s own “political baggage” when it came to considering the relationship between ministers and News International – and as the day progressed speakers reminded the conference time and again of the often covert concessions agreed by Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to appease the Murdoch press.
Grave doubts about whether data protection authorities in Britain and across the European Union can ever deliver on a “right to be forgotten” were expressed at seminar organised by the Westminster eForum.
Both the Ministry of Justice and the UK Information Commissioner believe the newly-published European data protection framework review is in danger of raising “false expectations” on the part of the public about the possibility of individuals deleting personal information.
There was criticism at the seminar (8.3.2012) of what one speaker described as the “political gesturing” of the EU’s Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.
Lord McNally, Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, urged the EU to offer the twenty seven member states a workable solution. The right to erase data would not be possible if it related to health care, crime or a free press, nor could it apply to credit rating.
“Businesses should have rights too...we must not undermine responsible lending or financial agreements. We may set the standard so high we don’t get a model which can work in practice.”
Secretly-filmed images of injured and apparently tortured dissenters lying shackled to their beds in a Syrian military hospital are another graphic reminder of the way devices such as mobile phone cameras have revolutionised the reporting of protests and uprisings.
Hardly a day goes by when television news bulletins do not feature dramatic pictures – either from the Arab spring or perhaps a demonstration on the streets of London – and their influence on public opinion cannot be under-estimated.
If thirty years ago there had been the kind of footage which activists can upload now on to the internet via video sharing sites like YouTube, there might well have been a different outcome to historic British struggles like the 1984-5 pit strike.
Photographers and camera crews were regularly corralled and held back behind Police lines during the violent industrial confrontations of the 1980s. As a result there were very few of the graphic images which feature so prominently in today’s newspapers and television news bulletins and which show almost as-live footage of the conditions facing protestors as they are being driven back by police or security forces..
One striking image from the notorious 1984 Battle of Orgreave at the height of the pit strike – showing a mounted policeman raising his baton against a woman protestor – came to symbolise, especially for the left, the doomed struggle by mining communities to protect their jobs.
A photograph captured by chance illustrated the one-sided nature of the conflict and the mineworkers’ vulnerability in the face of the massive superiority of the massed ranks of mounted police officers. But one fleeting image, reproduced by a few newspapers, had nothing like the impact of the sustained output of today’s citizen journalists.
Just think what the response might have been if strikers who took on Margaret Thatcher’s government had been able to upload their own footage of a picket’s eye view of being charged by mounted police or the often unrecorded violence and brutality which they say occurred in the mining villages.
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.
Page 37 of 57