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!
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.
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.
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