The Contempt of Court Act of 1981 prohibits all but the most straightforward reporting in a crime case from the moment “proceedings are active”, in other words once someone is arrested. The idea is to ensure that coverage does not interfere with the course of justice, for instance by prejudicing the eventual jury. But for years, when a big, competitive story came along, many editors and reporters in national media simply ignored the Act and continued to publish often grotesque allegations about a suspect after arrest and even sometimes after they were charged. Think Colin Stagg, Barry George, Karen Matthews and others — and Stagg and George were later shown to be innocent.

That may be about to change thanks to the actions of the attorney-general, Dominic Grieve. Not normally a man to cut the figure of a hero — a lean, bookish type, he was last seen filibustering awkwardly in the Commons when the government was under pressure over its links with the Murdochs — Grieve has done something genuinely brave. He has prosecuted the Daily Mirror and the Sun for contempt of court in the Chris Jefferies case, and he has won.

The consequences could be significant. Not only might future reporting of crime be more restrained, but we could even see fewer miscarriages of justice. I reported the first trial of Barry George for the murder of Jill Dando in 2002 and I am convinced that his wrongful conviction was partly due to the influence on the jury of the grossly prejudicial press reporting about him after his arrest. George spent seven years in jail before the conviction was overturned.

Chris Jefferies, you may remember, is the retired teacher in Bristol who was monstered by the tabloids before and after his arrest in January in connection with the Joanna Yeates murder, and who turned out to be totally innocent. (Another man confessed to the killing.) On the morning of 28 July, in what is becoming a familiar ritual in our courts, eight newspapers serially confessed to libelling Jefferies and agreed to pay him substantial damages.

On the afternoon of the same day, however, something much less familiar happened: the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, and two other judges found the Mirror and the Sun guilty of contempt of court. They upheld Grieve’s argument that, by publishing “exceptionally adverse and hostile” articles about Jefferies while he was in custody, the papers had breached section 2 (2) of the Act, which makes unlawful any publication about an individual who is under arrest “which creates a substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced”.

In a way, what is surprising here is not that a contempt prosecution happened and succeeded, but that it was necessary at all. The law is reasonably clear, after all, and is very well known to journalists. The problem has been that Grieve’s predecessors, most recently Baroness Scotland and Lord Goldsmith, failed to show the press that they would uphold it. The rarity of prosecutions, despite apparently flagrant breaches in high-profile cases, led editors to behave as though the Act was a dead letter and they could do what they liked.

Grieve therefore deserves credit for taking on the tabloids where his predecessors would not, and it is worth noting that he did so before the revelation that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked, and thus before these papers lost a lot of their bullying power. He didn’t kick them when they were down, in other words; he kicked them when they were still up.

Grieve has to share the credit, however, with the judges, who were placed in a tight corner by this case and who found an ingenious way out. For as long as the press has flouted the contempt law, judges have been finding excuses to try the victims anyway. When a trial begins and the defence claims it can’t be fair because their client has already been brutally convicted in the press, judges have developed a list of arguments to justifying carrying on regardless. Here is what they say. Jury members don’t remember the adverse reporting by the time the trial comes around (the “fade factor”), they know to concentrate on what is said in court (the “focus factor”) and they heed the instructions of judges to ignore extraneous matters. These arguments are entirely unsupported by evidence but they have had the merit, from the judges’ point of view, that important trials don’t have to be abandoned because of the excesses of the tabloids.

However, in the brief trial of the Sun and the Mirror, the judges found these arguments turned back on them. In effect the papers said: “If, when trials begin, you judges always insist that hostile reporting at the time of arrest doesn’t make a difference, then you can’t turn around now and say the opposite. It follows that whatever we wrote about Chris Jefferies at the time of his arrest, no matter how hostile, can’t now be described as prejudicial or even potentially prejudicial.”

It was a tricky problem for the judges and they simply side-stepped it, finding the Mirror and the Sun guilty on other, rather creative grounds. The Act speaks of publication “which creates a substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced”. The judges avoided saying that in the Jefferies case potential proceedings might have been prejudiced; instead they concluded that they could have been impeded.

What this means is that they decided Jefferies had been painted in such an appalling light by these papers that if he had been charged he would have found it more difficult to construct a defence. Witnesses in his support, for example, might have decided not to come forward, either because they feared association with this supposedly monstrous person or because they believed his conviction was a foregone conclusion.

Both papers were undoubtedly surprised by this ingenious judgement — and the attorney-general probably was too. The point about “impedence” had not been prominent in the case he put forward in court — it was fourth on a list of five arguments and was presented rather tersely. Indeed he felt the need to reassure the judges it was not just a “makeweight” in his case.

The Mirror was fined £50,000 for contempt and the Sun £18,000. They were refused permission to appeal, though according to Jefferies’s solicitor, Louis Charalambous, they are considering petitioning the Supreme Court. On the whole it seems unlikely that a considered finding by the Lord Chief Justice and two other judges will be overturned.

Where does this leave us? Contempt law is back on the editors’ radar at a time when, with Lord Leveson’s inquiry beginning its investigation of press standards, those editors must already be minding their Ps and Qs. It might be argued that the fines were small — papers pay much more in libel damages and generally go on to libel again — but Grieve has put down an important marker and is free to use the impedance argument again if he wishes. If papers don’t heed this warning, moreover, he has it in his power to crank things up, notably by citing not only the newspaper but also the editor in person in a future case. That might concentrate minds.

We will have to wait and see, but there is a strong chance that in future sensational criminal cases we will see a return to what used to happen, generally, 20 years ago and more. So long as no one is in custody, papers will remain free to report what they choose (consistent with the libel laws), but from the moment proceedings are active, in other words normally from the moment someone is arrested, they must show restraint. And the same law applies to online reporting, bloggers and tweeters.

It is, without doubt, a constraint on free expression, and an important one. But it is surely better than locking up innocent people because, in effect, journalists don’t like the look of them.

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and is a founder of Hacked Off. He tweets at @BrianCathcart

The post Courts and controversy appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post News of the World hacked Sarah Payne’s mother’s phone appeared first on Index on Censorship.

There is a confusion at the heart of British debates about privacy. We tend to speak of journalists, of their role, their rights, their responsibilities and very often their lack of restraint and how it should be addressed. But this is misleading, and prevents us from seeing some of the complexities and possibilities, because the word ‘journalist’, in this context, covers two very different groups of people. One group is the actual journalists, as traditionally understood, and the other is those people whose principal professional activity is invading other people’s privacy for the purpose of publication.

The difference between the two, when you pause to consider it, is profound. Journalism is demonstrably valuable to society. It tells us what is new, important and interesting in public life, it holds authority to account, it promotes informed debate, it entertains and enlightens. For sure, it comes with complications. It is rushed and imperfect, it sometimes upsets people and in pursuit of its objectives it occasionally does unpleasant or even illegal things. But by and large we accept these less welcome aspects of journalism as part of the package, and we do so because journalism as a whole is in the public interest. It does good, or to put it another way, we would be much poorer without it.

Invading people’s privacy for the purpose of publication does not do good, though it may make money. In that industry, deception and payment for information are routine, not exceptional. The subject matter is almost never important — except to the victims, whose lives may be permanently blighted – and while a story may entertain, it does so only in the way that bear-baiting and public executions used to entertain. The whole activity exists on the border of legality, skipping from one side of the line to the other at its own convenience and without sincere regard for the public interest.

If they are so different, why do we tend to lump them together? A number of reasons. One is that journalists themselves are slow to draw the distinction because theirs is traditionally an open industry, without barriers and categories, and also because they don’t tend to think of what they do in terms of doing good and being valuable. But there is also a more tangible explanation, which is that the privacy invaders do everything they can to blur the line. It is in their interest to be considered journalists, after all. They can shelter under the same umbrella and enjoy the same privileges as journalists. They can talk about freedom of expression, freedom of the press and serving the public interest; they can appeal to tradition and history and they can sound warnings about current and future censorship. This helps them to protect what they do.

Today, in 2011, the activities of the privacy invaders have provoked a crisis which threatens to compromise and damage the journalism that is done in the public interest. After a succession of scandals, the worst of them associated with Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, the demand for tighter legal constraints on the news media has reached a level not seen for many years. This is probably not another “last chance saloon” episode, with empty warnings and hollow condemnations, as was seen in the early 1990s, because the centre of gravity in the debate has shifted. Many people in Parliament, the law and the media itself who were previously vital to the defence of press freedom are in despair. They watch in particular the phone hacking scandal, in which the News of the World has been forced to admit illegally accessing people’s voicemails on an astonishing scale, and they feel that the press is out of control and unwilling to take responsibility for its failures. There is a strong chance that the next year or so will bring important change.

The greater the threat of effective press regulation, the more the privacy invaders can be counted upon to press their claim to be journalists, and so part of the free-speech tradition. They are like drowning men in the water, clinging on for dear life to those who have lifejackets. But journalists, for their part, may be approaching a moment of choice. Do they acknowledge the difference, the better to protect their own interests, or do they risk being dragged down into the depths by the sinking privacy invaders?

And it is not just a moment of choice for journalists. The reading public also needs a clearer understanding. We need to recognise privacy invasion for what it is, to accept that a luridly packaged, sensational, self-promoting and at the same time self-righteous product is actually bad for our collective health. And we need to grasp better the distinction between that and what is genuinely done in the public interest.

Privacy invaders at work: the Max Mosley case

The most vivid recent example of the privacy invaders at work, and the one which most clearly shows that what they do is not journalism, is the case of

Max Mosley, the former president of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile. Because Mosley sued, details of a modus operandi which normally remains hidden were exposed. The story is well known, but details are worth revisiting.

In March 2008, the News of the World persuaded a woman who participated in private S&M parties with Mosley to film one of these events secretly, promising her £25,000 if the resulting story made the front page. A reporter was recorded showing her how to use the camera and saying how far away from Mosley she should stand “when you want to get him to do the Sieg Heil”. The party took place and the paper got its film. There was no Sieg Heil, but some German was spoken in one role-play scene (by a participant who was German) and joke-shop prison uniforms were worn in another. In the paper’s view, this established a useful connection — Mosley’s father had led the wartime British fascist movement. The story appeared under the headline: “F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers”.

The next week, for a follow-up story, the paper approached two other women participants and told them to choose between being identified in print and giving an interview. They refused to cooperate, so the paper returned to the first woman. Her payment had been unilaterally reduced from the promised £25,000 to £12,000, but she was now told she could earn a further £8,000 if she gave an interview. (It was alleged in court that she too was threatened with exposure.) She agreed, but the court heard that her role in the interview involved nothing more than signing the first page of a text that had already been written, and which was altered between signature and publication. It appeared under the headline: “Mosley hooker tells all”.

Besides the fact that it appeared in a newspaper, there is almost nothing here that qualifies as journalism. For one, the whole approach is difficult to reconcile with the code of practice of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which at least in principle binds journalists working for member organisations and which includes clauses on such matters as accuracy, privacy and the use of subterfuge. The code makes clear, for example, that it is not acceptable to employ a clandestine recording device on a ‘fishing expedition’ — in other words, when you don’t have good grounds to expect you will gain a particular kind of evidence of a particular kind of wrongdoing. Though the paper made desperate efforts in court to create the impression that it had had such grounds, the judge would not credit them and indeed no reasonable person would have.

In a way, though, the terms of the code were the least of it. This may sound pious, but it is a simple fact that journalism has to be about truth. If a reporter is not trying to write about the world as he or she sincerely believes it to be, then the product is not journalism. It is fiction passing itself off as journalism. In this case the paper didn’t get what it hoped for (the Sieg Heil) but relied instead on some other German words it didn’t understand and did not bother to have translated. (German = Nazi to the News of the World.) The paper promised its informant £25,000 and then paid her £12,000 because it knew she could not hold it to its word. It threatened people with exposure if they did not cooperate, but in court denied this was blackmail. It presented its readers with an ‘interview’ which was nothing of the kind. Even in court it could not get its facts straight. The judge observed of the author of the supposed interview: “… his best recollection is so erratic and changeable that it would not be safe to place unqualified reliance on his evidence”. And yet for all the shameful conduct that was laid bare, no one at the paper was disciplined or reprimanded, let alone sacked. In other words, this is what the News of the World does.

More than anything, though, it is in their attitude to the public interest that the privacy invaders mark themselves out as different. The public interest is central because it is a sort of get-out-of-jail card for journalists, though it is actually recognised only grudgingly in law. An ethical journalist can justify telling a lie, or covertly recording a conversation, or trespassing if this act is done in the pursuit of the public interest, and even if he or she is found guilty of an offence, others will usually understand this as valid and will give their support. The public interest can literally keep a journalist out of jail, and it is not merely in the eye of the beholder. The Press Complaints Commission, for example, defines it as follows:

The public interest includes, but is not confined to:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety
ii) Protecting public health and safety
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation

How did the News of the World justify publishing the Mosley story, which concerned legal sexual activity between consenting adults? Mosley’s behaviour, the trial was told, was “so debased, so depraved that the law will not offer it protection from disclosure”. The alleged Nazi elements of his activities were said to have mocked the Holocaust and, when combined with Mosley’s family background, contributed to a “disturbing situation” which was of “legitimate public interest”. Colin Myler, the paper’s editor, further claimed that exposure was justified because “as the head of Formula One Mr Mosley is the figurehead for the sport. He’s invited to the opening gala dinners, whether it’s with princes, prime ministers, kings, queens and presidents”. And the paper also argued that the beating which took place during the session amounted to a form of assault which it was legitimate to expose, and that Mosley’s relationship with the women amounted to illegal brothel-keeping.

Not only did the court reject every one of these arguments but it also exposed the cynicism with which they had been prepared. The assault argument, put forward only after Mosley sued, was dismissed by the judge as “artificial” and “verging on desperation”. The brothel-keeping charge, he noted, had been “thought up” by the paper’s lawyers, only to be “abandoned” before the trial’s end. As for the Nazi theme, it turned out to have no foundation in fact — and here the judge’s remarks revealed just how a public interest defence works in the hands of privacy invaders. He said he was ‘prepared to believe’ that the paper’s editors and reporters, “on what they had seen, thought there was a Nazi element – not least because that is what they wanted to believe. Indeed they needed to believe this in order to forge the somewhat tenuous link between the claimant [Mosley] and his father’s notorious activities more than half a century ago, and, secondly, to construct an arguable public interest defence …”

There was no cool assessment of the evidence, therefore, and no measured calculation of whether this was really one of those rare cases where intrusion into someone’s most private affairs could be justified because exposure makes the world a better place. This was about what they wanted and needed to believe if they were to publish –– and they were determined to publish. In other words, the story comes first and then, as the judge put it, you “construct an arguable public interest defence”. And if that defence doesn’t work you try another, and another, and another. This is not how journalists behave. They don’t “think up” public interest cases which are “artificial”, and they don’t allow themselves to believe something just because it suits them. They don’t abuse the entire ethical structure just so they can get whatever it is they know or believe they know into print. Certainly they get things wrong sometimes and they make misjudgments, but their general aim is to act ethically, just as it is to act truthfully.

Deception, muddy waters and the right to know

The suggestion that journalists are ethically driven often provokes sniggering, because many people believe the opposite. Yet journalists spend more of their time confronting and worrying about ethical questions than people in most other walks of life. Being accurate, balanced, fair and responsible while turning around a product that is acutely time-sensitive is demanding. You will not always agree with the decisions they make, but it is a simple fact that professional publications and professional journalists take these matters seriously though the procedures are often not formal. It is obvious, however, that no such scruples attended the preparation of the News of the World’s Mosley scoops, and it would be hard to exaggerate how far recklessness has damaged the name of journalism in recent years.

The coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, when a dozen national newspapers printed between them hundreds of grossly libellous stories on their front pages over a period of nearly a year, is probably the most shocking instance (though it was not a privacy issue). The Express papers were the worst offenders on that occasion, forced to pay a reported £550,000 in damages – and what soul-searching followed? What did the then editor of the Daily Express, Peter Hill, do to ensure it could not happen again? He famously told MPs: “I have reprimanded myself.” Journalists tend to laugh or shrug at this but they should take it seriously, because with those words Hill was mocking what they do for a living.

In both motivation and method, the Mosley case demonstrates, journalism is distinct from the industry of privacy invasion. But the privacy invaders prefer to muddy the water. When the News of the World lost that case it announced that “our press is less free today after this judgment” — appealing, by implication, to a noble British history and British tradition of press freedom. Now press freedom is an important matter and its history is certainly rich in noble deeds, but William Cobbett and John Wilkes did not suffer imprisonment and exile to enable journalists to bribe, bully and deceive their way into other people’s bedrooms. Nor, if you forgive the anachronism, did they have in mind the sort of people who would illegally hack into the mobile phone messages of the famous on the off-chance they might learn something titillating. These martyrs in the cause of press freedom had some meaningful conception that the press needed to be free to serve the public interest, and they did not see the public interest merely as a smokescreen.

You may by now be thinking that this is all very precious, and wouldn’t it be a dull world if we didn’t have these naughty boys in the tabloids blowing raspberries and shaking things up? It’s a comfortable attitude so long as you are not at risk of being a victim of the intrusion for which it is a cover, and so long as you don’t care that innocent people suffer for it. But spare a thought for those of us who teach the journalists of the future. What are we supposed to tell them? “Don’t worry about ethics because, so long as only a minority of people suffer from what you do, the majority will thank you for making the world a more diverting place”? That is not a viable attitude.

The privacy invaders use another version of that argument. They suggest that they are journalists, but the anarchic, irreverent, pushy part of the business, keeping the rest on its toes and preventing complacency. Again this isn’t viable. They don’t keep journalism virtuous; they drag it down, routinely showing contempt for the kind of boundaries they demand to see enforced in every other part of society. When the News of the World was convicted of illegally breaching Max Mosley’s privacy, it raised two fingers to the court, attacked the judge and the law and did nothing whatever to alter its habits. When the Express was caught libelling the McCanns, nobody was disciplined and nothing changed and, as we have seen, the editor mocked the idea that it should be otherwise. When Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, produced evidence in 2008 that his phone had been hacked by the News of the World, the paper paid him £700,000 to shut up and go away.

For the privacy intruders the water can never be muddy enough. We are told that celebrities collaborate in their own exposure and it’s all part of the modern publicity industry. Often true, no doubt, but not always — and any journalist should be able to tell the difference between the person who wants to tell or sell a story and the person who has to be stalked, deceived and bullied for a story. We are told that public figures have an obligation to behave in certain ways because they are “role models”. Among the many problems with this are that the standards are arbitrarily set by editors and inconsistently applied, simply because the test is not what is right or wrong but what will sell newspapers on a given day. And editors who live by such dictates (and rely on dubious means to get their stories) are surely the last people we should rely on to judge what is appropriate conduct and what is not. We are also told that this is all about power and privilege, that the protection of privacy is a confidence trick designed to conceal from us the wrongdoing of top people. This is a con trick in itself. It just happens that editors aren’t usually interested in intruding upon the privacy of the poor, but when the time comes that they are —  say in the case of victims of crime or with bereaved families — they often show no mercy. Rich or poor, they will stitch you up if it suits them.

Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, has offered a different and curious defence. In a speech in 2008 he argued: “… if mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process”. This implies that professional intrusion into privacy is a price society has to pay if people are to be informed about things that are genuinely in the public interest. That can’t be right. It is true that the News of the World carries coverage of public affairs, indeed it occasionally prints front-page stories which are genuinely in the public interest — its coverage of match-fixing in cricket was a case in point. But journalists know that every story has to stand on its own ethical merits. Because you have published one worthy story does not mean that in the next one you have a licence to intrude. That is like saying that if you get 20 stories right you are free to commit a libel in the 21st, providing the story helps to keep your paper afloat. If the News of the World is to survive, it should pay its way by reporting in the public interest, full stop.

Let us say, then, that we are going to make a distinction between journalism and intruding in people’s privacy. Two questions immediately arise. First, where is the line between the two? And second, what difference does it make?

This is not simply a matter of drawing a line between tabloids and broadsheets, as they used to be, or between populars and qualities, as they were before that. In the first instance, we are identifying a kind of activity, but from there it is a short step to knowing who the people are who routinely engage in that activity, and which are the organisations that encourage, condone and trade by it. It is not all that complicated. The new non-journalist category, incidentally, will include some people not previously thought of as journalists, people like Glenn Mulcaire, Jonathan Rees and Steve Whittamore — private detectives who in their day were employed by the News of the World and who have all, incidentally, been convicted of crimes. Is this snobbish? Only if you believe there is something elitist about having ethical standards. Is it realistic? If we put aside the obfuscation, and make the effort to recognise these distinctive activities when we see them, yes. It really is not such an effort to tell the difference between those who want to inform and entertain and those who share the motivation of the former assistant news editor on the News of the World who told a colleague in 2002: “This is what we do. … We go out and destroy other people’s lives.” And it could be argued that making the distinction might strengthen the hand of those people in the relevant organisations who want to behave ethically.

An urgent matter

Will it make a difference? Certainly not in the sense that it will solve the privacy problem, and put an end to unjustified intrusion. That argument will run and run, and it is likely that no satisfactory boundaries will ever be fixed. Moreover the intruders, who are resourceful, will find ways to shield at least some of what they do. But the distinction will help to clarify the debate by separating those participants who have no real interest in ethical conduct or the public interest from those who do. It will more clearly expose the interests of those who argue that that law which allows scrutiny of the activities of a corporation must also allow scrutiny of the private life of an individual. And it will surely lend extra weight to the demands of journalists to be free to do what is genuinely the work of journalism.

This is an urgent matter. Because of the serial horrors — McCann, Mosley, hacking — the demand for statutory regulation of the press is growing. The Press Complaints Commission has failed to shore up standards or to convince the public that the press is sincere in wanting to regulate itself. If journalists, for reasons of nostalgia, inertia, confusion or misplaced loyalty, choose to keep swimming with the privacy intruders, they may well drown with them. If they push themselves free, then there is a better chance that we will find ways of protecting the freedoms that are vital to journalism.

Most of all, though, a clearer distinction will benefit the reading public. The more distance that opens up between ethical journalism and professional intrusion into privacy, the more the public will understand what it is getting and what it can trust. And that is in the public interest.

Brian Cathcart’s “Code breakers” appears in the new issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Privacy is dead! long live privacy, available now.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University and former media columnist at the New Statesman. He was a journalist at Reuters and the Independent. His books include The Case of Stephen Lawrence (Penguin). He is a regular contributor to Index online.

The post Code breakers appeared first on Index on Censorship.

When Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman of the News of the World were jailed in 2007, the story told in court was that Mulcaire adopted a relatively crude procedure to gain access to the voicemail messages of victims. First he got their numbers. Then he tried the standard procedure for remote access to voicemails, and when required to enter a PIN, he used the default code, which he knew. If the victim had overrridden the default and created his or her own PIN, Mulcaire would then blag it. Blagging is a confidence trick: he would call the technical desk at the phone company pretending to be an employee working on a problem with that phone and he would ask for it to be returned to the default PIN. For this he needed his own employee password, although in the only instance that was closely explored in court in 2007 he simply used bluff and charm instead.

The idea that an outsider can have your mobile phone settings altered with such ease is pretty shocking, but it is also the case that a lot can go wrong for the hacker in this procedure if phone company staff are even passably vigilant. Perhaps we can imagine Mulcaire getting away with it five times in a few months, or even ten times. What is very hard to imagine is that he did so dozens or even hundreds of times over a year or so — and there is even a possibility that the number of victims runs into the thousands.

Nobody has that much charm. If Mulcaire was doing this systematically he had to have systematic access to PINs, just as he had to have systematic access to mobile phone numbers. (Remember, Sienna Miller changed her phone twice in one year because she suspected hacking, and each time Mulcaire swiftly got hold of both the new number and the voicemail PIN.) And if Mulcaire had systematic access to phone company data that raises the very worrying possibility that people inside those companies were knowingly helping him, and that would be corruption.

For some reason the Metropolitan Police do not seem to be in the least bit concerned or interested in the implications of this. They have been in possession of Mulcaire’s papers since August 2006 but there is no evidence that they have ever questioned the phone companies about their role. If, however, the files were given to another police force to investigate, perhaps something would be done.

One further note. People keep writing about Mulcaire, the private investigator, as if he was not an employee of News of the World. He was. For one thing, he worked for them year after year on a full-time, explicitly exclusive contract worth more than £100,000 a year, and for another, after he was released from jail they made a payment to him of £80,000 on the basis that he had been a full-time employee and was entitled to severance. (It must have been severance because otherwise it would have been a bribe to keep him silent, and it couldn’t have been that, could it?) Glenn Mulcaire may not have had a desk in the Wapping newsroom but he was no wayward, out-of-control freelance. He was on the News of the World staff.

Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here, here and here

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on twitter at @BrianCathcart

The post Phone hacking: The role of the phone companies appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Latest revelations on the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal puts the police under the spotlight, says Brian Cathcart. The Met should be taken off the case and the investigation reopened

We like to think that a good detective leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of truth. In the Met’s phone-hacking investigation of 2006 it now seems that, on the contrary, almost every stone was left unturned, no matter how suspicious it looked. Miller has now turned one over all on her own, and what it reveals looks very bad for Scotland Yard.

Her claim document states that when the Met arrested the NoW hacker Glen Mulcaire in 2006, among the documents they seized were the following:

— the number, account number, pin number and password for not just one but three successive mobile telephones she used

— the times and dates of a number of mobile phone calls she made

— the contents of two voicemail messages left on her mobile phone

— the mobile phone number, pin number and password of her friend Archie Keswick

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Jude Law and of his personal assistant

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Miller’s publicist and the address and home telephone number of Miller’s mother

Just a reminder: voicemail hacking is illegal and all these materials were in the hands of a man employed full time by a national newspaper.

This impressive file should surely have been enough, you might think, to arouse the suspicions of even the least inquisitive of detectives. But no. No detective saw fit to phone or visit Miller either to alert her that she might have been a victim of a campaign of illegal intrusion or to inquire whether she had anything to say.

On the evidence of the claim document, if detectives had contacted her they would immediately have been presented with another impressive bundle of evidence. She could have told them about new messages that mysteriously appeared in her voicemail queue as messages already accessed, about messages that disappeared altogether, about her concerns in 2005-06 that her phone was being hacked, and about stories that appeared in the News of the World which she could not account for.

If detectives had then examined some back numbers of the News of the World, they would have found at least 11 articles relating to Miller whose origins they might have investigated in a phone-hacking inquiry.

But there was no investigation of Miller’s case at all. The Met contented themselves with a prosecution which implicated only one reporter at the News of the World — Clive Goodman — and left the rest of the organisation untouched. The offices of the paper for which Mulcaire did his hacking were never raided. No journalist other than Goodman was even questioned.

Worse, the Met sat on the Miller information. The claim document hints at the effect of hacking on Miller — her personal distress, her suspicions of close friends, her repeated changes of phone, her sense of being exposed. But the Met did not tell her what it knew.

She has had to go to court to secure documents giving her that information, and the Met released it with the greatest possible reluctance — just as it is currently employing every legal means to prevent many others from finding out whether they were hacked.

When the Commons select committee on the media looked at all this last year (and, to declare an interest, I was an adviser) it criticised in blunt terms the Met’s failure to even question three News of the World journalists — Neville Thurlbeck, Greg Miskiw and Ross Hindley aka Hall — in connection with a very simple paper trail of phone hacking evidence.

At that time, the Met’s position in this scandal appeared to be a secondary one, though very serious — it had conducted a bad investigation and failed to get to the bottom of the affair. The picture is now much darker than that.

Much fuller disclosure of the Mulcaire documents is now required, so that everyone who was targeted knows about it. And the Met needs to answer a lot of questions about why it failed to investigate the News of the World in a proper and timely fashion. At the very least, the force should be removed from all contact with the case and with the evidence, and a reinvestigation should be undertaken by outsiders.

Finally, it is worth noting that Miller’s claim document contains the strong suggestion that at least three more people associated with her have a case to sue the News of the World. About 20 people are already suing or are about to sue. For the newspaper too, it’s definitely not over.

Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here and here

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on twitter at @BrianCathcart

The post Phone hacking: Questions to answer appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Director General Mark Thompson’s motives may be good and his manner sincere, but he is surely wrong to suggest that a clearly labelled humanitarian appeal to help desperately needy people in Gaza would, in the eyes of any reasonable viewer, compromise the BBC’s reputation for impartiality. We know the difference between BBC news and an appeal, just as we are able to tell an advertisement from a television programme.

Of course, what really matters here is that help gets to the victims of conflict, so it is a relief of sorts that the controversy has generated more publicity for the DEC appeal than the broadcast itself ever could have. Let us hope the cash flows in as a result. (And in case you have missed it, here’s a link.)

The money aside, it looks like the principal casualty of this affair is the BBC itself. Thompson and his colleagues may have their scruples intact, but the BBC’s reputation among a lot of people who normally trust it is in tatters. And the only people pleased by this will be those with a vested interest in damaging the BBC – not the pro-Israel lobby, but the same media organisations that revelled in the Corporation’s confusion over the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand affair, notably the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press, who are surely wallowing in this new disaster.

To call them BBC-haters is no exaggeration. Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor, regards the Corporation as the flagship of a subsidised, unelected and unrepresentative ‘liberalocracy’ that is intent on foisting its values, or rather its lack of values, on to a hapless British public. Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, is personally offended by the whole idea of a news organisation that exists outside the capitalist system – one, in other words, that he can’t buy. In their different ways, both men want the BBC humbled and damaged. And while neither is what you might call a friend of the Palestinian people, that is neither here nor there. What is bad for the BBC is good for them, and by gum this business is bad for the BBC.

For the very same reason they hate it, of course, the rest of us need to cherish and protect it – and, difficult though it may be at times like this, forgive it. Our society is vastly better for having a powerful news source that depends for its existence not on the market, but on public consensus. It is easy, sometimes, to forget how precious it is that BBC news is not bought and sold, just as it is easy to overlook the benign influence the BBC exerts over much of the rest of our news culture (even the Mail).

For sure, the BBC managers have made a mistake, and if they don’t see that then they are at least aware that their friends are telling them they have. We can batter them further, and possibly secure a grudging and belated broadcast, or we can hope they have learned a lesson and devote our efforts to the more urgent and worthwhile cause of helping the Gaza appeal.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

The post A mistake we must forgive appeared first on Index on Censorship.