29 Nov 2011 | News and features, Volume 40.04 Winter 2011
Studies to test the safety and efficacy of drugs and medical devices are too often never made public, putting lives at risk. Head of Investigations at the British Medical Journal, Deborah Cohen reports
Transparency is at the heart of medical science. Every day decisions are made about when to stop and start treatment and how best to invest large sums of money in ways to protect the public from disease. All these rely on knowing as much as possible about the benefits compared to the risks of action or inaction.
No medical treatment is perfect or suitable for everyone — that’s why balancing risks and benefits is crucial. But healthcare is big business; it’s where science meets big money and not all research evidence makes it into the public domain — specifically into medical journals where doctors and academics glean their information.
Medical history is replete with examples of the benefits of a treatment being overhyped and potentially serious side-effects being buried, leading to poor decisions. This wastes public money and can cost lives.
Take the case of the drug lorcainide, used to regulate the heartbeat during a heart attack. In the early 80s, researchers in Nottingham carried out a study of the drug in 95 people using a method known as a randomised control trial. They noticed that nine out of the 48 people taking the drug died, compared to only one out of 47 who got a sugar pill, or placebo, instead.
At the time, the researchers thought that the high number of deaths in those given lorcainide might have been due to chance rather than the drug itself. For commercial reasons, the drug was not developed any further and the results of the trial were never published. However other, similar, heart drugs did make it onto the market and were widely used. But they too had serious safety problems and many were withdrawn.
According to Sir Iain Chalmers, a long-standing champion of transparency in medical research, the lorcainide trial might have been an early warning of trouble ahead for these other heart drugs. At the peak of their use in the late 80s, these medicines are estimated to have caused between 20,000 and 70,000 premature deaths every year in the US alone.
This is a particularly stark example of what might happen when critical evidence remains unavailable to doctors and researchers. Even when individual drugs do make it onto the market and have overcome the regulatory hurdles, information about their risks and benefits might well be hard to come by.
What the public doesn’t know
In western countries, legislation dictates that companies have to provide regulators with a thorough scientific dossier on all trials conducted on a drug so the data can be scrutinised before the drug is allowed onto the market. They are then required to do follow-up studies looking at any adverse reactions that might not have been picked up in the pre-market research. They must inform the authorities about what they find.
Many companies, however, have been reprimanded — mainly in the US courts — for hiding troubling side-effects of drugs, including: anti-depressants, such as Seroxat (known as Paxil in the US; generic name paroxetine) and painkillers, such as Vioxx (rofecoxib).
But it’s not always the companies which are unforthcoming about safety concerns; the regulators have dragged their feet too. Last year, the diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) was suspended from the market in Europe and severely restricted in the US because of an increased risk of heart problems. But this was long after both the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and the US regulator had reason to suspect an increase in serious side-effects.
Rather than the regulators — whose remit is to protect the public — it was the actions of the then New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, in a 2004 court case of GSK’s Seroxat, that led to the side-effects of Avandia coming to public attention. As part of a settlement with the state over its hiding of data on heightened suicide risk in teenagers who took the drug, GSK agreed to post results from its recent clinical studies on a website. And this included studies of the drug Avandia, many of which had been unpublished until then.
Three years later, Dr Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the high-profile Cleveland Clinic in the US, decided to analyse all the studies of Avandia on the website. Using a research method called meta-analysis, he pooled all the results together to see what they said overall. He found that the risk of having heart problems in people with diabetes who took the drug rose by 43 per cent compared to those who had diabetes and did not take it.
The following years entailed investigations into GSK’s conduct by the US Senate; intense deliberations by national drug regulators; questions about how we regulate medicine; and now pending class actions. But what really broke the case open was enforced transparency.
‘It’s important to realise what an important role publicly available trial results data played in the rosiglitazone story’, said Jerry Avorn, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
During an investigation in collaboration with BBC’s Panorama in September 2010, the British Medical Journal looked into the different drug regulators’ attitudes towards transparency. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee discussions are held in public in front of the national press. Most of the relevant scientific documents are made available on a website in advance. Before the deliberations start, each panellist is required to declare any conflicts of interest in line with US legislation to increase transparency.
The UK: a need for transparency
But gaining an overall perspective of discussions within the European and UK regulators was far trickier. The BMJ attempted to speak to people who had sat on panels for them both, but they were bound by confidentiality clauses. Nor would Europe’s regulator release the names of the members of the scientific advisory group discussing the drug under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Doctors and the public in the UK had not been told that the national regulator had voted unanimously to take Avandia off the market several months before the European agency came to the same decision. If the European vote had gone the other way, who knows if the views of the UK’s panel would ever have been revealed.
Some say that open discussions and more transparency do not necessarily lead to better decisions. But documents obtained from the European regulators under the FOIA showed that advisers had concerns about Avandia’s side-effects from the outset. And knowing about these could have lent support to other academics who were ‘intimidated’ by the company, according to a 2007 report by the US Senate Finance Committee.
Manipulation of data
In 1999, when the drug was first licensed, Dr John Buse, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who specialises in diabetes, told attendees of academic meetings that he was concerned that while Avandia lowered blood sugar, it also caused an increased risk of heart problems.
Concerned about the effects that his comments would have on their drug that had been touted for blockbuster status, executives at GSK (then SmithKline Beecham) devised “what appears to be an orchestrated plan to stifle his opinion”, the Senate Finance Committee report stated — in the light of internal company documents it had seen.
The report goes on to state that GSK executives labelled Buse a “renegade” and silenced his concerns about Avandia by complaining to his superiors and threatening a lawsuit. GSK prepared and required Buse to sign a letter claiming that he was no longer worried about cardiovascular risks associated with Avandia. Then, after he signed the letter, GSK officials began referring to it as Buse’s “retraction letter” to curry favour with a financial consulting company that was evaluating GSK’s products for investors. GSK has denied all allegations in the report, describing them as “absolutely false”.
Years later, Buse wrote a private email to a colleague detailing the incident with GSK: “I was certainly intimidated by them. … It makes me embarrassed to have caved in several years ago.”
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, EU drug agencies were drawing similar conclusions that the drug increased the risk of heart problems during their premarket discussions. In March 2000, Buse sent a letter to the FDA, saying Avandia might raise patients’ risk of heart attacks, and he criticised the company’s marketing, saying it employed “blatant selective manipulation of data” to overstate the drug’s benefits and understate its risks. Doctors may not have prescribed the drug if they had known from the outset there were issues around its safety.
Tamiflu and hidden data
But data transparency doesn’t just mean exposing harm done, it can also help to establish how well something works —- and that reported benefits aren’t just hype. Major international decisions are made on how best to tackle impending health crises based on how well a medical invention works as reported in journals, for example the UK government’s decision to stockpile the influenza drug Tamiflu.
Back in 2009, during the swine flu pandemic, the internationally respected Cochrane Collaboration, a network of independent academics, was commissioned by the NHS to look at the evidence about the benefits and risks of using Tamiflu — a drug the UK had spent around £500m on to treat all those infected in the outbreak.
The academics, led by Christopher Del Mar at Bond University in Australia, scoured the medical literature to find all the different relevant studies of the drug to pool together all the results to see what they said. They were also aware that there had been reports of suicides in Japan — the biggest consumers of Tamiflu — and they wanted to find out more.
But when they went about surveying the medical literature, not all of the trials they knew existed about the effects of the drug in healthy people appeared in the medical press. To fairly reflect the evidence, they needed to know exactly what all trials said. But they couldn’t access all the data they needed — the majority of trials were unpublished. This included the biggest, and therefore arguably the most important, trial conducted.
The UK government at the time had based its decision to stockpile Tamiflu in such large quantities on one particular piece of research published in 2003. This paper showed the dramatic benefits of giving Tamiflu to healthy people who got the flu and not just those who were at particular risk of getting sick. It claimed that the drug reduced the number of people taken to hospital with the flu by a half and reduced serious complications by around the same amount. Little wonder that health officials, concerned about the strain on the NHS, stockpiled the red and yellow pills in such vast quantities.
But this piece of research was funded by the drug’s manufacturer, Roche. It relied upon eight unpublished studies, each given code names, and used the company’s own statisticians to draw conclusions about the data. The two independent researchers named on the paper — who are supposed to be accountable for the content of the research — could not produce the unpublished studies when the Cochrane Collaboration asked them.
Medical research relies heavily on the ability to replicate the findings of another piece of research. This helps to show that a finding wasn’t fraudulent or simply due to chance.
But the Cochrane Collaboration couldn’t replicate the 2003 findings. Its calculations based on the publicly available papers were at odds with the claims made and it needed to see the unpublished studies, so it turned to the company.
Despite asking Roche repeatedly for the full complement of research documents showing that Tamiflu would stop so many healthy people from going into hospital, the whole set were never forthcoming. What it did provide was limited in detail and not what the Cochrane Collaboration needed. Roche did nothing illegal — it is its commercial information. But its commercial information has huge repercussions for public health spend — both in terms of direct costs of the drug and its distribution, but also on what economists call the opportunity costs. Half a billion spent on Tamiflu is half a billion not spent on some other wonder drug.
Del Mar and his team were left to wonder if these bold claims really did stack up — and if the unpublished trials really were the best of the lot, why were they unpublished?
What should have been a straightforward exercise to confirm the evidence base for current policy and practice became instead a complex investigation involving the Cochrane Collaboration, the BMJ and Channel 4 News. Not only did this unmask the extent of unpublished data, it found that the person who actually wrote some of the journal papers was never credited — known in the trade as ghostwriting.
This is not the benign undertaking it is in celebrity autobiographies. Commercial medical writing firms team up with drug companies to draft a series of academic papers aimed at medical journals to promote a carefully crafted message. In the case of Tamiflu, it was that the drug helps to reduce serious complications.
The lead investigator author who was named on the biggest trial – which was unpublished — said that he couldn’t remember ever having participated in the trial when the BMJ/Channel 4 News asked him. And the investigation revealed that documents submitted to Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) show different investigator names appended to the key Tamiflu trials at different points — nowhere is it totally clear who took overall responsibility for all of the studies.
Behind closed doors
In a later twist, an investigation the BMJ conducted with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that experts who had been paid to promote Tamiflu were also authors of influential World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance on the treatment and prevention of pandemic flu. Nowhere were their conflicts of interest made public, despite the WHO having a specific policy to exclude those with such major competing interests from crafting guidelines. And when the scientific evidence pointed to a serious global outbreak of swine flu in early 2009, the WHO pulled together an international expert panel called the Emergency Committee. Keeping up the trend of opacity that had been a recurrent feature of pandemic planning, the committee executed its decisions — which the former health secretary, Alan Johnson, said would lead to “costly and risky” repercussions — behind closed doors in Geneva. An internal WHO investigation conducted by Harvey Fineberg, president of the US Institute of Medicine, criticised the lack of transparency and timely disclosure of conflicts of interest in May last year.
After an inauspicious start — with experts from within the US regulatory agency saying the benefits of healthy people taking the drug were marginal at the outset — Tamiflu sales sky-rocketed. This, coupled with a mild strain of flu and an abject lack of transparency, allowed conspiracy theories to ferment that alleged the WHO was in league with big pharma and had fostered fears of a pandemic in order to boost sales of drugs. And with blogosphere rumours abounding, not only has the WHO’s reputation taken a hit, scepticism might well accompany future warnings of serious flu outbreaks.
“Open access should be the default setting”
Yet again the role of the regulators comes into the spotlight. Roche said that it had supplied all the required data to US and EU regulatory authorities. Only after five months of chasing drug regulators with FOI requests, asking for the full study reports of trials that Roche submitted for its market approval, did the Cochrane Collaboration get some of what it asked for.
“Open access should be the default setting for drug trials once the drug is registered. The public pay for the drug, the public should have access to the facts, not sanitised versions of them”, one of the Cochrane collaborators, Dr Tom Jefferson, said. He believes that drug regulators should make data accessible once a drug comes onto the market. Others suggest that the regulators should also publish the data of drugs that have failed to make it onto the market. That way the situation that happened with locainide would be avoided.
This, too, might be helpful for those charged with making decisions about which drugs health services should use, such as Nice. Writing in the BMJ last year, researchers from the official German drug assessment body charged with synthesising evidence on the antidepressant Edronax (generic: reboxetine) reported they had encountered serious obstacles when they tried to get unpublished clinical trial information from the drug company that held the data.
Once they were able to integrate the astounding 74 per cent of patient data that had previously been unpublished, their conclusion was damning: Edronax (reboxetine) is “overall an ineffective and potentially harmful antidepressant”. This conclusion starkly contradicted the findings of other recent studies that pooled the data published by reputable journals.
But the amounts of data submitted to regulators can be voluminous — another reason why overstretched and underfunded drug authorities could benefit from the safeguard of publicly available data that academics could analyse. The Cochrane Collaboration is now in possession of over 24,000 pages to peruse and distil. But this kind of volume doesn’t deter researchers; they are actively asking for it.
In June this year, Medtronic, a medical technology company, drew widespread criticism in the US for its alleged failure in published research papers to mention the side-effects of a spinal treatment it manufactures. Capitalising on the company’s dip in public opinion, Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine and public health at Yale University, approached Medtronic to take part in a transparency programme for industry that he had set up. He wanted access to all data it had on file — published and unpublished — to commission two independent reviews of it to see what it really said about safety.
“Industry’s reputation has really dropped substantially. People are concerned. They’ve lost confidence and trust in these companies,’”Krumholz said, adding: “Marketing has sometimes gotten the best of the companies and there have been some episodes that have tarnished their reputation. So they are in great need to show to the public that they are really interested in the societal good and want to contribute in ways that are meaningful.”
The company obliged and described its move as “unprecedented in the medical industry”. Needless to say, not all companies are keen on having their data analysed by independent researchers. When Krumholz first approached manufacturers asking them to allow the scientific community to vet their data when safety concerns had emerged, he was rebuffed at every turn. Nevertheless, he hopes this will change and transparency will become expected rather than simply celebrated. He hopes his scheme will make it impossible for other companies — particularly when questions are being raised about the safety of their products — to simply say that they are not going to share all the information they have that may be relevant.
Betraying trust
But there is a broader ethical aspect to selective publication. People often participate in clinical trials because they want to help grow scientific knowledge. And the very nature of many trials means there is a level of uncertainty of what a drug or device may do. This includes any potential benefits and it also involves risks.
According to Chalmers, those who don’t publish all the studies are betraying the trust of those who have volunteered themselves to medical science. “If a patient takes part in a clinical trial — which is essentially an experiment — they are doing their service to humanity and putting themselves at the disposal of science. Unless patients are explicitly told that the results won’t be published if the trial does not show what the researchers or the company want before they start the trial, there is a dereliction of duty on behalf of the researchers.”
Chalmers is uncompromising on what the fate of doctors who are complicit in the burying of bad results should be — they should face discipline that might include the loss of their right to practise medicine or conduct research. His mood reflects a growing concern about the moral duty of medical scientists to publish their results. Journal editors have railed against what they consider a distortion of the medical literature.
But for many years there has been comparative silence from organisations representing people conducting medical research. In the UK, the charge for transparency has been led by the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine in London. Over a decade ago, it said:”Pharmaceutical physicians have a particular ethical responsibility to ensure that the evidence on which doctors should make their prescribing decisions is freely available.”
In June this year, the Royal Statistical Society followed suit and released a statement saying it is “committed to transparency in scientific and social research”. It said it is “crucially important that the results of scientific research should be made publicly available and disseminated as widely as is practical in a timely fashion after completion of the scientific investigation provided that there is no conflict with any legislation on confidentiality of data”.
Chalmers is critical of organisations who represent people conducting medical research — such as the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians — which refuse to sign up to a bill of transparency.
Attempts have been made to limit a researcher’s ability to hide trials that they may not want to come to light. Registers of trials sprang up. In 2005, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors said its journals would only publish trials that were fully registered before they started — which should make trials that went missing much easier to spot. Then, in 2007, the US implemented legislation to ensure that all trials protocols are listed on a public searchable website called clinicaltrials.gov. Companies are supposed to update the information with changes or highlight when and where their research has been published. But the BMJ has found instances where the information on the website is out of date. And, unless someone goes through the database systematically to identify what studies have surfaced publicly, it’s hard to pin down exactly what impact the register has had on publication bias.
But once again, Europe trails behind in terms of transparency. The names of the trials being conducted in the EU appear on the EudraCT database. But crucial details of the study design and where it’s taking place are not on the website.
Europe: an example of how bad it can get
If data transparency is an issue for drugs, the opacity surrounding medical device governance is in a different league. Medical devices cover a wide range of products from adhesive bandages and syringes to heavy duty implantables, such as hip prostheses, pacemakers and stents.
Representatives of the drug industry marvel at how devices get away with a comparative lack of government and public oversight both in the US and the EU. Debates about the perceived flaws in the US system have been hammered out in public — the media weighing in on what they considered to be a failure of their regulators to protect the public adequately. Front page coverage of hip replacements failing and heart devices misfiring has forced discussions about inadequacies in their system into the US Congress.
But this has not happened to the same extent in Europe. One senior US official asked me why the European media has not scrutinised device regulation in the way that the American press had. In the States, Europe has been held up as an example of how bad things can actually get — with patients on this side of the Atlantic having been described as “guinea pigs”.
A joint BMJ/Channel 4 Dispatches in May this year didn’t do much to quell concerns. The EU system of approval by agreement between manufacturer and a commercial regulatory body operates under conditions of almost total commercial secrecy and is overseen in a hands-off manner by national regulatory authorities. Manufacturers submit data to a private body, which then assesses it to see if it is fit for market, and it is then allowed to display a CE mark. It is the same process that non-medical products such as mobile phones and toys go through.
As Nick Freemantle, professor of epidemiology at UCL, said: “The current European regulatory framework — CE marking — might provide sufficient safeguards for electric toasters and kettles, but it is not adequate for treatments that can affect symptoms, health related quality of life, serious morbidity and mortality.”
Representatives of device manufacturers say that the European light touch regulation approach is fine — that there is no evidence it is any worse than America’s. But, as the medical adage goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There is no way of knowing what percentage of serious medical devices are faulty, poorly designed or have had to be recalled, because the European authorities have no centrally maintained register listing the devices on the market. In short, they do not know exactly what patients have had put into them in the first place.
Nor do they know on what evidence market entry was based. No European governmental regulator has it — scientific data sits with the manufacturers and the private companies that “approve” the device. As the head of device regulation in the US, Dr Jeffrey Shuren, said: “For the public in the EU, there is no transparency. The approval [requirements] are just what deal is cut between the device company and the private [organisation].”
Even data about devices that have been pulled from the market is virtually impossible to come by. When the BMJ — together with two doctors from Oxford University — contacted 192 manufacturers of withdrawn medical devices requesting evidence of the clinical data used to approve their devices, they denied us access, claiming that “clinical data is proprietary information”, that it was “company confidential information” and that they could discuss only “publicly available information” — of which there is very little.
Likewise, when we asked the relevant commercial regulatory bodies for the scientific rationale for approval of various devices that had been recalled, the results were stark. This information was classed as confidential because they were working as a client on behalf of the manufacturers — not the people who have them implanted in their bodies.
Even the Freedom of Information Act is of little help in obtaining information on any adverse events. The BMJ/Channel 4 Dispatches attempts to get access to adverse incident reports for specific implantables from the UK national regulator through the act were thwarted because it is overridden by medical device legislation. Article 15 of the EU Medical Devices Directive states: “Member States shall ensure that all the parties involved in the application of this Directive are bound to observe confidentiality with regard to all information obtained in carrying out their tasks.”
Even the Association of British Healthcare Industries, a trade organisation of device manufacturers, agrees that the lack of transparency leads to misunderstanding and mistrust. “Today it is very hard for anyone, even manufacturers and authorities, let alone citizens, to find out what products are approved to be on the market. We would like to see enhanced transparency and information to patients, citizens and all EU government authorities.”
Signs of change
So what does this mean? It means that doctors and patients are left to trust the companies to provide them with information about the benefits and harms of using their products. But with little scrutiny, oversight and transparency, there are no guarantees of this being a fair reflection of what their data — where they have it — actually says.
But there is a movement for change. As Krumholz says: “I think one day people will look back and say now wait a minute. Half of the data were beyond public view and yet people were making decisions every day about these products? How did you let that happen? And I’m not sure how we let it happen.
“But I hope we’ll enter an era where that will be over, and in fact there will be a great sharing of data, that we’ll be able to have a public dialogue that’s truly informed by the totality of evidence, and that we’ll be able to make choices that are based on all of that
evidence, knowing that there are no perfect drugs. That’s always going to be a trade off. But we ought to be informed by all the evidence when we’re making these decisions.”
29 Nov 2011 | Media Freedom, News and features
As British journalism faces the most significant public inquiry in a generation, Julian Petley talks to former Press Council chief Louis Blom-Cooper about ethics, public debate and maintaining a free press
The Leveson inquiry, whose remit includes examining “the culture, practices, and ethics of the press”, as well as making recommendations for a “new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press:, represents a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform the behaviour of the press and the manner in which it is regulated. Why twice? Because we’ve actually been here before.
During the 80s, intrusive and generally excessive behaviour by the popular press led to a growing number of calls in Parliament for newspapers to be regulated more effectively. In 1981, Frank Allaun introduced what was to be the first of a series of private members’ Bills calling for a statutory right of reply for members of the public against whom allegations had been made in the media as a whole; Austin Mitchell introduced a similar Bill in 1984, and in 1987 Ann Clywd brought forward her Unfair Reporting and Right of Reply Bill. These were all Labour MPs, but in 1987 the Tory MP William Cash presented his Right of Privacy Bill, and the following year another Tory, John Browne, introduced a Protection of Privacy Bill, closely followed by Labour MP Tony Worthington’s Right of Reply Bill.
In 1980, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom set up an independent inquiry into the Press Council, chaired by Geoffrey Robertson QC. This produced the highly critical report People Against the Press, which called for the Council to be given considerably sharper teeth and for the creation of a statutory press ombudsman, as well as for a Freedom of Information Act and the relaxation of laws which hindered investigative reporting. (In the present context, this is a work which urgently needs revisiting.) In February 1987, Lord Longford initiated a debate on press standards in the Lords, and in July of the same year Labour forced a debate in the Commons on Murdoch’s acquisition of the Today newspaper.
By the late 1980s, loud demands for press reform were therefore very firmly on the political and social agenda. This led to the appointment in 1988 of the eminent QC Sir Louis Blom-Cooper as the new head of the Press Council, with the aim of making it a more respected, authoritative and effective self-regulatory body. Like Geoffrey Robertson, Blom-Cooper was concerned both to protect, and indeed to enlarge, the freedom to practise serious journalism which was clearly in the public interest, but also to provide forms of redress for those who had been the victims of mere muckraking and scandalmongering.
The problem was, however, that the popular press cared little for the former kind of journalism but was determined to protect the latter at all costs. Thus Blom-Cooper’s reforms not only found little support amongst owners and editors (and by no means only at the popular end of the market), but he himself became the target of press mischief-making, both in the newspapers themselves and, more damagingly still, behind the scenes in Westminster and Whitehall. Thus the Council was described in the news- papers it was supposed to be regulating as consisting of “pompous laymen and self-important journalists”, as straying “too far into the jungles of taste and discretion”, as a “bunch of loonies” (the Sun, inevitably) and as issuing “hectoring encyclicals”.
Seemingly showing little faith in Blom-Cooper’s reforms, in 1989 the government responded to the growing clamour over press misbehaviour by establishing a committee of inquiry under Sir David Calcutt QC, whose remit was to “consider what measures (whether legislative or otherwise) are needed to give further protection to individual privacy from the activities of the press and improve recourse against the press for the individual citizen”. The writing was clearly on the wall for the Council, and indeed Calcutt was to recommend its abolition and its replacement by the Press Complaints Commission, a body with, to the delight of the press, an even narrower remit than its predecessor, being an organisation which was concerned solely with receiving, mediating and adjudicating on complaints.
The press attitude to Louis Blom-Cooper’s reforms demonstrated all too clearly that the newspaper owners and editors simply would not countenance any self-regulatory measure of which they themselves did not approve. Furthermore, they used their considerable political influence to help into existence a neutered body with which they would feel considerably more at ease. And as absolutely nothing has changed, at least for the better, since the death of the Press Council and the birth of the PCC, this immediately raises a crucial question: even if Leveson does come up with proposals for effective press reform, would the government be prepared to enact them in the teeth of massive, daily press hostility? Past experience suggests that it would not. Even now the knives are out for Leveson in papers such as the Daily Mail, and it’s likely that the government is being relentlessly lobbied by the press barons behind Leveson’s back. Indeed, given that one of the other matters which Leveson is investigating is ‘the relationship between national newspapers and politicians’, he already has a ready-made case study right under his nose.
Julian Petley: What opportunities for press reform do you think are presented by the Leveson Inquiry?
Louis Blom-Cooper: In my view, Leveson presents us with a golden opportunity to do something on the grand scale. All the focus on the press has been, for historical reasons, on complaints, but handling complaints is a disciplinary function, it’s not about monitoring or supervising. What the public needs is to know what its press is doing on its behalf, and also what it is not doing — for example, the reporting of the activities of government prior to the war in Iraq, about which we were left almost totally in the dark because newspapers were not reporting them.
Julian Petley: There has been a great deal of discussion about whether any new arrangements should be independent, self-regulatory or statutory. What’s your view?
Louis Blom-Cooper: I go absolutely spare when people say that whatever intervention there is it must be non-statutory. This is a total nonsense. It depends entirely on what the statute seeks to achieve and what it contains. I also think we need to get rid of the word “regulation”; what we actually need is an independent body which carries out monitoring — independent monitoring of the press. The word “regulation” implies, I think, to some people, some form of executive power, and what I would propose does not contain executive power.
Any form of public intervention to create such a body would require legislation in the first instance. But one absolutely does not want the supervision to be carried out by government itself, rather the government should establish an independent, standing body by means of statute, namely a Commission. The statute establishing the Commission would also set up an Appointments Commission which would consist of, for example, the chairmen of the British Library, the British Museum, the Association of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of Universities, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the Lord President of the Court of Sessions; they wouldn’t be specifically named people, but the people who held these offices at the time of selection. One would thus put between the institution of government and the public itself a wholly independent body, independently selected.
Julian Petley: What powers would this body have?
Louis Blom-Cooper: This brings us back to the nature of the body itself. I would have a standing Royal Commission composed of people who were entirely independent of publishing in any form and appointed in the fashion which I’ve just mentioned. And it should certainly include members of the public; half of the people appointed to the Press Council were members of the public, and every year we used to receive more than 1,000 applications. This certainly wasn’t replicated in the PCC. As I’ve said, this body should be conceived on the grand scale. For example, it should be involved in the question of the education and training of journalists, and in ensuring that there is plurality of press ownership, so that in the case of mergers they can examine whether or not they should take place. In all of these matters it should be undertaking investigations, not exercising executive power. What I do think vitally important would be the Commission’s ability to conduct public inquiries, and the statute would have to give it all the necessary procedural powers to conduct such inquiries, in particular the power to subpoena witnesses. These are what the Press Council sadly, and damagingly, lacked when it carried out its inquiries into press behaviour in the Peter Sutcliffe case and the 1990 Strangeways Prison riot. These would be statutory powers, but they would be procedural, they wouldn’t deal with the substance.
Julian Petley: How would the Commission be funded?
Louis Blom-Cooper: The Commission would have to be funded by Parliament, to whom it would be answerable, and they would have to go to Parliament every year with their budget, just as the Supreme Court has to do, to ask for money to support their activities. So it would have to be funded out of the public purse and not, for example, by a levy on the newspapers: one doesn’t want the press to have any interest, as it were, in the activities of this body. My parallel here, structurally and constitutionally, would be the Standing Royal Commission on the Environment, which is constantly looking at what’s happening to the environment, or PhonepayPlus [formerly known as ICSTIS], the regulatory body for all premium rate phone-paid services in the United Kingdom.
Julian Petley: Would the Commission deal with complaints against individual newspapers?
Louis Blom-Cooper: No doubt one of the Commission’s functions might involve receiving and adjudicating on complaints, but I don’t think that complaints are what really matters here. And, incidentally, insofar as complaints do matter, in my view the first clause of the PCC Code, which has to do with accuracy, is far more important than the one pertaining to privacy. The real problem is the daily lying, cheating and distorting in the press, all of which fall under the first clause of the Code.
Julian Petley: Indeed. Let’s just remind ourselves of what this actually says: (i) The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures. (ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology published. In cases involving the Commission, prominence should be agreed with the PCC in advance. (iii) The press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact. Now, this is trampled on daily and routinely treated with absolute contempt, particularly by the popular press. You have only to open any popular paper with the code beside you to realise the yawning chasm between the rule and the reality. Thus it’s entirely unsurprising that the PCC’s own statistics reveal that, in 2009, 87.2 per cent of the complaints which it received concerned accuracy and opportunity to reply, and only 23.7 per cent were about privacy.
Louis Blom-Cooper: Indeed, but I’m not sure that I’d necessarily get rid of the PCC under the arrangements which I’ve just outlined — if the industry itself wishes to deal with complaints against its members, why the hell shouldn’t it? It seems to me a perfectly sensible exercise on the part of any employer to want to know what is in fact happening amongst his own employees. On the other hand, it does need to be stressed that self-regulation in the newspaper industry has proved to be self-serving; it aims to protect the newspaper industry from anything that would impose responsible conduct on proprietors, editors and journalists by an independent agency. It has palpably not served the public interest. And the PCC Code is constructed entirely within the newspaper industry for the benefit of its practitioners, rather than as a standard bearer of ethical behaviour for the public.
But the really important point about the body which I’m advocating is that the statutory power which it would have would be non-executive, that is to say that it would have no direct control over journalists or editors — it would act by precept. Its main function would be monitoring — looking at the press day in and day out and telling the public what it is and, equally importantly, isn’t, doing. It could organise conferences with practitioners in journalism. It would keep under review all the laws affecting the press. It would make representation to the Competition Commission in cases involving takeovers. It should promote centres for the advanced study of and research in journalism. In all these things the Commission would aim to assist the newspaper industry in defining a set of workable standards, and to act as a forum for public debate on the freedom of the press.
It really is extremely important to understand, as I said in my 2007 lecture in honour of Professor Harry Street [“regulation of the media is entirely compatible with, indeed required by, society’s commitment to the values of freedom of speech. There is a need for a new watchdog which barks authoritatively, and, where appropriate, in stentorian terms, but does not bite, except indirectly and influentially”].
Julian Petley: I would agree entirely, but unfortunately the press has done its absolute utmost to equate regulation with censorship.
Louis Blom-Cooper: Yes it has, but what I’m talking about has nothing to do with controlling the press, because I regard all press freedom as simply a manifestation of our individual freedom; that is to say, we give to the press the duty to practise collectively and on our behalf the freedom of expression which we all possess under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Freedom of speech belongs to all of us, it belongs equally to those who work in the media and to those who don’t. It’s particularly important to understand that such a conception of freedom of expression rules out the licensing of journalists. As Harry Street himself argued in Freedom, the Individual and the Law, journalism is “the exercise by occupation of the right to free expression available to every citizen. That right, being available to all, cannot in principle be withdrawn from a few by any system of licens- ing or professional registration”. No one can be prevented from exercising free speech other than by a law which applies to everybody. But, of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong in restricting and confining freedom of expression by rules of law which do apply to everyone. If freedom of the press means no more than our collective rights performed on our behalf by those daily engaged in newsgathering, then we (the public), in the form of democratic government, should determine how far we should restrict our collective rights, and how the press is to be monitored and supervised. And it is certainly the case that current concerns about the standards of journalism suffice to demand both public debate and governmental action.
Julian Petley: Again, I would agree, but unfortunately the way in which press owners and their appointed editors understand press freedom in this country has precious little to do with Article 10. What they appear to mean by press freedom is the freedom to do just what the hell they like with the newspapers which they own and run. What we have here is in fact simply a smokescreen, the assertion of a property right in the guise of a free speech right, and an extremely arrogant claim that newspapers should be immune from regula- tions which apply to everyone else.
Louis Blom-Cooper: But such a position is wholly untenable. Tell me where, constitutionally, do they get that idea from? Maybe things have developed in this fashion, but tell me what is the legal basis for the present state of affairs? The only legal basis for freedom of the press is Article 10.
Julian Petley: Of course, but the kind of people to whom I’m referring don’t give a damn about Article 10 — all they’re concerned with is the threat posed by Article 8 to their commercial lifeblood of kiss ’n’ tell stories. Indeed, they want the government to rip up the Human Rights Act (HRA) and to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and their papers are filled day in and day out with the most poisonous and ill-informed stories peddling this particular line. The fact that British newspapers clearly hate the whole notion of human rights tells you everything you need to know about the fundamentally populist, illiberal and indeed anti-democratic nature of much of the British press.
Louis Blom-Cooper: Maybe, but the press’ argument is hopeless, because they’re caught by the Human Rights Act whether they like it or not. And the whole campaign against both the Act and the Convention is just historically illiterate and utter nonsense. One of the things which I found most disappointing about Ed Miliband’s speech at this year’s Labour conference was that there was absolutely no acknowledgement of probably the best thing that Labour did when it was in office, namely to introduce the Human Rights Act. There’s Nick Clegg nailing his flag to the mast of the HRA, and delightfully so, but how much better it would have been if Miliband had said that “we are the architects of the HRA and we have no intention ever of seeing it destroyed”.
Julian Petley: Which they’ll never say, because they wake up every morning terrified of what has been written about them in the right-wing press. What Leveson really needs to investigate is how we’ve arrived at a situation in which, thanks to politicians’ pusillanimity in the face of newspaper bullying, the likes of Paul Dacre, who is accountable only to his readers, effectively dictate government policy on a wide range of social issues. However, turning back to Leveson, do you think that the Calcutt Inquiry, the death of the Press Council and the subsequent creation of the Press Complaints Commission hold any lessons for the present moment?
Louis Blom-Cooper: The Calcutt Committee came to the conclusion that a body like the Press Council which, under my chairmanship, was pro- moting the freedom of the press was incompatible with a complaints body. And that was the reason for getting rid of it — the newspaper industry did not like the way that I was wanting to take the Council, to make it a public body which, whilst dealing with complaints, was very much there for the public. In other words, its primary function was not to protect the industry but to give the public something which they could recognise and accept with confidence as being on their side. So it was in the industry’s interest that the PCC was established, and from my very first day at the Council prominent people in the newspaper industry set about getting rid of me. And when Calcutt was set up, the industry saw this as the perfect opportunity to further their interests in the abolition of the Press Council.
This article appears in Dark Matter the new edition of Index on Censorship magazine, which explores science and censorship.
Follow Index’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry here and on Twitter @IndexLeveson
29 Nov 2011 | News and features, Volume 40.04 Winter 2011
A fresh round of climate science emails were hacked and released to the public last week. With the debate over secrecy in science back in the headlines, science writer Fred Pearce makes the argument for open access
Steve McIntyre is a pernickety Canadian. A retired mining geologist, trained mathematician and amateur climatologist, he has for the past eight years locked horns with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, trying to gain access to their data on the history of global temperatures.
He is not (repeat: not) paid by, beholden to or in regular contact with fossil fuel companies or lobby groups trying to undermine climate change science. He is not even a climate sceptic. For years, McIntyre has been asking for CRU’s “crown jewels”, raw data assembled from weather stations round the world that it says proves how much the world has warmed in the past 160 years.
He does not believe this conclusion is a big lie. But he does want to see for himself. And in particular to look at how the data had been “manipulated” — a perfectly honourable process in which, for instance, some weather stations are made to count for more than others because they represent large areas with few weather stations, while others are discounted because their rural locations have been invaded by growing cities.
It’s not what everybody wants to do on a Saturday night, but surely he is exactly the kind of citizen investigator the 2000 Freedom of Information Act was intended to help.
Of course, his persistence has not made him a friend of CRU’s director Phil Jones. The crown jewels are his life’s work. For years Jones held out, with the backing of his university’s Freedom of Information (FOI) officers, from releasing the data to McIntyre. Jones said it was commercially valuable. He said it was his intellectual property. He said revealing it would damage international relations. CRU has been congenitally hostile to FOI requests from McIntyre and others. At the end of 2009, 105 FOI requests had been submitted to UEA for CRU data, of which only ten had been acceded to in full.
The crown jewels and data libertarians
The battle between the two men for the crown jewels was the backdrop — and very possibly the motive — for the still-mysterious hacking of CRU’s emails and their publication online at the end of 2009. Much of the world’s science community sided with Jones in the resulting “climategate” saga, condemning what they regarded as politically and commercially motivated attacks on their research.
But others took McIntyre’s side, seeing him as a data libertarian. And last June, following a new request for the data from Jonathan Jones, an Oxford physicist and “climate agnostic”, the FOI’s commissioner, Christopher Graham, finally ruled that the crown jewels should be handed over. And they were, a month later. The world did not fall in.
If CRU had been more open with its data from the start, a great deal of time and angst on the part of its scientists — and a great deal of public uttering of paranoid nonsense from climate deniers — would have been avoided. And if, in the months before the hack, Jones and his colleagues had not spent ever more time bitching about McIntyre and scheming to keep their data and working methods secret, then the emails would have contained little of outside interest.
Graham’s decision unlocks some four million temperature readings taken at 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. But as the journalist Jonathan Jones put it, “the most significant features of this decision are the precedents that have been set”. It could open the door to thousands of other British researchers being required to share their data with the public. Good.
Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, universities, like other public institutions, must share their data unless there are good reasons not to. It is now clear that the good reasons have to be just that — not excuses. Graham, who is the final arbiter in FOI requests, was scathing in his ruling that CRU claims that sharing data would harm international relations were “highly speculative”. And on commercial considerations, he noted acidly: “it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information”.
But should all publicly funded data be free, and all publicly funded researchers required to hand it over? In an age when data distribution is so easy, it is hard to make a case that sharing data is just too hard. After the military, scientific researchers were the first people to use the internet, precisely so they could share large data sets among themselves. So why not let us all join in? But what about emails and research notes and the data from failed experiments? Some believe requests for such stuff would both damage research and overwhelm researchers. And some think your access should depend on who you are.
At the same time as the climategate FOI requests began building up at CRU, the giant tobacco company Philip Morris began — initially anonymously — asking for data from Scottish researchers who had interviewed thousands of teenage smokers on what they thought about tobacco marketing. Not only was this expensive research – paid for by a cancer charity — it was also, as the head of the Stirling University research unit Gerard Hastings put it, “the sort of research that would get a tobacco company into trouble if it did it itself”.
The researchers have held out — and went public with their disgust in the Independent in September. But here’s the bottom line. FOI legislation is “applicant blind”, as Maurice Frankel of the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information puts it. It does not matter if the thoughts of smoking teenagers are of interest to Philip Morris or the National Heart Foundation or someone who wants to stop their child from starting to smoke. They are, and should be, all the same. Otherwise Friends of the Earth would never get pollution data.
In this case, researchers may be able to argue that disclosing the information could jeopardise future planned research, for instance by drying up funds from cancer charities. But Graham’s tough line with CRU suggests that argument is not guaranteed to succeed.
Data sharing and a climate of fear
One reason scientists have such a problem with FOI is that virtually none of them realised that it would apply to them. Certainly, the science community failed to consider the consequences or lobby for the drafting of laws that might make sense for them. Only now is the Royal Society trying to catch up by forming a working group to discuss openness in science.
It is also true that there is little consistency among scientists about what the rules on data sharing and confidentiality should be. Some peer-reviewed journals have tough rules requiring access to that data underpinning research papers, but others do not, including some academic institutions. But there is a growing move to more openness that should surely be welcomed. Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, writing in New Scientist in September, said the aim should be for “anyone, anywhere to contribute to science”. You can hear the shudders in the labs across the land. But to those who fear an avalanche of ill-informed nonsense arising from data sharing, he said: “If you care about the place of science in society or are worried about the quality of information on the web, then openness offers massive potential to engage people more deeply, educate them about how science works and increase the store of quality information on the web.”
In the months after climategate there was much discussion in the science community about the need for greater openness. But outside those in the open access movement, it has faltered. The message in the labs is that the inquiries into the affair absolved the scientists of any wrongdoing.
That is not quite true. The inquiries decided, rightly, that there was no grand conspiracy, although they felt they were not in a position to judge the finer points about the conduct of the science. The main enquiry, under Sir Muir Russell, seemed particularly confused about FOI. It noted damagingly that CRU had shown a “consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”. But on the detail it showed a sometimes breathtaking lack of attention. It concluded that “there was no attempt to delete information with respect to an [FOI] request already made”, when the emails published online revealed quite clearly that one round-robin requesting the deletion of an email correspondence was sent two days after an FOI request for precisely that information.
Much of science has “closed ranks” behind the idea that those demanding access to their data are troublemakers. Nobel laureate and Royal Society president Sir Paul Nurse says “some researchers … are getting lots of requests for, among other things, all drafts of scientific papers prior to their publication in journals, with annotations, explaining why changes were made between successive versions. If it is true, it will consume a huge amount of time. And it’s intimidating.” Maybe, but the current law allows vexatious requests to be rejected. So that is a straw man.
A fine line between the crackpot and the sublime
In any event, the whole point of research is that it should be open to maximum scrutiny. And the scientific priesthood can no longer claim that scrutiny should only be among their specialist fellows.
And there is sometimes a fine line between the crackpot and the sublime. Earth science guru Jim Lovelock — a doyen for many modern climate researchers — left institutional academia in frustration at his ideas being ostracised. The Independent began its report of the 2011 winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry, Daniel Shechtman, thus: “An Israeli scientist who was once asked to resign his research post because his discovery of a new class of solid material was too unbelievable has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry – for that same discovery.”
The charge of sloppiness in the way science often portrays its findings to the wider public is also a warning against allowing too much self-policing. In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued what it said was a summary of the findings of a detailed study of renewable energy. It headlined the claim that 77 per cent of the world’s energy needs could be met from green power by 2050. In fact, the “77 per cent” finding was the most optimistic of hundreds of academic studies reviewed in the report itself. Moreover, that particular study was conducted by one of the report’s own lead authors, who was also a Greenpeace campaigner. Curious. But most damagingly of all, this highly relevant information only emerged a month after the press release and subsequent media coverage, when IPCC got round to publishing the report itself. This was shameful spin.
The fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that “we are scientists; trust us”. Other people want to join the scientific conversation. Good scientists, interested in finding truth, should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters. The wider world instinctively knows to distrust those in all walks of life who reject openness. As McIntyre put it recently, “probably no single issue damages the reputation of the climate science community more than the refusal to show the data that supports their work”. There should, for the good of science as well as public discourse, be a presumption in favour of open access.
McIntyre, meanwhile, is still hunting. He believes CRU researchers using tree rings to unpick temperatures in past eras may have been cherry-picking their Siberian logs to help sustain the argument that recent decades are warmer than anything in the past 2,000 years. He cannot be sure, because they are still refusing to hand over their full data sets. CRU’s justifications have a familiar ring. Disclosure could do “financial harm” to the university by reducing its “ability to attract research funding”. Really?
If McIntyre eventually gets the data, could it undermine the case that man is warming the world? Certainly not; that is independent of past natural variability. Could it change our ideas about past natural climate change? Conceivably, yes. Is it a scandal that McIntyre cannot get to see the data to review CRU’s work and do his own science? I believe it is.
Fred Pearce is author of The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming (Guardian Books)
28 Nov 2011 | Leveson Inquiry
Political blogger Paul Staines, better known as Guido Fawkes, was today summoned to the Leveson Inquiry to explain how he gained access to Alastair Campbell’s witness statement three days before Campbell was due to appear in the Inquiry witness box.
Staines posted a draft of the former Number 10 communications director’s written evidence on his website yesterday, claiming he obtained it legally. The document was still available on the site today. [Update: the statement was removed at 9:30pm tonight.]
Staines is due to appear at the Inquiry on Thursday afternoon.
Lord Justice Leveson warned this morning that anyone leaking or publishing future witness statements could face high court action under a breach of section 19 of the Inquiries Act, which restricts the publication or disclosure of any testimony prior to it being made orally, outside the confidentiality circle of Leveson, his assessors, the Inquiry team and core participants.
Leveson added that he did not want to give Staines “the oxygen of additional publicity”, and so withdrew his plan of posting Campbell’s statement on the Inquiry website today, deciding to delay publication until Wednesday — the originally intended time. Associated Newspapers’ counsel, Jonathan Caplan QC, argued in favour of delaying publication, saying that relevant parties should be given time to make submissions on the Campbell evidence before it is made public. Robert Jay QC, counsel to the Inquiry, said that the version on Staines’ website was “quite an early draft.”
As with last week’s evidence, today also saw further exposure of the worst excesses of the tabloid press. Chris Jefferies, the former teacher wrongly arrested on suspicion of murdering his tenant Joanna Yeates last year, described how the media “shamefully vilified” him with coverage that was “intended to appeal in every possible way to people’s voyeuristic instincts”.
He and Jay ran through a series of headlines, largely from the Sun and the Mirror. One read “Murder police quiz nutty professor”, another “Was killer waiting in Jo’s flat?” A slew of articles labelled him a “creepy oddball”, “lewd”, a “peeping Tom” who had an obsession with death and was associated with a convicted paedophile. “The press were trying to have it every possible way,” he said.
While in custody, Jefferies was unaware of the coverage. He said lawyers and friends advised him against reading it or to go out and visit friends for fear of being “besieged” by the press. ” I felt like some recusant priest at time of reformation,” he said, “going from safe house to safe house.”
The stories were untrue, and Jefferies successfully sued eight papers in total for libel earlier this year, with the Sun being fined £18,000 and the Daily Mirror £50,000 respectively for contempt of court.
Jefferies said he would “never be able to recover” from the events of the past twelve months, and that “there will always be people…who retain the impression that I’m some sort of very weird character who is best avoided.”
Broadcaster Anne Diamond and singer Charlotte Church also gave evidence. Diamond claimed she had been targeted by Rupert Murdoch after telling him his newspapers “seem intent on ruining people’s lives.” She described a phone call she received from a News of the World reporter after a visit to a Harley Street clinic. “He said, ‘we know you’re pregnant, confirm or deny’,” Diamond said. Out of fear of miscarrying, Diamond denied she was pregnant, but said the paper called her a “liar” when her pregnancy was eventually revealed. She added that a Sun reporter posed as a doctor in the hospital where she gave birth.
She described the death of her son from cot death when he was four months old, and how, within an hour, a scrum of photographers were outside her home. Diamond added that she and her husband had “begged” Fleet Street editors to stay away from the funeral, but the couple were long-lensed by a photographer there. A photo of them carrying their son’s coffin then on the front pages of the Sun. Diamond revealed that the paper had told her and her husband they had the photo and would print it with or without the couple’s permission; claiming their image would be tarnished if they refused to co-operate with the tabloid’s cot death campaign.
When asked by the Inquiry counsel why she credited the paper with raising funds for a cot death campaign in an article earlier this year, Diamond said: “the Sun was a very large circulation tabloid paper, and we were able to use it as a force for good.”
She also upheld regulation of broadcasting as proof that solid, investigative journalism can thrive. “I wish we could achieve same in the press,” she said.
Church, meanwhile, recalled having to “suffer the indignity” photographers trying to take photos up her skirt and down her top; she described a News of the World story reporting her father’s affair as “horrific”; revealed that the paper printed details of where she lived despite having previously published a threat of plots to kidnap her.
The Sun revealed she was pregnant before her family knew, Church told the Inquiry. She said she suspected a voicemail from her doctor had been hacked by the paper. “Only my doctor and partner knew,” she said.
Church also claimed that, aged 13, she was offered either “good press” or £100,000 to sing at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng. While Church and her mother were keen on the payment, the singer’s management advised she waive the fee. Church was told Murdoch was “a very, very powerful man and [I] could certainly do with a favour of this magnitude.”
News Corporation, meanwhile, has denied the allegations and said that Church’s performance was a surprise to Murdoch.
The finger was also pointed at the police today, with former army intelligence officer Ian Hurst accusing the Metropolitan police of “corruption” and had covered up journalistic misdeeds.
Hurst was informed by BBC’s Panorama programme this year that his computer had been hacked by the News of the World, and was shown transcripts of his own emails that were sent to the Dublin office of paper in July 2006. Hurst was told that the paper hired a private detective who employed a “specialist hacker”, known as Mr X, to access his computer. Hurst revealed that, through sending a bogus email in 2006, Mr X had infected the Hurst family’s computer with a Trojan programme that could allow him to access Hurst’s messages and other documents.
Mr Hurst added that documents seized in 2007 by the police showed the security on his computer had been compromised and information had been obtained. However, he added, the authorities chose not to act. Hurst was only told by the Metropolitan police about the hacking this year. The Metropolitan police, he said, had “let society down”.
Jane Winter, director of human rights organisation British Irish Rights Watch, also told the Inquiry today that Hurst had told her earlier this year that “confidential” and sensitive” emails between them had been accessed illegally.
The hearing continues tomorrow, with evidence from Guardian journalist Nick Davies, former News of the World reporter Paul McMullen, and ex-tabloid reporter Richard Peppiatt.
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