10 Nov 2011 | Uncategorized
This post was originally published in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian on Wednesday 9 November
James Murdoch knows his future as the heir apparent is hanging by a thread. As he prepares for Thursday’s second, and crucial, appearance before MPs, he will reflect that he remains in his job only thanks to family loyalty, a Saudi prince and some weak questioning last time. For all the hullaballoo surrounding his first appearance before the Commons culture and media select committee in July, the young Murdoch managed to bat away the questions easily as he chaperoned his smarting and near-silent father, Rupert, who was sitting alongside him. The amateurishness of most of his inquisitors – a perennial problem with parliament’s weak committee system – helped his cause.
Since then the questions have mounted. In September the News of the World’s former legal manager, Tom Crone, told MPs he was “certain” James Murdoch had been informed about the now famous email showing that phone hacking went beyond one rogue reporter. Murdoch had told MPs in July that he had not seen the email when he signed off the settlement to Gordon Taylor in 2008. Both cannot be right.
News International’s senior figures are fighting for survival. Many shareholders in its global arm, News Corporation, have signalled their disquiet. Murdoch Jr survived a vote at the company’s AGM in California a month ago only because of the company’s preferential share arrangements, which are skewed towards family and friends.
Is he, as some have described, a dead man walking? Thursday’s session will provide clues but is unlikely to produce the killer punch. For that, attention will turn to the next stage of the Leveson inquiry, which will hear from the victims. The important thing is that Leveson differentiate between specific crimes – and many of the allegations do revolve around criminality – and the broader conclusions about the UK media.
Almost every day brings further damaging revelations about News International. The spying antics of the private detective Derek Webb are just the latest. It seems that anyone who came into News International’s orbit was tailed or bugged. The Metropolitan police inquiry confirmed last week that the number of possible victims of phone hacking has risen to 5,800 – far higher than previously thought.
The company has launched a damage limitation exercise on all fronts. It is desperately seeking to reach out-of-court settlements with as many people as possible. Some estimates put the total bill at £200m – a sizeable chunk even for NI. Some in the organisation are seeking to learn the lessons. One of the few slivers of light in this tawdry affair has been the strong coverage devoted by the Times and Sky television to the actions of their bosses. That takes gumption, even if the bosses’ power is fading fast.
Since the understandably fevered reaction to the Milly Dowler revelations in July, the atmosphere has calmed. Lord Justice Leveson and his team have started proficiently. They are fully aware of the balance they have to strike between recommending measures that will improve journalistic standards while not limiting the ability of reporters to find out the awkward truth that the rich and powerful seek to withhold.
The Press Complaints Commission, under its new chairman, Lord Hunt, is looking afresh at its own practices, which were flawed in both conception and execution. The PCC was a mediator, not a regulator. It needs to start regulating and presiding over standards, in order to stave off the ever strong calls for rules by statute. It is important that the PCC, an organisation long dismissed as toothless, seeks to take the initiative, and presents a strong agenda for reform to Leveson in the new year. Hunt has already begun to ask searching questions and to take some useful advice.
Some media-watchers have been bending the ear of politicians in their attempt to take revenge on Murdoch and to “control” a profession that Tony Blair unwisely described as “feral beasts”. As I made clear in my presentation to Leveson, the real danger facing journalism is that it is too weak. It finds out far too little. It too often swallows the spin and takes no for an answer.
A perfect press does not exist anywhere: it never has and never will. Given the inevitable choice, would we rather have a press that is excessively pliant, cautious and deferential, or one that sometimes gets it wrong? Would we want a media shackled as in France? Not only do privacy laws there prevent much legitimate investigation of financial and other public misdeeds, but more broadly journalists are frightened stiff of offending politicians. How else could one explain the reluctance for five days to publish the embarrassing Sarkozy-Obama taped discussion about Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu? At Index on Censorship we catalogue daily cases of not just egregious harassment of journalists by authoritarian regimes, but the more subtle restrictions imposed by western governments.
Britain’s media remains, mercifully, raucous. Even so it already operates under a vast array of restrictions – from dangerously restrictive libel laws to official secrecy and various self-denying ordinances. The phone hacking affair casts a dispiriting light on the state of journalism. But it is about far more than that. It is most of all about corporate governance. Although other newspapers will be implicated, this was mainly about one media organisation. News International accrued such power that it believed it had impunity to act as it pleased. It dominated public life, dictating to politicians what they should say and do.
That all this happened was an indictment of two generations of politicians, from Tony Blair flying to an Australian island to kneel at the feet of Rupert Murdoch to David Cameron’s intimate Oxfordshire suppers with Rebekah Brooks, and police chiefs taking jollies. One under-reported story in this saga was Blair’s decision to become godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.
NI executives behaved as they did because they were allowed to by politicians who were in turns cowardly and titillated by the invitation to the corporate top table. This was a vivid example of a corrupted public life. The most heartening factor in the affair is that it was investigative journalism that, finally, extracted the information. If Leveson and the politicians draw the wrong conclusions, if they are lulled into thinking that journalists rather than corporate executives accrued too much power, the consequences for democracy will be stark.
21 Oct 2011 | Leveson Inquiry
Cross-posted at Hacked Off
The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, has joined the debate about press reform with a speech warning of the risk of throwing the baby of freedom of expression out with the bathwater of cruel and unfair journalism. Things are not as bad as they may seem, he implied. Self-regulation in the form of the Press Complaints Commission has not failed, though it “might be strengthened”. The really serious problems, where they arise, can continue to be left to the law.
The plea for freedom of expression was eloquent and clearly heartfelt, though hardly controversial. Is there any serious participant in this debate who does not believe in the value of freedom of expression, or anybody who believes it should be placed at hazard when addressing the problems before the Leveson inquiry? Here, Lord Judge is pushing at an open door.
His arguments about the status quo, by contrast, are largely wrong-headed. Two stand out. The first is that the courts are successful in restricting serious wrongdoing and the second relates to the role and faults of the PCC. Let us look at them.
Lord Judge says this:
“First, crime is crime. If and when crime is committed by reporters with or without the support and encouragement of an editor, it should be investigated, and if on the available evidence there is a reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution, he or they are prosecuted. We do not say that the General Medical Council and self-regulation have failed when, as sometimes happens, a doctor sexually molests one or more of his patients, or like Dr Shipman murders them.”
Later he repeats the point:
“We must remember, that whatever lies ahead, the ordinary law of the land will continue. Crime will be crime.”
The Lord Chief Justice is saying that we can rely on the courts to deal with serious wrongdoing perpetrated in the name of journalism, just as it delivered justice and deterrence in the case of Harold Shipman. But can we? What if the courts had convicted and sentenced Shipman and he had emerged from jail to commit the same crime again? And what if, after a second conviction, he reoffended a third time? We would wonder then about the effectiveness of the courts.
This is what is happening in relation to the most cruel and unfair journalism we see today. In the cases of Robert Murat, Kate and Gerry McCann, the so-called Tapas Seven and Christopher Jefferies, victims of the grossest press cruelty went to court and won, yet the same group of papers went on to commit the same offences again, and again, and again. The law is not preventing this.
For another example, look at the libel record of the Express newspapers as compiled by Roy Greenslade and listed here. It is, as he remarks, an inglorious inventory, and the offences just go on and on.
Why is this serial offending happening? It is partly that the punishments available are no deterrent. The Express papers paid the McCanns £550,000 for well over 100 libels. That is around £5,000 each. Eight papers are reportedto have paid Christopher Jefferies around £500,000 for three days of outrageous character assassination: that is some £20,000 per paper per day (in the otherwise quiet New Year weekend). At these prices libel is good business.
To say that the ordinary law of the land will continue, as Lord Judge does, is therefore no reassurance for future victims of false, cruel and unfair journalism. Crime may be crime, but for the tabloid press this crime pays, and for the victims (just ask them) the scars remain forever.
Turning to the PCC, the Lord Chief Justice points out in his speech:
“Membership is not obligatory. The Commission has no investigative power. In reality it has no disciplinary power. When it works, as most of the time it does, it is because the press itself is prepared to comply with its rulings, not because it is under legal compulsion to do so. Its main role, and I do not seek to diminish it with faint praise, is to provide a sort of ombudsman/mediation service between the newspaper and an individual group which is aggrieved by an article. It cannot award compensation. To criticise the PCC for failing to exercise powers it does not have is rather like criticising a judge who passes what appears to be a lenient sentence, when his power to pass a longer sentence is curtailed.”
The problem here is not with the critics but the advocates. The press has always characterised the PCC as a regulator or self-regulator, even though, as Lord Judge says, it has never fulfilled that function. Editors and proprietors have made this claim repeatedly over the years because they want the public to believe the industry is regulated when it is not. This is a confidence trick, a trick which has helped to shelter the kind of newsroom culture that gives us serial libelling by the Express and the hacking of the voicemails of Milly Dowler, Sara Payne and Shaun Russell.
It is true that the PCC does valuable complaints work and that whatever new dispensation emerges after Leveson, someone will need to do that work. It is also true, however, that the leadership of the PCC over the years has been complicit in the confidence trick and those people have some responsibilities to acknowledge.
Here it is worth noting a factual error made by Lord Judge. He cannot be blamed for the error because it is a common one, which the PCC has never been at pains to correct. In fact the PCC commissioners do have investigative power; they just choose not to use it. Article 53.1A of the PCC Articles of Association states:
“It shall also be the function of Commission to consider and pronounce on issues relating to the Code of Practice which the Commission, in its absolute discretion considers to be in the public interests.”
That is a clear mandate to examine infringements of the code without waiting for a complaint by a directly affected party — a mandate the commissioners failed to fulfil, for example, throughout the whole year of the Madeleine McCann affair, as flagrant breaches of the code occurred every day. It is a depressing and revealing irony that when, in a very rare instance, they did exercise this power, in the case of phone hacking, they used their authority to exonerate the News of the World and turn the blame on the Guardian.
An important point which also does not seem to be understood by Lord Judge relates to what happens after something goes wrong. Any regulator worthy of the name will conduct post mortems to establish the facts, where responsibilities lie and what lessons should be learned. If the press had been regulated, or effectively self-regulated, such post mortems would have occurred after each of the scandals listed above, with the consequence (one would hope) that the later scandals might not have occurred. As a result, the burden on Lord Judge’s courts might have been lighter and their relative impotence in newspaper libel matters less exposed.
The PCC, while it does good but limited mediation work, has never done this kind of work. Instead it has functioned as a figleaf for press misconduct. It has had no obvious impact on ethical standards in the national tabloid press and it stood by as an unregulated industry slid into its present state of disrepute.
Lord Judge say he would prefer press self-regulation with a “strengthened” and “more powerful” PCC that is not a “toothless tiger”. It must be “all-inclusive”, with authority “over the entire newspaper industry”. And like everybody else he does not want political interference or censorship. How to square these circles is a difficult problem with which Lord Justice Leveson, his panel and many other interested parties are already wrestling. Welcome to the debate, your lordship.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University and is a founder of Hacked Off. He tweets at@BrianCathcart
28 Sep 2011 | Uncategorized
Index on Censorship’s event with the Hacked Off campaign and English PEN at Labour party conference was a useful exercise in ruling out possibilities. The phone hacking scandal is just one in a series that has rocked Britons’ faith in their institutions: a theme picked up by Labour leader Ed Miliband in his speech yesterday. Yet some of the solutions proposed for rebuilding faith in the fourth estate would have a disproportionate effect on freedom of expression. That’s why these events across party conference season have proved useful. Whilst there is no clear consensus on what should be done, the debate is ruling out options that would clearly be unpalatable, and slowly a middle-ground is emerging.
At our events at both Labour and Liberal Democrat conference it was evident there is a strong anti-Murdoch feeling amongst delegates. But alongside this, the consensus is that a free press is essential in holding politicians to account.
As for ruling out the unpalatable, Ivan Lewis MP, Labour’s Shadow Culture Secretary in his keynote speech to the party’s conference argued:
We need a new system of independent regulation including proper like for like redress which means mistakes and falsehoods on the front page receive apologies and retraction on the front page. And as in other professions the industry should consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off.
The second idea provoked an immediate response. On this blog, Padraig Reidy described it as a “bizarre distortion of the idea of a free press. Roy Greenslade pointed out countries that licensed journalists included Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, King Khalifa’s Bahrain and President Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan. Labour MP Tom Harris also sounded caution tweeting: “If a journalist commits a serious misdemeanour, they can already be sacked.” Dan Hodges, an influential Labour activist went further: “On the day of the leader’s speech we announce the state banning of journalists. Labour is ceasing to exist as a serious political party.”
It is interesting that Lewis did not float this idea at our fringe event. Though Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust distanced his organisation from the idea, he did point out that professional registration bears a similarity to John Lloyd’s proposals for a “Journalism Society” outlined in the Financial Times in July.
However regulation moves forward, the PCC in its current form is no longer credible. One reccurring theme is that Northern & Shell (owner of the Daily Express amongst other titles) don’t even belong to this arbitrator.
At these events, English PEN and Index on Censorship have outlined how not to do press regulation. Jonathan Heawood, the Director of English PEN, has warned against imposing regulations that could constrain investigative journalism, echoing John Kampfner’s warning that the real problem is that the press find out too little rather than too much.
Heawood told the Labour meeting:
“In my five-year-old son’s language, writers of conscience around the world are the “goodies” and the News of the World journalists hacking into Milly Dowler’s voicemail are the “baddies”. The problem is: in the real world, a lot of great journalism happens in the grey area between good and bad. Anyone who thinks that we need tougher media laws in this country should realise how desperately constrained investigative journalists are already.”
Through the Libel Reform Campaign alongside Sense About Science, we have campaigned effectively for a stronger public interest defence as the existing defence in libel has not been of practical use for authors, scientists, NGOs, and citizen journalists. It’s also been pointed out that internationally, states will be watching how Britain approaches press regulation. Any impediments to free expression imposed here will make it easier for despots abroad to justify their actions, as China did when David Cameron floated the idea of banning social media during disturbances.
Public confidence in the press has been shaken. It won’t be restored by ill-considered proposals from politicians. As the Leveson inquiry begins, the focus for reform must be clearer.
You can sign the Libel Reform Campaign’s petition here (http://libelreform.org/sign)
