20 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
The former TV editor of the News of the World has told the Leveson Inquiry how she “fell out of love” with the industry after being asked to write an untrue story about a celebrity being cheated on by her partner.
Sharon Marshall, now a television critic for ITV’s This Morning, said she could not stay on at the News of the World, stating she had been asked to breach the PCC code over the story. It involved a pregnant celebrity whose partner had allegedly been unfaithful, though Marshall discovered the photo evidence supplied was two years old.
“Morally, it wasn’t going to happen,” Marshall said of the story, which she refused to carry out. “I made sure I killed it.”
She then resigned from the paper despite being asked to stay on. The individual who asked her to write the story, she said, remained in their job.
She described the “tough” and competitive enviroment at the tabloid. “You literally didn’t know what the person next to you was doing.” She described editorial meetings with line managers where she would be asked what she had done to stand up a story, but not about sources.
She said she was “not involved in any direct conversation” in which she was asked to work unethically, adding that she did not see any evidence of unethical behaviour with vast majority of those she worked for.
She denied a bullying culture at the tabloids, but said that “some editors are less than idyllic.”
The Inquiry also heard extracts of Marshall’s book, Tabloid Girl, which detailed her career at the redtops. Lord Justice Leveson asked if the book was “a true story”, as its cover read. Marshall repeated that the text was filled with “heightened reality” and “a bit of topspin”.
“I was writing something somebody told me in the pub,” she told the Inquiry, adding that she did not have “hard evidence” for the stories because she was not “writing a witness statement.”
“I intended it to be a good yarn,” she said.
When Leveson questioned if “topspin” meant “lying”, Marshall said that she would call it “colour”. She later said one example of it was a part of the book in which she described how she “gatecrashed” celebrity weddings.
Another story she recounted involved her being asked to travel to Rhyl to find someone who would back up a kiss and tell story about a member of the band Steps. Marshall admitted an advert for the story, with the pre-ordained headline “My five, six, seven times a night with Steps girl”, was running before the story was written.
During a slightly tense back and forth between Marshall, Leveson and Inquiry counsel, David Barr, a defensive Marshall admitted she “shouldn’t have allowed” the book’s cover to read “a true story”, but repeated that the text involved “dramatisation”.
She concluded that the maxim her book ends with — “fuck the facts…just file” — was not one that the entire industry tabloid worked by. “It’s a few individuals,” she said. “Bad apples.”
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19 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
A former News of the World sports reporter who received a bullying compensation settlement worth almost £800,000 has said his choice to take on his bosses “finished” his career.
Matt Driscoll, who was diagnosed with severe depression in 2006, told the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon he could not “imagine any editor wanting to snap me up tomorrow.”
“I am the guy who has taken on the bosses,” he said.
Driscoll worked on the paper’s sports desk from 1997 to 2007, when he was sacked. An employment tribunal found in 2009 that the paper had discriminated against him on grounds of his disability and that the editor had presided over a culture of bullying at the redtop. He was awarded £792,736 in compensation.
He said his illness was “entirely” due to the treatment of the News of the World, and noted his doctor had advised he “distance” himself from the paper. Driscoll described receiving daily calls from the paper and being told his pay would be stalled if he sought advice from an independent doctor rather than a company nurse.
Driscoll had received a tip that Arsenal football club would play in a claret-coloured strip, though the team dismissed the claim. Some months later the story appeared in the Sun. “I received a phone call from my sports editor to say ‘we’re dead’,” Driscoll said.
He said “power corrupts” some editors, with their egos allowed to “run wild” and that some had “lost touch with reality”.
“Editors were under even more pressure than proprietors to make sure their readership stayed at a certain level,” he added. “That pressure passed down.”
Of journalism, he said, “you work at a certain level of stress but you are almost at saturation point.”
He said he had no direct involvement with phone hacking, but added that “it was known throughout the whole of Fleet Street that news reporters or feature writers could obtain mobile phone messages.”
He said any suggestion of stories being fabricated at the paper were “absolutely crazy”, claiming the litigation costs would be too high to risk.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, and will include evidence from Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror and the News of the World, who’ll be appearing via satellite; the paper’s former TV editor Sharron Marshall; Farrer & Co partner Julian Pike, and Steve Turner, who represented Matt Driscoll during his tribunal.
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08 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
A group of academics told the Leveson Inquiry today that there is no lack of ethics training for students on journalism programmes, and that the issue to address is newsroom culture.
Professor Steven Barnett, of the University of Westminster, said ethics were like a “stick of rock” running through modules taught. Brian Cathcart of Kingston University (and Index on Censorship blogger) added that, in offering ethics training, he and his colleagues sought to produce “not just journalists but reflective journalists who think about what they’re doing.”
Cathcart, also founder of the Hacked Off campaign, added that we’ve “come a long way”, noting he received no ethical training at the start of his career.
Head of journalism at City University, Professor George Brock, added that the key issue was the newsroom culture, which he said determined behaviour. Barnett added that it is impossible to teach someone how to deal with ethical problems on national tabloids. “It is a matter of individual moral courage,” he said.
Angela Phillips, of Goldsmith’s College, noted that many young graduates want to work for more ethical papers but get “trapped” due to higher salaries offered by redtops.
Lord Justice Leveson was keen to reiterate he was “not on a witch-hunt”, adding that he was “anxious to find out what has gone wrong in an industry in which there is an enormous amount that goes absolutely right.” Brunel University’s Julian Petley (also an Index on Censorship contributor), while noting that the term tabloid should not be a “dirty word”, was eager to differentiate between the redtops and broadsheets. He suggested it was time that “editors of ethical papers stop making common cause with editors of papers that have brought this Inquiry into being”, adding later that the Daily Mail “bullies” the government. Cardiff University’s Ian Hargreaves replied, “nice liberal broadsheets can be bullies as well.”
Both Petley and Phillips argued journalistic standards could be improved by a statutory right of reply and for offending newspapers to print adjudications.
Brock spoke in favour of rewriting privacy legislation, arguing that balancing Article 8 and Article 10 of the Human Rights Act had “not worked well”. He advocated legislation that protects private life while not chilling solid journalism, and called for a greater focus on public interest defences.
There was a consensus that the Press Complaints Commission needed reform, with Hargreaves arguing that robust regulation does “not come in the thickness of the armour, but in the cunningness of design.” Petley advocated a new regulatory process with a “limited” statutory backdrop and more investigatory powers, while Barnett suggested those who choose not to sign up to a new, independent self-regulatory system should pay VAT.
Petley added later that “journalism rarely recognises its own power”, while Cathcart and Barnett argued that the press had not been “caught up in the move towards greater accountability.”
“Public trust in journalism has been damaged,” Cathcart said, adding that any remedy “must be seen to be radical.”
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with evidence from former Information Commissioner Richard Thomas.
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02 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
Over the past ten days, Lord Justice Leveson has been overseeing an Inquiry that resembles more a daytime chat show than the first public examination into the standards and ethics of the British press in thirty years.
There have been some memorable moments: ex-Formula 1 boss Max Mosley claiming Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre was “completely naive about sex”; we learned Hugh Grant‘s middle name is Mungo; and on two occasions — to the horror of the the press gallery —Leveson admitted he had not read the morning papers.
But the comedy gold of the Inquiry surely came from Paul McMullan. Those watching sat agog as the News of the World deputy features editor ran through his life as a tabloid hack. He told us stories of pretending to be “Brad the rent boy” to expose a priest — “there’s two of us, in our underpants, running through a nunnery at midnight after getting the priest…it was such fun” — he admitted he “loved giving chase” to celebrities (“fun” before Princess Diana died, he said); he had tried and failed to hack David Beckham’s phone; he claimed “circulation defines the public interest”; and, in a quote he’ll now forever be associated with, affirmed that “privacy is for paedos.”
Then there was his solemn regret for having discovered actor Denholm Elliott’s homeless and drug-addicted daughter begging outside Chalk Farm tube station, took her to his flat, photographed her topless and turned it into a News of the World splash. She later killed herself.
Blend these two and you get an Inquiry that has been a cocktail of surreal, intense, sometimes hilarious, and at other times haunting.
In the first week of evidence, it was at times impossible not to feel a sense of guilt for being a journalist, as witnesses gave example after damning example of press intrusion, harassment and, in some cases, indefensible and vile exploitation. In a raw, 30-minute account, the Dowlers recounted the moment they managed to get through to their missing daughter Milly’s voicemail, leading them to believe she was alive. It was only nine years later, this year, that they were told the reason they had managed to was because Milly’s voicemail messages had been hacked and deleted to make room for new messages to come through. She was almost certainly dead at the time.
How bizarre it was to have that chilling testimony juxtaposed with Hugh Grant’s lengthy afternoon account of press intrusion, sprinkled with his wit and movie-star charm.
As the first week drew to a close, paparazzi emerged as the villains. Sienna Miller described being chased down her street by 10 photographers —- “take away the cameras,” she said, “and you’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman”. Sheryl Gascoigne recalled driving to a police station to chase off a paparazzo who was following her, only to be told nothing could be done. JK Rowling had more than one tale of being long-lensed while out with her family, with her daughter, then aged eight, being snapped in her swimsuit. These photos were later printed in OK! magazine. An image, she said, “can spread around the world like a virus”.
It was hard not to sympathise with the witnesses as they doled out story after story of questionable press standards, reminding us of the worst of the trade to which we belong and have cultivated, seemingly limitless in its desire to get just one shot.
This reminder turned into guilt with the stories of ordinary people. The pain of the McCanns was almost palpable: a couple, desperate in the search for their missing daughter, being accused in the papers more than once of killing her and freezing her body. The wrongly arrested Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies described how, in a matter of days, the British media’s distorted coverage had “vilified” him and left him “effectively under house arrest.” And there was the haunting revelation by the Watsons, whose remaining son had killed himself and was found clutching copies of the articles that had, they said, defamed their murdered daughter.
That the Dowlers in particular remained balanced, conceding that the press had been helpful in spreading information about their missing daughter, made the tabloid pill an even more bitter one to swallow.
As journalists took to the witness box, we were been doled out sizeable home truths about the British press, elements of which Alastair Campbell deemed “putrid”. He slammed the Daily Mail for a “culture of negativity”, where speed and ideology reign supreme. Former tabloid hack Richard Peppiatt portrayed a tabloid culture of bullying, fabrication and agenda-setting more intent on delivering impact than seeking truth. And then there was McMullan, who revealed his editors did indeed know about phone hacking and were “scum” for denying it.
The PCC was criticised throughout the Inquiry, notably for its failure to investigate phone hacking in 2009 or mitigate in the coverage doled out to the McCanns. JK Rowling called the regulator “a wrist-slapping exercise at best”. Libel was also repeatedly highlighted as something for the “rich”.
Various solutions that were offered included a public interest advisory body to help guide reporters; a regulator with the power to issue fines and impose sanctions; and a league table of newspapers to see which ones adhered to a code of conduct. A cheaper and more accessible system in which it would be possible for libel or privacy cases to heard in county courts, not just the high court, was also suggested. Unsurprisingly, Max Mosley championed a policy of prior notification to warn people before publishing stories exposing their private lives.
The past ten days of revelations, criticisms and potential solutions hammered home the quandary Leveson has on his hands: how to avoid infringing free speech — “the cornerstone of democracy”, to quote Hugh Grant — while finding ways to restrain further bad behaviour in the British press. Listening to Nick Davies’ account alone, recounting a history of rigorous and meticulous reporting, we were reminded that it was an act of brilliant journalism that exposed an act of putrid journalism; and it is of credit to this Inquiry that it is giving those on the receiving end a rare platform to criticise the redtops.
But there is far more to come. Before Christmas we will hear from the former information commissioner, a solicitor for phone hacking victims, and News International. In the new year editors and proprietors will take to the witness box to face the accusations of unethical behaviour they have received.
McMullan may have set the entertainment bar high, but what will go on in court 73 is set to be no less intense than ten days just passed.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
