Leveson: journalist conscience clause could be Inquiry’s lasting legacy!

The biggest irony of yesterday’s publication of the report from the Leveson Inquiry into the standards, ethics and abuses of the UK press, is that in recent years our press in this country has been incredibly well-behaved.

With Sir Brian’s Sword of Damocles hanging over their collective heads the press has, in effect, reformed itself.

I offer this as evidence.  Firstly, not one single national newspaper published the photos of the Duchess of Cambridge topless on holiday.  In fact only one newspaper, in what was a deliberate two fingers to Sir Brian, published the photos of Harry in Vegas.

Is this some Damascene Conversion to the right of privacy?  Almost certainly not and one suspects that once the haggling over self-regulation “underpinned by statue” is out of the way, normal service will be resumed.

However, buried in Sir Brian’s mammoth publication is one recommendation which could have very far-reaching consequences for how our press behaves, namely the conscience clause in journalist employment contracts, which would allow individual journalists to opt out of working on any story which they believe to be unethical.

When I heard the Labour MP Tom Watson speak in Birmingham earlier this year, he offered the view that the abuses at the News of the World could never have happened if Wapping had been unionised and there had been a counterbalance to employer abuse of power.

There are many in the trade union movement who agree with him and it would seem that Leveson does too.  Some of the most interesting sections of the report in fact, detail the culture of abuse and bullying at Wapping which fed the (alleged) criminal behaviour of journalists.

There are numerous positives that have come out of the Leveson Inquiry and its resulting report, but the conscience clause, and the increasing recognition of the positive effects that workplace unionisation can have in curbing employee abuse, could be Sir Brian’s most lasting legacy.

 

Savile scandal is a body blow to the BBC’s editorial credibility

The facts behind the Jimmy Savile Scandal are, unfortunately, horribly familiar, but the puzzling bit about the whole affair is not that Savile managed to get away with it for so long, but the editorial decision-making process within the BBC once Newsnight got wind of the story.

Here was a story which was potentially career-making for the journalists involved, requiring brave editorial decisions and the backing of senior management.  This could have been one of the BBC’s finest hours, fearlessly turning the spotlight on itself and, in turn, metaphorically pulling down the Saddam-like statues which were being erected in Savile’s name, not least by BBC Light Entertainment.

It’s not as if the journalists involved were going that far out on a limb.  The investigation had generated filmed witness statements and Savile was known to have been interviewed by various police forces over the years.

There was not even fear of retribution.  It is not uncommon for journalists to want to run a story, but for their editors to be warned off by the in-house lawyers for fear of being sued for six figure sums.  But Savile is dead and the dead can’t sue.

So, instead of being fearless, supporting investigative journalism at its finest and having to put up with some short-term discomfort as part of a whole host of organisations who now have questions to answer, the BBC decided to spike the story.

The lessons of history, from Watergate through to Hillsborough and beyond, show us that the truth will, 99.9% of the time, come out. Somebody will turn whistleblower; a document will be uncovered or someone will listen to the tapes.

Did nobody think to try and get ahead of the story and break it on the BBC’s terms?  Lo’ and behold, less than a year after the BBC decision to drop the story, ITV screened its own version of events which has set off the current storm.

One of the biggest ironies in all of this is that many of those whom we can only assume were involved in the decision, namely Helen Boaden, Head of BBC News and Stephen Mitchell, Deputy Director of News have gone to ground.  They don’t want to talk to the media!

Many of these individuals, from Director General George Entwistle down, are paid huge amounts of money (the BBC’s Head of News is paid circa £350k per year) to get these decisions right.

They have failed and in the process have done enormous damage to the BBC’s credibility.

Forty years ago today journalism started on the road towards its finest hour!

40 years ago today the Washington Post carried a small story at the bottom of page one with the headline “Five held in plot to bug Democratic offices”. This was the start of what is probably the greatest journalistic triumph of all time.

At the time nobody much cared, but within two years the dogged pursuit of the story by the Post, in particular journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, had caused the story to be renamed, creating a suffix which has become synonymous with political scandal ever since.

Watergate, as it became known, is the mother of all‘gates. In simple terms it was, in Nixon’s words, a “third-rate burglary”of the Democratic Party office in the Watergate complex perpetrated by White House henchmen and designed to uncover embarrassing information about candidates for the Presidency.  In reality, it is the story of how journalists on the Post, in the face of unprecedented political and peer pressure (for months no other newspaper would touch the story) uncovered a political scandal which brought down a President.

In many ways this was the high water mark for the profession. With a series of brilliant scoops, often using unnamed sources, the Post linked campaign contributions to the Committee to re-elect the President, or CREEP as it was known (you couldn’t make it up!), to the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars and then linked the White House to the burglars in the person of Charles Colson, Special Adviser to the President who was effectively in charge of campaign dirty tricks.

When Nixon embarked on a cover-up, the Post continued its pursuit alleging that the White House had instructed the CIA to illegally block the FBI investigation and that documents had been shredded at the Justice Department.

As Nixon wriggled on the hook the Post linked Presidential advisers of increasing importance with either the original break-in or the cover-up, eventually forcing Nixon to sack his most senior advisers, namely Chief of Staff HR ‘Bob’ Haldemann and policy adviser John Ehrlichman. When the Senate started investigating, and the Oval Office “tapes’ became public knowledge, Nixon’s fate was sealed. In all 43 people went to prison for Watergate related crimes, although of course not Nixon himself.

Forty years on the media landscape looks very different. The web is making traditional print news look, at best sluggish and, at worst, positively outdated. Newspapers across the country are closing, merging or going down one edition per week. Social media is making us all into ‘Citizen Journalists’ armed with our iPhones to record events to post ourselves on YouTube. Twitter and trending allow instant sharing of information.

Most importantly, journalism itself is now in the dock.  Parallels between phone hacking and Watergate have been made before, but it is startling that the key lesson, that the cover-up is at least as bad as the original crime, appears not to have been learnt. For the White House substitute News International with all of its alleged shredding, obstruction of justice and non-denial denials.

However, it would be wrong to paint journalism as an outdated and dying profession.  The Telegraph’s investigation of MPs expenses proved that investigative journalism can perform a public duty in the 21st century. The challenge for Leveson is to bring the press into line without strangling the opportunity for the sort of investigation which holds our public officials up to scrutiny and can bring down a President.

A triumph for social media (in Glasgow!)

For those who didn’t get around to reading the Guardian’s excellent article on Saturday about the phenomenal job done by the blog ‘rangerstaxcase.com’, I would urge you to make time to give it a read.

Even if you are not a football supporter, there is much to ponder on from the perspective of the performance of traditional media sources and in terms of the impact of social media.

It is a story with multiple themes; alienation of the traditional football fan; a perceived failure on the part of traditional media and the use of social media as a catalyst for the sharing of vital information amongst stakeholders.

For those who don’t have the time let me summarise the story for you here. An anonymous football supporter, ironically not a Rangers supporter, got wind of the tax trouble that Glasgow Rangers was in, but could find no mention of it amongst traditional media outlets.

Instead, traditional media fed its readers, namely the club’s supporters, the usual stories including the building of a super casino and transfer gossip, including, apparently, a ‘link’ to the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. The result was that many Rangers supporters had little clue that their club owed £70 million to HMRC until last week when it went bust.

In frustration, our anonymous hero set up a blog, ‘rangerstaxcase.com’, and started digging deeper. The blog has ‘broken’ a whole host of stories in relation to the case and now has a daily traffic of over 100,000 views with reader comments coming in at a rate of about 1,500 per day. Bear in mind that these people are not discussing football, they are discussing accounting conventions and insolvency law!

How did this happen? Our hero blames an unholy triangle of trade in which traditional media sources have got too close to the club and felt unable to cover the story for risk of losing their ‘access’.

For the record, I am fully aware of the role that PR has probably played in all of this. PR people at Rangers, let’s assume they were in the know, have been feeding these stories to traditional media outlets, in the guise of ‘doing their job’.

So what can we learn from all of this? Media owners from Rupert Murdoch down have blamed the internet for their woes, but this case begs the question whether certain sections of traditional media are giving readers the information they need and perhaps explains why so many are turning to alternative sources of information.

It must also be remembered that not all traditional media is scared of questioning itself. After all, I read this story in The Guardian. Kudos to them for running it!

New Independent website is [expletive deleted]

The new Independent newspaper launched earlier this week and I am still waiting for it to work properly! Try it, go on, and see if you can go two minutes without resorting to language you only usually find down at Liverpool docks.

Broken links abound on a site which was trumpeted as a rival to the Guardian’s site and the Telegraph’s. I’d give you an actual quote but the page won’t load.

In an excellent piece in The Drum magazine on Wednesday, Matt Lindop, a digital marketer from London commented “It’s clear the site just wasn’t ready for launch.” He goes on to list a host of technical and advertising “don’t dos” which put into context the disaster this has been.

I’m no web designer, I really can’t comment, but denying me my regular fix of three of the best writers in UK journalism is driving me mad. For me there are three ‘must reads’ in the Independent, namely Hamish McRae on economics; Steve Richards on politics and James Lawton on sport (I’d post links to some of their best stuff but all you get is “The Webpage Cannot Be Found”).

At a time when the world is undergoing a seismic financial shock; we’ve just witnessed the biggest rebellion by Conservative backbenchers since Maastricht and racism has reared its ugly head again on the football pitch, the fact that I can’t read any of them is [expletive deleted].

I can’t think of a worse start for new editor Martin King.

Murdoch suffers at the hands of ‘Generation Won’t Pay’

(An excellent blog from my colleague Stephen Graham which I thought was deserving of wider circulation)

It’s been a torrid year for the Murdoch family and Rupert in particular.  The media mogul was ‘humbled,’ during hacking gate, closed his only UK newspaper which actually made any money and was even accosted with a custard pie.  You’d forgive him for thinking that things couldn’t get much worse, but, as they say in old blighty, ‘when it rains, it pours.’

It would seem that Murdoch’s venture into the digital world has not provided the ray of sunshine it may have been hoped to be and I’m not talking about paywalls.  The tablet newspaper ‘The Daily,’ launched in February, is averaging a rather pitiful 120,000 readers a week.  Bearing in mind that when the paper was launched in February it was declared that it would need an average weekly readership of 500,000 to break even, it’s safe to say that so far it has not been a success.

Why?  It would appear that once again News International is falling foul of what is fast becoming a cast iron law of digital communication that, if it is on the web, then ‘Generation Won’t Pay’ wants it for free.  No matter how insignificant 99 cents a week is, against a plethora of quality and more importantly free content online, we just won’t reach into our pockets.

It is hard to over-emphasise how much of a blow this is for Murdoch.  The tablet was seen as a way of extracting revenue from a bust financial model, namely print media.  Now it would appear that it is back to the drawing board unless of course he makes the Times / Sunday Times paywall actually work.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for any readership figures on that though!

High fashion, high stakes

Today, I turn my blogging attention to the world of fashion. Surprised? I don’t see why, those who know me well also know that I can admire a crop-top or a crocheted stitch as much as the next man.

Anyway, I will defend myself no more, the big news is that Times fashion editor Lisa Armstrong and her deputy Luke Leitch have jumped ship to the Telegraph who are cock-a-hoop at their coup. However, there is more to this than meets the eye. Apparently, this is no mere case of the Telegraph dangling much gold in front of The Times’ star pair.

According to rumour (Roy Greenslade’s blog to be exact) both Armstrong and Leitch have become increasingly disenchanted with The Times’ paywall which has seen their readership drop and have resorted to “tweeting like crazy” to maintain their links with readers. Greenslade, in fact, describes them as “paywall refugees”.

This has happened before. When the New York Times erected a paywall around its OpEd pages many years ago the columnists rebelled. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman etal threw their toys out of the pram and demanded the return of their readership.

Why? Because those journalists working at the pinnacle of their profession are not mere writers anymore, they are ‘brands’ for whom the weekly column is a loss-leader to get their message to the wider world in the hope that we all then go and buy their books. Think I’m kidding? Try searching any of the names listed above on the Amazon US website and see how many books they’ve each written. Brooks, for example, is currently #2 on the New York Times Non-fiction Bestsellers List.

Can we expect to see a similar rebellion over here? I’ve got news for you, we already are! Armstrong is a contributing editor to Vogue and has written multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction, all with a fashion twist.

An anonymous life behind the Times paywall is no good to her!

Hyprocrisy stalks reaction to Panorama FIFA investigation

Contrary to much of what you will read this morning, there was plenty of new information in last night’s Panorama programme which exposed million dollar bribery and corruption in FIFA. The Sun, shamelessly, wraps itself in the flag and takes the opportunity to further News Corporation’s anti-BBC agenda declaring it has ‘sabotaged’ the bid. Inside, Ian Wright labels the programme, “brainless, betraying and cretinous” and “ridiculously unpatriotic”.

Much more surprising has been the reaction from some of our most respected journalists, who seem to have forgotten that they should be wielding the ‘simple sword of truth’ not aiding and abetting cover-ups.

Henry Winter in the Telegraph wrote this today. “Panorama have a right and duty to investigate, even into events a decade old, but sitting on the story until the eve of the World Cup vote smacked of cynical ratings-hunting.”

Er … well isn’t that what the media does Henry? Are we to believe that you have never written a negative story about a club or a manager designed to appear on the morning before a team plays? Are we to believe that if this information had come into your possession you would have sat on it until the cricket season?

What’s more, I’d be interested to know what your current employers, who spearheaded the investigations into MP’s expenses, think about this interpretation of your role as a respected journalist.

I’ll give you another good reason why Panorama got its timing absolutely right. Last night’s programme alleged that Jack Warner, a member of the FIFA Executive Committee ordered $84,240 worth of tickets for World Cup matches in South Africa this summer, in order to sell them on to ticket touts for a huge profit. Today, Mr Warner has breakfast with the Prime Minister.

Two realisations have dawned upon me in recent months. Firstly, England will never win the World Cup in my lifetime. The way the game is set up and governed in this country means that we will never produce the numbers of quality, technically adept, players needed to give the national team coach a realistic chance.

Secondly, England will never host the World Cup in my lifetime. The corruption that is rife within FIFA will see to it that the World Cup goes to those who line some very shady pockets in Zurich.

FIFA’s motto is “For the Good of the Game”, what a load of *’&#!

New York Times puts Met PR in the dock

That it has taken the ‘Paper of Record’ to bring to light not only more evidence of continued News of the World phone-hacking, but also the lackadaisical approach of the Metropolitan Police towards investigating illegal phone-tapping operations, is only one extraordinary part of this unfolding story.

The entire New York Times article can be read HERE (it’s eight pages long so one for lunchtime probably!) but for those who have better things to do the facts are these. Firstly, unnamed sources within News International are now saying that Andy Coulson, then editor of NOTW and now David Cameron’s director or communications, knew full well what was going on and actively encouraged it.

There’s no surprise there, but what is extraordinary is the role of the Metropolitan police. Apparently, the Met’ has chosen not to investigate evidence of industrial-scale phone hacking of celebrities, MPs, members of the security services, football administrators because they were too busy, choosing to limit its investigations to hacking of Prince Harry’s phone.

What’s more, the Met’ has chosen not to inform those hacked by the NOTW that they had been targeted, which means that the targets can’t launch civil lawsuits against News International which could cost the organisation hundreds of millions. Gordon Taylor, Chief Executive of the Professional Footballers Association, has already taken them for £700,000 for one hack.

The article infers that the cosy relationship between the Met’ and the NOTW, encouraged and defended by police communications people (subsequently denied), has got in the way of the legal system. In other words, neither party wanted to disturb the flow of tip-offs about arrests in return for positve police-friendly headlines.

There are a number of concerns here, not least that hacking, according to the article, continues at the NOTW to this day and also the role of Coulson as special adviser to the Prime Minister.

However, I believe there is also a wider issue, namely the precise role of civilian PR representatives within the police service and, critically, how proactive they should be in publicising the work of the police.

I have no problem with the publicising of CSR related ‘good works’or arrest rates. However, working in PR, I know that the natural inclination of the PR person is to justify our existence with news headlines and ‘good coverage’. I worry that this tendency has potentially led to television cameras and the press pack outside football manager Harry Redknapp’s house at four o’clock in the morning when the police knocked on his door. What were they doing there? How did they know?

If, and it remains an if, civilian PR people are responsible for these tip-offs then many would argue that they exceeding the boundaries of their job and encouraging the sort of cosy relationships which could potentially hinder the proper investigation of criminal activity.

The Met’ is under pressure now and may well have to re-open its investigation, but the New York Times has also highlighted a wider issue which deserves debate in the PR community and beyond.

“I was misquoted”, the excuse nobody buys anymore!

There is an old Groucho Marx one-liner which goes “quote me as saying I was misquoted”. Unfortunately, there is nothing funny about the increasing numbers of those in the public eye who resort to this defence when their mouths run away with them.

Current US Ryder Cup Golf captain, Corey Pavin is the latest case in point. When asked by a journalist at the USPGA Golf Championship, which finished yesterday, whether he would select Tiger Woods for the team Pavin was, apparently, unequivocal. ““Of course I’m going to. He’s the best player in the world.”

However, once he was reminded that a: Woods is playing incredibly badly at the moment and b: that it’s not much of an endorsement for the other players who are hoping to get a pick and are playing much better, he started to rapidly backtrack.

Of course he didn’t directly approach the journalist or use a press conference he twittered the following: “For the record, Jim Gray misquoted me re: picking Tiger. I never said such a thing and won’t say such a thing until 09.07 [the date when the team is actually picked].

Inevitably, the journalist in question was furious, his professional credibility called into question in a very public way. Most interestingly though in a poll on another journalist’s website, geoffshackelford.com, the vast majority of people backed Gray rather than Pavin.

So I have news for those in public life who are liable to put their brains into neutral and let their mouths off the leash, like Ian Poulter (“I’m the best golfer in the world”), Michelle Obama (“If McCain wins I’m leaving America”) Glenn Hoddle (“disabled people are paying for the sins of previous lives”) and Leighton Baines, the Everton fullback (“I’m not sure I want to go to the World Cup, I get homesick”).

My message is, nobody is buying this anymore, you just need to swallow your pride and say the following: “I shouldn’t have said that, I made a mistake”.

Believe me, it will all go away much quicker.