It's Gone All Gordon

Hugo Rifkind wrote an excellent article in The Times (£) about Gordon Brown's evidence at the Leveson Enquiry this week. He compares Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's views on the press, views that expose the two men's very different outlook.

Tony Blair thought back then — and doubtless still thinks — that the British press was awful. “Of course the accuracy of a story counts,” he said. “But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be, but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.”

It’s a fairly devastating critique, this, painting the press as irresponsible and amoral; a nihilistic force of mob-handed destruction. In the wake of phone hacking and everything else, this does not seem inaccurate. But this is not what Gordon Brown thinks at all. He sees a press that is not amoral, but immoral. Or, to put it another way, Tony Blair would say that the press tore apart Gordon Brown because he was rubbish, because it was fun, because it was just so damn easy, because a mindless sort of group-think took hold and ordinary humanity flew out the window. Whereas Gordon Brown thinks it happened because two or three powerful men, for ideological or commercial reasons, entered into a conspiracy to get rid of him.

I would argue that this isn't just how Gordon Brown thinks but how many on the left think. The left sees News International as a political opponent (at least since its papers swapped sides) not as a news outfit whose failings are the same as other media operators. They genuinely believe that News International is in league with the Tories and out to get them.

It is this paranoid political outlook, allied with the commercial opportunism on the part of Murdoch's competitors, that has led to the unjustifiable amount of media coverage that Leveson and any Murdoch related story gets. Rifkind concludes...

“Attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment,” said Tony Blair in 2007. “It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.”

Quite. The Leveson Inquiry was born out of a sudden public awareness that print media had terrible problems. I’m not going to play those problems down. But they were Tony Blair problems, not Gordon Brown problems; problems about process, not motive. All the way through, I’ve had a sense of lawyers looking for problems with motive and simply not finding them. And thus, what started seven months ago (seven months!) as a righteous autopsy into grotesque wrongs done to ordinary folk has become a whirlwind of innuendo about whether the sidekicks of media bosses and Cabinet ministers are sending each other the right sort of text message.

This is why it’s getting boring. It’s gone weird. It’s gone Gordon.

My favourite comment under this article is from Stephanie Bennett...

"A politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea". - Enoch Powell

Murdoch Leaves Select Committee As Seen By The Guardian

The Guardian continues its fair and balanced coverage of Hackgate with this picture of Rupert Murdoch leaving the enquiry with James Murdoch and other News Corp Execs behind him...

Minor Mistakes and Little White Lies

So, the News International flagellation continues unabated. There's no sign that their competitors or politicians want to focus on other media organisations that we know have been at least equally guilty of using dubious information gathering methods, so it's not going to move on any time soon. But I note that the anti-News International lobby have a new bit of spin.

It's a cunning line, based on the reported words of Rupert Murdoch in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Murdoch, referring to News Corp's handling of the crisis since it broke, said they'd handled it well with only and few "minor mistakes". I've now seen this has been reinterpreted by some (BBC reporters and Labour politicians, including John Prescott, so far) as meaning the accusations against the News of the World (such as the accessing of Milly Downler's voicemails) were minor mistakes. Clever. There will be many that may disagree that News Corp have handled the crisis well with only a few minor mistakes, but no one would agree that the accusations regarding the accessing of innocent private individuals' voicemails, including victims of crime, are minor mistakes. Indeed, it's a line that, had he actually said it, would add to the public outrage and focus it more sharply on Rupert Murdoch himself. Which is, of course, their agenda.

After Gordon Brown's dodgy claims regarding The Sun this week we can see that the, mostly politically motivated, anti-News International campaign is resorting to lies and smears to progress it's agenda. It may seem like natural justice for the press, and I wouldn't be too bothered, if it wasn't for the fact that all this energy is being focused on one organisation, mostly because it upset a political party when it turned it's back on them. The worry is the wider problem in the press generally won't be addressed. What we need is the same tenacious focus on The Mirror, People, Mail etc. No one seriously suggests they've not been using similar methods as the News of the World. It will be interesting to see if Labour MPs maintain the same level of passion and indignation and the BBC continue wall to wall news coverage, when the story moves on to the non-News International papers and, God forbid, Labour papers like the Mirror and People.

Hoist By His Own Petard?

Now we've had the politicians express their, rather hypocritical, disgust at the behaviour of News International, perhaps we can move on to the real, broader issue of press ethics generally? The Mirror, Mail, People, in fact almost all of them, have been involved in questionable activities.

If anything good can come of this epiphenominal imbroglio it will be a shift in the taste of tabloid readers, away from the salacious tittle-tattle that they now know is gathered using illicit and morally dubious methods.

A rather amusing and ironic consequence of such a change in demand would be less work for the likes of Max Clifford, one of the most vocal celebrity phone hack victims.




What a shame that would be.

They're All At It!

When the serious allegations regarding the News of the World phone hacking scandal emerged last week it was clear that this "scandal" had finally produced some real substance. Previously, the faux outrage being exhibited by left leaning papers, politicians and celebs was transparently in their own self-interest. Bitter at News International for turning their back on Labour after so long, their hatred had undermined the case that was being made against the press, mainly because they sought to focus on the one organisation. But now we hear the extent of the use of phone hacking went beyond those in public life to include innocent private individuals, even victims of crime. The worst accusation involves PI Glen Mulcaire, apparently in the pay of The News of The World, listening into voice mail messages of Milly Dowler when she was still missing. This is an appalling revelation and all the outrage and indignation was well justified.

News International has moved decisively and ruthlessly to cut out the cancer in its midst by closing down the title in the frame for this disgusting behaviour. It seems massively unfair to the many staff and journalists, not to mention millions of readers, who have not done anything wrong. But such was the damage to the paper's brand and the potential for that damage to seep into other News International titles that Murdoch clearly felt the action was necessary. However, more and more revelations are emerging that could yet threaten his other titles. Ironically, it is this threat that would do more damage to media plurality that any BSkyB takeover would.

What is sickening is seeing Ed Miliband attempts to be seen, all of a sudden, as a leader of the campaign against The News of the World and now News International. This is a man who employs a News International ex-journalist as a press secretary who was, just a day before the story broke, following his advice to lay off the topic. Miliband even undertook a complete about turn over night by saying the BSkyB/News International deal was not affected by the revelations one day, and then calling for the deal to be reassessed the next, when he had to appear in Prime Minister's question time... on the telly.

The danger is that the politically motivated johnny-come-lately opposition politicians and original protagonists in this saga will, in their attempts to maintain focus on Andy Coulson because of his 4 year stint in the employ of David Cameron and News International generally, distract attention from the broader issue of how the press conducts itself. So desperate are they to implicate Cameron in the scandal and destroy Murdoch's company, they may deny this country a real opportunity to reset the values and moral compass of our tabloid media, or at least deny them easy access to ill-gotten information without a true public interest justification. By public interest I don't mean "interesting to the public", of course!

It is this last point that I think everyone who used to buy the News of the World or any other tabloid such as the Mirror, Sun, Mail... should ponder. What motivated these journalists to go to such lengths to get info on people? It was the fight of readership. You get what you deserve in the real world, not necessarily what is good for you. We have the press and politicians we deserve. The truth is salacious stories about celebrities (or anyone who finds themselves in the public eye) sold newspapers. The News of the World was the top selling Sunday newspaper for a reason. It did sex and scandal better than its rivals. And we lapped it up. Despite what the anti-Cameron/News International brigade want you to believe, the NotW's competitors are just as deeply immersed in the mire of dark arts in the search for a juicy story. As the What Price Privacy Now report found, there exists a market in confidential personal data, often provided by private investigators (like Glen Mulcaire), grubbing around in bins, blagging confidential information, accessing personal voice mail messages and exploiting contacts with the police etc, to get information on anyone they think the tabloids would be interested in. And if you thought it was only the News International titles making use of these dodgy services, think on...

So, it's great that we have a public enquiry into the activities of the press. I hope it exposes their practices which, for decades, have been hardly questioned because of the assumption that anything was justifiable in the name of a free press; the myth that such practices were ultimately in the public interest. In reality they were mostly pandering to the salacious interests of the public and didn't care who they hurt or destroyed along the way. It wasn't just the News of the World, or the Sun or the Mail (the papers most of those on the left want attention focused on). It was all papers, including left leaning ones like the Mirror, the Observer and the People. Yes, the Observer. It's not even limited to tabloids! The whole industry needs to be looked at. Party politics has no place in these deliberations. It is shameful that there are those that wish to make it about Cameron or the "right wing press". I think Miliband and others will come out of this looking very shabby indeed.

But once the enquiries report and we understand the full picture, lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The MPs expenses scandal required the receipt of stolen goods to be overlooked as the story was clearly in the public's interest. Phone hacking is similarly perfectly justifiable if it is in the search for information that could lead to similarly important story being broken. The public needs to understand how journalists get their information and be reassured that, should they use illegal methods without a real public interest case, they will be prosecuted and their paper will bear a heavy cost for overstepping the mark. For that to happen we need to:

• Have a clearer definition of "public interest" - this isn't as easy as it sounds. A real public debate is required to sort the answer out. But the real penalties that will make Newspaper's think twice before using intrusive measures to dig up information.
• That there isn't a corrupting relationship between the police and media that could be exempting journalists from their legal responsibilities (hence Cameron's second enquiry into the police's role in this scandal)
• Politicians that are not frightened to hold media organisation to account. Something all party leaders have only now, belatedly and only after all media proprietors are running scared, started to do.
• A newspaper buying public that doesn't reward papers that publish the most base, sensationalist and scandalous stories. This final requirement will be the hardest to achieve. Impossible in fact, unless the nation changes its tastes all of a sudden!

The Inconsistency Of Being Ed

When you next hear Ed Miliband call for the News Corp/BSkyB deal to be halted due to the phone hacking scandal, bear in mind the details of a memo he circulated to the shadow cabinet via Tom Baldwin, Miliband’s media chief and ex-News International journo:

“Any frontbench spokespeople should use the following line when questioned on phone hacking, BSkyB bid and phone tapping ... these issues should not be linked. One is a competition issue, the other an allegation of criminal activity.”

Hypocrisy would be his middle name, if Inconsistency wasn't already.