Press Regulation for the UK in the Wake of HackGate

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 042011
 

Pretty much everyone is agreed that the current “regulator” for the printed media (the Press Complaints Commission) is pretty much a waste of space and needs to be replaced with something else. After all, it has pretty much ignored the whole News of the World phone hacking scandal. But what ?

It would be easy to say that self-regulation has failed, and that a legal regulatory framework is required. But that gives politicians far too much say in how the media operates – which is something far less desirable even than allowing phone hacking. Because despite the current scandal involving phone hacking, breaking the law to obtain information for a story is not always wrong.

It depends on the story of course – a story about some celebrity up to some sexual shenanigans does not justify any illegal information gathering. This applies even more to some victim of crime, but getting to the truth behind something like the politician’s expenses scandal ? Perhaps that does justify what would be illegal activity.

The overriding requirements for a new organisation to oversee the press are :-

  1. It should not be controlled by politicians. This is the core of what it means to have a free press – free from political interference. Specifically free from interference from publishing stories that the press wishes to publish. That is not to say politicians cannot have a say on what kind of story would be acceptable.
  2. It should not be controlled by journalists, editors, or newspaper proprietors. The current PCC is controlled by the media themselves, and look how effective that is.
  3. It should be controlled by ordinary members of the public selected by lottery. This avoids the regulation of the press being controlled by the establishment; offer £75,000 a year and most people selected would jump at the chance.
  4. Sanctions available to the authority should be significant – varying from a fine as a percentage of daily revenue, banning publication for a number of issues, requiring an editor to resign, etc. This would require a law allowing the enforcement of the sanctions.
  5. All stories together with the classification of sources (more on this later) should be sent to the authority in an electronic copy. Most stories can (and should) be sent in advance of publication to allow the authority to review and prevent publication.

Public Interest Immunity

Certain stories qualify for public interest immunity, but the phrase “public interest” is problematic as it does not mean what the public are interested in. There is no clear definition of what public interest is, but you could think of it as what the public should know rather than what they want to know. For example, some members of the public may be interested in the sex life of a famous footballer, but that most definitely is not in the public interest.

Unless his “sex life” includes rape of course.

But if a story were to be about perhaps a bunch of newspaper editors allowing their journalists to routinely break the law on the flimsiest of pretexts, then there is a “need to know”.

In the later situation, a public interest immunity should apply. Or in other words, breaking certain laws to gather information is justified.

The key thing here is that we no longer trust editors to make this sort of decision without the commercial interest influencing their decision. Such decisions now must be made by an appropriate authority. So in addition to the list given above, a press regulatory authority needs to allow and encourage journalists to seek their advice on such matters in secret.

Classification of Sources

One of the things we have heard consistently on the past is that journalists do not reveal their sources … not even to their editors. Well, perhaps (or I’m not entirely sure I believe that), but that does not mean that the journalist has to hide what kind of source the story comes from.

The reason journalists never reveal their sources is that a source for a story may fear retribution for leaking information. After all footballers with a predilection for balling the wrong person are notorious for killing off those who would leak their stories. But fair enough. After it is not just their lives that sources might fear for – it could be job security, or reputation, etc. And in some cases, they could have a legitimate fear for the life.

But anyone who has read any history of the intelligence services will know of this problem, and of any number of solutions. The most obvious solution, is not to name sources but to allocate them code numbers, and categorise the source information – from which numbered source, and what kind of source it is – information from a whistleblower, copied from a document, rumour, etc. There’s a lot of ways this can be improved.

But the key thing is that an editor or a regulatory authority does not need to know the name or identity of a source, but the methods by which the information was obtained.

News Of The World: Final Edition

 Media  No Responses »
Jul 102011
 

So the last one is out. It is amusing to note that many souvenir hunters will be short changed – apparently whilst they have printed extra copies of the newspaper itself, the supplement has no extra copies printed. Not the souvenir pull-out (unless someone corrects me) but the normal supplement.

The interesting part is the souvenir pullout where they highlight 46 of their big stories throughout history. Of which 21 amounted to little more than kiss and tell stories which were little more than salacious gossip with backing evidence. So 45% of the News of the World’s great stories really amounted to telling us that someone famous was shagging someone they perhaps shouldn’t have been. Not exactly world-shaking investigative journalism then.

 

News of the World Is Closed Down

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 072011
 

But is this merely a cynical move by a morally bankrupt management hierarchy to put a stop to the bad news in the hope it will not torpedo their plans to take over BSkyB ? Essentially News International has decided to blame the probably innocent journalists (who allegedly have all been employed after the phone hacking was routine) to avoid blame being placed squarely where it belongs – with the management who permitted such a lax regime at the old News of the World that illegal phone hacking, and potentially even corruption of police officers could carry on.

The odds are that the News of the World team will mostly get jobs in an enlarged Sun organisation which is supposedly going to shortly become a 7 day newspaper. But if any fail to find jobs, is it unreasonable to wish that News International could somehow be forced to pay their unemployment benefit ? After all, the journalists put together a profitable paper, and they have been thrown out of work because of what is in the end a failure of management.

It is clear that the old News of the World was responsible for phone hacking on an industrial scale involving hundreds of victims including not just the famous and infamous, but also ordinary members of the public caught up in tragic events – victims of crime or war. Plus it seems that payments were made to members of the police – not only illegal, but something illegal for so long nobody could claim they didn’t know it was illegal.

With any luck the individuals who were there listening into phone calls, commissioning such snooping, and passing brown paper bags to corrupt coppers will be found and prosecuted with the full weight of the law. But the managers who allowed such activities within their organisation also need to pay a price – they may not have known what was going in (if they were particularly dumb), but they are ultimately responsible for a regime in which such activities could take place.

Even if they did nothing more than profit from the results of the illegal journalism, they all deserve to go. Ever since the phone hacking scandal first burst on the scene 5 years ago, they have been claiming it was just the odd bad apple doing this. They at the very least, are responsible for sweeping the mess under the carpet and trying to conceal the magnitude of the crime.

There are people who are claiming that it was only a tiny cabal of journalists – perhaps 6 – who were up to this. Well we have heard all that before when News International were claiming it was just one journalist and one private investigator up to these criminal acts. Even if it was just six journalists, one thing has been neglected in all the noise about this – the other journalists, the newspaper, and News International all benefitted from the phone hacking that was going on.

Even if it was just a busy phone hacking journalist nodding the wink to another “more respectable” journalist in need of a story – perhaps “look into what celebrity X is up to”, they all benefited.

Our favourite hate figure Rebekah Brooks has commented that in a year’s time we will all know why it was necessary to shut the News of the World down – what other dirty little secrets have yet to see the light of day ? This isn’t something that is going to go away. She claims that it was “inconceivable” that she would know what was going on when Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked – which is completely unbelievable. An editor should know what is going on in her own newsroom – perhaps not who was being hacked, but that hacking was going on.

An editor who didn’t question the kind of information the phone hacking journalists were coming up with is either grossly incompetent, lying, or knew it was too good to be true and chose not to know so she could keep her hands “clean”.  Bear in mind that she admitted that News of the World was paying policeman for information in 2003!

You will often hear the pathetic excuse that journalists protect their sources even from their editor. Protecting sources is indeed important in serious investigative journalism, and an editor may well not want to know the name of a source, but will need to know the kind of source information comes from. If Rebekah (and other editors of the News of the World such as Andy Coulson)  didn’t query the kind of source behind certain stories, they could be accused of gross misconduct as editors.

And moving on, do we really imagine that it was only News of the World journalists subcontracting phone hacking out to dodgy private investigators ? At the very least some News of the World journalists went on to other papers and quite probably carried on the same old behaviour in other news rooms.

How many other newspapers are going to be closed down by the end of the investigation ?

Now onto the sorry story of the police corruption and the “investigations” that have taken place. The allegedly corrupt officers and the investigations that failed to find the blindingly obvious were both from the Metropolitan Police. One has to wonder if the earlier investigations into phone hacking were carried out by some of those corrupt officers. Maybe it was just incompetence.

However it has serious implications for the current police investigation into what went on – this is also being done by the Met. Which to many people will look a bit odd. Whilst I do not doubt that the current investigation will be carried out fully, it would be better by far if it were to be carried out by a force other than the Met. To avoid disturbing the current investigation, perhaps it could be as simple as bringing in a senior officer from outside the Met to head the investigation.

But most importantly of all, we have yet to give this scandal a good “gate” name in the traditional (at least ever since Watergate) fashion. I propose “hackgate” given the two appropriate meaning behind the word “hack”!

Milly Dowler’s Phone Messages Interfered With

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 042011
 

According to the latest bit of news leaked from the investigation into the News of the World’s phone hacking scandal, it is alleged that a private investigator hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and even deleted messages to make space for more messages. Whilst listening to the phone messages of celebrities is one thing – not a good thing, but sort of understandable – this is well beyond the pale.

Didn’t anyone at the News of the World stop and think for a moment ? Apparently not, which goes to show that everyone at the News of the World at the time must share responsibility in this sordid example of what happens when you give the gutter press a free hand. It’s time to take serious action on this :-

  1. Drive the News of the World out of business. Easily done – everyone should refuse to buy a single copy of the newspaper. Even if you like the gutter press, buy something else. And sneer at everyone who does buy a copy. And well done to Ford who have pulled ads from News of the World – lets see more of that!
  2. Get the investigation into this into the hands of a police force who don’t care and don’t need the co-operation of the London-based press. One of the Scottish forces would work quite well. And tell them there’s no need to be gentle.
  3. Prosecute, prosecute, prosecute. Those responsible should be in jail. This isn’t a freedom of the press issue – this is blatant interference in a serious police investigation.