Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-248)
TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2003
THE PRESSWISE
TRUST
240. It was put to us though that proportionality
has not been used in this field, has not been introduced properly,
if I remember rightly, that public bodies such as the police have
been required to use it when they release information, and an
example in Wales was given to us, but that it has not been tested
in this field properly and that this might be a way forward.
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) The Human Rights Act is partly
about intervention by public authority, not by commercial outfits.
241. Is this a useful deterrent?
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) I think proportionality certainly
has some application. How it would work out in the commercial
field, I do not pretend to know at the moment.
Rosemary McKenna
242. One of the areas you have alluded to but
have not really gone into more is the fact that most of the complaints
to the PCC do not come under privacy, but come under accuracy
or distortion. I think that is very important. It is ordinary
people who do not have recourse when there is a total distortion
or reporting which is completely wrong, in fact lies. We have
had evidence from victims, who have said that it was a complete
lie. What can the Press Complaints Commission do, what could they
do themselves, to change that or is there a case for highlighting
that which is called clause 1 and looking very firmly at clause
1 complaints and beefing up their procedures or their sanctions
on clause 1?
(Mr Jempson) There are two different stages. One of
them is that one of the difficulties of complaining to the PCC
is that you have to understand the system and, if you look at
clause 1, it talks about significant inaccuracies. I have given
a number of examples in my document which have fallen on the question
of "significant". Who decides what is "significant"?
I shall not make up another scenario, but it can be something
relatively simple to you about me which has tremendous significance
in terms of my relationships with other people, but it is down
to the Press Complaints Commission to decide what is significant.
In one case I mention in here where nobody doubted what a complainant
was saying, but it was decided it was insignificant, he killed
himself, because that is how significant it was to him. That means
that there needs to be an opportunity to argue the case about
significance. That does not exist at the moment. That may mean
that there are occasions where you have to have some sort of oral
hearings, or it may mean that people require more assistance in
making their complaints. The second point is that a very important
element of many complaints, when they are about privacy or accuracy,
is to do with the way in which information has been collected,
the techniques used, whether by a journalist or someone else,
and sometimes you do not even know whether it is a journalist
who has been collecting the information. In my experience, which
is nothing like as many cases as the PCC have handled, in many
of the cases I have dealt with that element is always discarded.
If I give a story about how the journalists have behaved and an
editor says they would not have done that, the editor would be
believed, yet it is that technique which puts people's backs up
and maybe makes them particularly worried. I have given some pretty
horrendous examples of that behaviour. Partly it is a question
of interpretation of the code, partly it is to do with procedures
for dealing with complaints. Then—you asked the question
about sanctions—it may be stronger comments need to be made
by the PCC about the techniques employed, to say we must not have
a situation where a private detective agency is going through
people's credit records or looking up their telephone calls and
feeding that information and then the newspapers say it was not
them. We can see what has happened here and it is not on. If it
is not on in this particular case, it will not be on again. A
tougher statement about the techniques used in gathering stories.
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) One of the striking features
of our procedure in the Press Council was that when we had complaints
from individuals against newspapers, particularly against journalists,
we were always faced with the position that the individual complainant
said X and then the journalist came with his notebook and said
he wrote it down at the time, this was what he said and he simply
reported that. One was faced with a complete headlong conflict
and of course the body being primarily a body for the interests
of the newspaper industry, the finding was usually in favour of
the newspaper, indeed almost always and inevitably.
243. A comment was made by a witness in written
evidence on which I should like you to comment. It was an ordinary
person and a total distortion of an event. The person did get
a retraction, even an apology, but it still felt like they got
away with it. These people do not want redress for themselves,
but what they want to do is make sure that it does not happen
in the future, that ordinary families caught up in a tragedy do
not end up in this situation. How can we as a committee address
that in our inquiry into privacy and media intrusion?
(Mr Jempson) You have expressed precisely the reasons
why PressWise was set up. It was set up by victims of the media.
They said that they wanted somebody who understood the predicament
they were in, so they could talk to people who felt as frightened
as they did. They wanted somebody who knew the system to pick
up the cudgel on their behalf and they did not want it to happen
to anybody else. That has been the most difficult area to think
about. The way we have functioned is that, as we have seen particular
problems, especially around significant areas of reporting, like
reporting about children or child abuse, working with journalists
we have tried to develop training materials and working with journalists'
organisations tried to develop codes of conduct and we have talked
to journalism trainers about making sure that on these issues,
to do with the reporting of suicide for instance, representation
of ethnic minorities, the current issue about representation of
asylum seekers, the lessons which can be learned from the excesses
that there may have been are then built into training. One of
the things the Committee could do would be to ask—it is
up to you, I am not sure what powers you have in this—to
persuade the training organisations for the industry to take these
things on board seriously and to make ethics and an understanding
of regulation a much more central part of training. You will hear
no doubt that ethics is there. It is usually on a wet Friday afternoon.
It is often done by the PCC coming in and doing a little lecture.
We occasionally get invited but we ask people to pay our train
fares and most of the colleges cannot afford them. Ethics tends
not to be central to training. As somebody once said to me, who
is going to give a job to a journalist who has won a prize for
ethics? What you could be doing is saying this needs to be much
more central to the training.
Mr Doran
244. I want to quizz you and our subsequent
witnesses today on the issue of ethics. As somebody who practised
as a solicitor in Scotland for many years, I had a governing body,
the Law Society of Scotland, which had a professional code and
everyone understood what professional misconduct meant. The accountancy
profession, the medical profession, the dentistry profession,
teachers, all have a similar position. There are bodies which
deal with misconduct. It strikes me that at the heart of all of
the issues we have been discussing in this inquiry seems to be
a lack of professional standards and a lack of ethics. You have
suggested that we find some way to bring that to the heart of
the profession of journalism. Certainly on the evidence we have
seen so far, I am finding difficulty in understanding how we could
do that.
(Mr Jempson) Journalists themselves saw that as a
problem 60-odd years ago and developed a code of conduct.
245. That is not enforceable, is it?
(Mr Jempson) It can be enforceable by the body which
introduced it. The NUJ—you are going to hear from them later
so they can speak for themselves—did have a system of applying
sanctions at one time. The industry did not recognise it, the
employers did not recognise it, so it became very difficult to
impose. Once upon a time there was a system, when I started out
in journalism, where, if I had serious problems about a story
and I was not prepared to produce it in a way an editor was suggesting
I did, I could appeal to my colleagues on the newspaper and discuss
it with them. There have been several occasions when I have gone
to colleagues in an editorial meeting and said that my editor
saw it this way and I saw it this way and I asked what they thought.
We have discussed it in front of an editor and reached a decision.
I knew in those days that I could rely on my colleagues. Once
the NUJ was not recognised, once there was deregulation within
the industry, we had a problem because everybody was on their
own. If I do not do the story, somebody else will. We do not want
a situation where you have to register and license journalists,
but we do need to have some recognition that we have consciences,
individual journalists do want to behave properly. There is no
conscience clause in anybody's contract which says if you do not
feel in all conscience you can do this, you will not be disciplined.
I know very well I shall be passed over, if I do not do what the
editor tells me to do.
246. So the answer to my question really is
to empower individual journalists and the way to do that is to
get back into recognition processes.
(Mr Jempson) That is part of it. There is nothing
wrong with ethics. If newspapers felt that they were recognised
as people who took that seriously and that was imbued into the
corporate culture, that would be a good idea too, would it not?
Then we journalists are not seen as the dirty mac brigade who
would do anything for a story. Maybe we might be seen as people
who are prepared to fight the good fight.
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) May I end with a note of caution
to Mr Doran? Really you cannot compare journalism with the professions.
All professional men are licensed and if you commit an offence,
you can be prevented from practising. You cannot do that with
journalists. May I just mention that many years ago, it must now
be 12 or 15 years' ago, UNESCO were proposing a system of licensing
of journalists. I am glad to say it was scotched. That is the
road you have to go down. If you want to have sanctions against
ill-disciplined journalists, you have to have a licensing system.
247. I am certainly not advocating that.
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) No, and I was not either.
Chairman
248. As I pointed out, as somebody who has been
a member of the National Union of Journalists for more years than
I care to count, when this came up when Mr Dacre was here last
week, we are not a profession, we are a trade and there is nothing
wrong in being a trade.
(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) That is right; absolutely
not.
Chairman: Thank you.
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