Examination of Witness (Questions 345-359)
TUESDAY 11 MARCH 2003
MR PIERS
MORGAN
Chairman
345. Good morning, Mr Morgan. Welcome here.
We have not had the pleasure of seeing you here at this committee
before. Before we start, I should declare an interest. I am a
member of the National Union of Journalists. I was a member of
the staff of the Daily Mirror for nine years and I have
written from time to time for all of the newspapers which will
be represented here. No doubt if any of my other colleagues have
such an ample interest to declare, they will do so as we proceed.
Mr Morgan, you have been kind enough to give us information about
your view on the work of the Press Complaints Commission, which
is fairly widely shared though not totally, as you know, among
your fellow editors. We made it clear that this inquiry is not
an inquiry whose intention and aim is to come to the aid of public
figures who have problems with the press, although, obviously,
it is not possible to proceed entirely without mention. We are
concerned with ordinary people whose lives can be affected, perhaps
adversely, by their relations with the media. We are told that
95% of the complaints to the Press Complaints Commission come
from ordinary people, not public figures. Without at this stage,
obviously, the Committee having come anywhere near conclusions
about what, if anything, needs to be done, do you think there
is a case for particular protection for ordinary private citizens
who are the subject of events (crimes committed against them,
for example, or members of their family killed in action) who
suddenly find themselves the subject of concentrated press interest?
(Mr Morgan) Yes, but there already is.
That is what the Press Complaints Commission is there for. I have
listened to a lot of the evidence, I read every transcript before
I came here, and I frankly despair that I have to read, for example,
this from Mr England. I went to the National Council of Trainee
Journalists—he is the Chairman—and when I read somebody
saying to you as an official body, "I should hate to think
that journalists are tarred with the brush of the tabloids. We
have to tell our trainees to totally disregard the type of people
who work on the tabloids in case they begin to hero worship,"
and, with the greatest of respect, you all just sit there and
let him say this kind of thing without really challenging him,
I am not sure what the real agenda here is. If it is simply to
perpetuate the myth that tabloids are run by a bunch of sub-human
creatures who pleasure in destroying people's lives, revel in
misfortune, believe that trampling on people's privacy is our
only modus operandi every morning, then I am afraid you
and others are labouring under a massive misapprehension. I have
worked in Fleet Street for 15 years, I have never known standards
to be higher than they are today, particularly in relation to
how we deal with ordinary people. I have never known it better.
I challenge you as a Committee to justify how some of you last
week said that the standards had got massively worse. It simply
is not true. When I came into Fleet Street the atmosphere was
pretty lawless, I would say. Pretty lawless. There was no Press
Complaints Commission, there was no code. As a young journalist
on the Sun, for example, I was not really instructed how
to behave, what to do. I could really act with impunity. Things
have moved on so far that it is almost impossible to imagine that
you could put any more regulations in place to improve it. I really
think that is the case, and I am concerned that the general theme
here is this old mythology of the ghastly tabloids. It does not
bear relation to what is happening in our industry.
346. Well, Mr Morgan, you are of course entitled
to your opinion, you have several million people to whom you can
communicate your opinion, but I did not know that we had a theme
here. I thought that after 11 years from when we had our previous
inquiry as the old National Heritage Committee, inquiring into
these issues, and in view of the fact that we have moved on a
considerable degree since then, it was a good idea to come back
to it, and that was the view of the Committee. Of course everybody—and
the National Heritage Committee said so in its previous report—would
like self-regulation to work and believes that self-regulation
is the best way forward, but in a private session, where private
figures who did not want to be exposed further to publicity came
before us, they had a number of complaints about the way in which
they had been treated—not necessarily by the tabloid press
and not necessarily by the press, because this is about the media,
there were complaints about broadcasters as well. But when you
are saying that there was no Press Complaints Commission that
is absolutely true; before that there was the Press Council. Last
week we had Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, who was the Chairman of the
Press Council. He came before us and said that he was dissatisfied
with the situation and—
(Mr Morgan) I was pretty dissatisfied with his performance,
frankly, when he ran the Press Council. It was laughable—mainly
down to his actions and others. This is where you have to understand
the difference. I have read his evidence in full as well and it
did not surprise me at all. It just seeps through this: it is
the tabloids, it is a little body of these cretins on the popular
press that we have to control and shackle. I say to you: where
is the evidence that things have got worse and not massively better?
Where is the evidence? I have not seen any evidence yet. I have
seen other people, frankly, the other guy from PressWise, actually
lambasting you for invading the privacy of ordinary members of
the public in what actually was a pretty outrageous way. So you
yourselves can see how difficult it can be conducting your business
with people like Mr Jempson around. Every single person, with
the exception of Paul Dacre, who I have seen has had an anti-tabloid
agenda. I suppose my initial point to you as we start this debate
today, as you have some tabloid editors here, is that you need
to understand, I think, the working practices of a daily tabloid
newspaper, of actually what goes on, you need to understand how
seriously we take the Press Complaints Commission, and you also
have to understand that, in my view, there is very little difference
now between the way the tabloids operate and the broadsheet newspapers.
If you want evidence of this in the last two days, for example,
I give you two examples. It is not in our interest to have inter-paper
squabbling, it is not my purpose to come here and attack my marvellous
competitors, or, more importantly, the even more marvellous broadsheet
newspapers, but today's Daily Telegraph—
347. But you are doing it all the same.
(Mr Morgan) I am doing it to make a couple of points
really. Whenever I speak to politicians, it always seems to me,
with great respect, that actually a lot of your opinion is garnered
from the leader articles of broadsheet newspapers which have an
agenda that is relentlessly hostile to tabloids. It makes me laugh.
The hypocrisy makes me chuckle.
348. I love the word "chuckle". That
is a great tabloid word.
(Mr Morgan) I have two examples of perhaps the dilemma
we might be talking about. Today's Daily Telegraph carries
an openly paparazzi photograph of one of your colleagues, Peter
Mandelson, with his boyfriend. You all know better than I that
Peter Mandelson protects his privacy extremely vociferously and
that he would take great exception to this very intrusive paparazzi
photograph appearing. The justification by The Daily Telegraph
for doing this was that they wanted to establish the relationship
was still in order and they said that they did this because they
spotted the couple perusing the avocados of the salad section
of Tesco in Earls Court. You may argue that that is an outrageous
invasion of privacy, you may not. My point is that what you would
see in The Daily Telegraph is repeated attacks on the tabloids
for precisely this kind of thing. The second point about the broadsheets
I have mentioned, is the hypocrisy of The Guardian here:
they were covering a story about how revolting The Daily Mail
is, which is a bi-weekly occurrence in The Guardian—and
I have some sympathy with their position on that!—and to
illustrate this outrageous newspaper and the way it treats women
they published 12 photographs of celebrity women in bikinis on
beaches. They do not see the irony here but I do. (a) they have
not had to pay for these, which is obviously a very cheap way
of getting intrusive photography into the papers, and (b) I do
not think they have asked permission from any of these people.
Mr Rusbridger will be here to answer, I am sure, your serious
questions about this matter later, but it raises the highlight
again of what is good for them is evil with us. I think we take
these kind of things a lot more seriously than the broadsheets
give us credit for. It concerns me slightly in the way that this
has all been going that perhaps your views are slightly jaundiced
by this relentlessly stereotypical image that is put out there
about what tabloid papers actually do.
349. Mr Morgan, that is a very, very interesting
speech you have made to us.
(Mr Morgan) Thank you.
Mr Bryant
350. Irony everywhere today.
(Mr Morgan) A lot of irony is working.
Chairman
351. When I am not being called waspish I am
said to be an expert in irony. (a) Nobody on this Committee has
yet stated a view of any kind about what the outcome of this inquiry
should be except Mr Bryant, who has indicated that he does not
believe at this stage that there should be any legislation. (b)
Nobody on this Committee, to my knowledge, has distinguished between
the tabloids and the broadsheets, so you have invented that Aunt
Sally for your own satisfactions and not—
(Mr Morgan) I was talking more about the evidence
you have heard.
352. Mr Morgan, you have spoken for a very great
many minutes. Fine. We have invited you here, we are grateful
you have accepted our invitation, but it would really be something
of a courtesy to me if you would allow me to complete a sentence
before we put our question to you.
(Mr Morgan) By all means. I do apologise.
353. That is really good of you.
(Mr Morgan) Thank you very much.
354. It justifies my nine years on the Daily
Mirror.
(Mr Morgan) Thank you—and you were a very good
reporter, I may say so.
355. I was. I was very good indeed.
(Mr Morgan) You were.
356. Yes.
(Mr Morgan) Much better than your sub-editor, but
we will come on to that later.
357. Now, now, Mr Morgan. I realise that you
have come here to have a good time and I hope you will because—
(Mr Morgan) Actually I have only come here not to
defend what I do. I have come here to salute and celebrate it,
so we may have a difference of opinion about how this goes.
358. Well, that is great. I am not quite sure
why you have introduced Mr Mandelson into this discussion because,
frankly, this Committee does not care one way or another about
whether Mr Mandelson's privacy is being intruded upon in a public
place. It is not what we are interested in. We are interested
in what happens to rape victims; we are interested in what happens
to families of soldiers who are killed in action. On the whole,
public figures, whether members of parliament, members of the
royal family, whatever, have ways of looking after themselves.
Ordinary people have not and ordinary—
(Mr Morgan) But that is not true, is it? They have
the Press Complaints Commission.
359. You really do think, do you, that if the
widow of a soldier killed in action is besieged by the press,
is door-stepped, if all her family are telephoned so that no other
calls can get through, if she is mobbed by photographers, if the
funeral is disrupted, then she has ways of protecting herself?
(Mr Morgan) I do not know about the case you are referring
to. I can tell you that on the Daily Mirror we have done
a number of stories involving widows of soldiers who have lost
their lives, we have campaigned for them on several occasions
and achieved great results with that. I cannot get into the individual
cases you may have heard in private without having heard all the
evidence, and part of the beauty, in my view, of the Press Complaints
Commission is that they do not go into snap judgments, they go
into things in detail and the newspapers concerned are asked about
what happened and they put back their representation. I suppose
the other thing that concerns me slightly is this: if you are
watching Coronation Street at the moment you are seeing a portrayal
of journalists, and tabloids in particular, that very much fits
the bill in terms of what you have just said, in terms of the
mob, this shrieking, baying marauding gang of thugs, intruding
on people's lives.
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