TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2003

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Members present:

Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair
Mr Chris Bryant
Mr Frank Doran
Mr Adrian Flook
Alan Keen
Miss Julie Kirkbride
Rosemary McKenna
Ms Debra Shipley
John Thurso

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Memorandum submitted by The PressWise Trust

Examination of Witnesses

MR MIKE JEMPSON, Director and SIR LOUIS BLOM-COOPER QC, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The PressWise Trust, examined.

Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming to see us. We are now well on the way in this inquiry and I do want to emphasise that, although obviously the impact of media intrusion on public figures is something one cannot ignore in this inquiry, the purpose of this inquiry is to examine the impact and consequences of intrusions into the privacy of ordinary men and women in the street. That is what we are really looking at.

John Thurso

209. In your submission to us you made two statements on the general character of the press which struck me. You said A In a highly competitive market media invasion of privacy has become intractable and inexorable@ . Further on you said A What is at issue is public confidence in journalists to inform them accurately about current events and to defend their rights against abuses of power, rather than to abuse their trust by colluding in cynical marketing ploys that put profits ahead of human values@ . These are quite tough statements. May I ask you to expand on that and say what your opinion is on the current behaviour of the press in this regard and whether you feel things are improving or not?

(Mr Jempson) I am not sure how helpful the question is about whether it is getting better or worse. The circumstances of each particular story will vary. For instance, what has not changed is that if somebody is persuaded to sell their story to a newspaper, an exclusive story, which may be about intimate matters, what inevitably happens is that rival newspapers will then seek to rubbish it. So it becomes part of the game, which is to do with marketing, and you never know what is going to come out of the woodwork. Whoever has been persuaded - and I would suggest that many people do not do it voluntarily - is put at risk simply because the name of the game for the newspapers is to outrival or beat each other on the news stand. That has not changed at all. What has changed to some extent is the degree of intimacy to which we are now introduced. Once upon a time it may have been the fact that somebody was committing adultery, for instance, which was shocking. Now we are down to very detailed matters which some people would prefer not even to know about perhaps. There has not been a real shift in the techniques which are employed, it is the extent to which we are introduced to people= s private lives. Do you see what I mean?

210. Yes. May I take you up on that? You began by saying A if somebody is persuaded to sell@ . It seems to me that to a certain extent there is a Rubicon which has been crossed at that point because somebody has actually started to take part in that process. You clearly make a distinction between the organisation with which they form a contract by selling their story and other press organisations to whom they have not sold the story and who then wish to come in on it and either find out more, go deeper or rubbish it. It is not actually a problem to which I have turned my mind. I have been more thinking about the people who have not sold their story and who have suffered from intrusion as a result of external facts or find themselves unwittingly in the middle of a story through a fatality or some other factor.

(Mr Jempson) Indeed. The point I would make though is that one of the defences offered by the press is that somebody sold their story. The thing is that the general image which emerges is that there are people out there willing to sell anything. Very often people are persuaded to take money for giving their story. It may be about a tragedy, it may be about sex, it may be about all sorts of things, because that is the way the press want to operate. They have created a market which the public now know has put a price on information. In a recent case, the Damilola Taylor case, if I remember correctly, one of the defences there in a complaint to the PCC was the family of one of the witnesses had asked for money and that became a justification. I would say that the problem is the press have created a market, people then fall in with that and then it gets turned against them. I do not think people who are supposedly selling their story are necessarily in on the act. They have been duped too.

211. May I seek clarification? You are not, for example, suggesting that there should be some kind of code of conduct in respect of the purchase of stories. Rather that the people should be protected from unwarranted intrusion, having sold their story. Or is it the other way round?

(Mr Jempson) My position is that chequebook journalism is inimical to press freedom. If information ought to be in the public interest, if your story ought to be told because it is not just of interest to the public but of importance to the public, it should not have a price tag on it. The moment you start putting a price tag on information, you are limiting access to information. What I am saying is that invasions of privacy can happen, even when people have agreed or come up with a contractual arrangement with a newspaper, because that is part of a marketing ploy which exposes them to ridicule and to intrusion which they are not aware of.

212. Would that mean that you would not allow somebody to sell something they have? It just seems to me a rather curious road to go down. What you have said in a way is that if it has to be sold, then by definition it is private. If it is not private then it is freedom of the press. If somebody has some information which may be valuable and they wish to sell it, should they be permitted to do so?

(Mr Jempson) With respect, that was not what I said at all.

213. I am misunderstanding.

(Mr Jempson) I am saying that people can make a choice. If they have information which they think they can get a price for, they have to make a choice about it. The pity is that the market has been created in the media, so people think they must. So they will always ask if there is a price. This may not necessarily be about private information, but once you have entered into that contract, then you are fair game. If people choose - and I am not convinced that most people do actually choose - to give intimate information, they have to live with the consequences. I do not think in kiss-and-tell stories, the person who has allegedly sold their story has been told what they are letting themselves in for at all. There is no informed consent and they are being abused. That is the distinction I am making. I mentioned sale of stories simply because that is one of the routes by which quite hideous intrusion is opened up. I decide that I am going to sell the story of my affair with a footballer, let us say, to The People, but I have not sold it to the Sunday Mirror and to the News of the World, so they will go looking for my friends and acquaintances and will, if necessary, offer them money for the most intimate details about my life in order to undermine the credibility of the story I have sold. Whose fault is that? It is not necessarily my fault, but that is the extent we have now reached. Anything can be published, especially if what you are dealing with is a commercial rivalry. That is nothing to do with the individuals, it is to do with the industry.

Chairman

214. May I just ask something consequent upon John Thurso= s question and your reply? Let us take not a hypothetical case but an actual case, the case of Mr Burrell, Princess Diana= s butler. He was an entirely private person. He did a job, like anybody does a job of some kind or another. He was tried, he did not volunteer to be tried, therefore he did not volunteer to be put in the public eye. He was tried and, because of what it was about, it attracted a lot of attention. He was acquitted in sensational circumstances. He was then approached, my guess is, by every single tabloid newspaper, to sell his story. He had no idea whatever what he was letting himself in for. One newspaper was successful in buying his story. As you say, the other newspaper who failed to buy his story, then set out to rubbish it and they rubbished him in terms of his integrity, in terms of his marriage, in terms of his sexuality, in terms of his business. There was no aspect whatever of his life that they did not do. The question is: at what point, because he had now volunteered through selling his story to go public, in your view or Sir Louis= s view, does he still have rights to protect his privacy on the aspects of the things I have mentioned? Let me put that to you.

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) Perhaps I ought to declare myself. When I was chairman of the Press Council I was one of the few people on it who favoured a law on privacy and I have not changed my mind, at least nobody has persuaded me to the contrary. So I come from that background. In answer to your question, may I put a general proposition which I held for a long time that there is a difference between the investigation by journalists and the publication of the material which they acquire through their investigations. Putting aside now physical intrusion, because quite clearly that is different, but talking about questioning of the individual, of his family, of his friends, be it the single journalist or a whole horde of journalists, ordinarily, as a general proposition, I would not regard that as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. It is the publication that matters. May I give an example which we had at the Press Council which has always lived with me of the case of a couple, it was in Yeovil, who had attended the inquest on their son who had committed suicide? The local newspaper had published a report of the inquest proceedings - it is perhaps a little far from investigative journalism, but it makes my point - and there was no objection to that. What had happened thereafter was that the couple had gone off to the local tea shop with their family and friends and coming out of the teashop, they were photographed looking thoroughly miserable and that appeared in the newspaper alongside the report of the inquest. The objection was that this was an invasion of their privacy, that they were entitled to have their grief to themselves and not have it splattered all over a newspaper. I am sorry to say that by a small majority the journalists on the Press Council won the day and said this was all in the public domain. My point was, all right, the journalist who took the photograph may or may not be invading privacy, but he was entitled to take the photograph. The gravamen of the complaint was the editor= s decision to publish it. My general view is that, if one has a new law on the statute book which says an unwarranted invasion of privacy is an actionable wrong, the investigation itself would not necessarily be covered by it, but the publication would.

215. If it is an actionable wrong, and if one went down that route, surely one would have to provide legal aid, otherwise it would only be an actionable wrong on which the well-heeled could act for a remedy?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) The difficulty about that is that legal aid has never been available for libel actions and one would have to argue whether there was a difference between a libel action and an actionable invasion of privacy and whether it ought to carry legal aid. I would have thought myself that there ought to be some system of legal representation for people who desire to bring their actions. I am not sure one would be able to persuade the Treasury that funds should be allowed for that purpose.

(Mr Jempson) I want to come back to your original question. It seems to me that if there were some sort of statutory definition of the limits of privacy or the extent of personal privacy, there is a step over which the press or anybody else, a private investigator or social security officers, could not step. We are missing that at the moment. If we have the case of somebody, much of whose life has been poured over in a court of law, and we are entitled to report that and we should report it, it is a great mistake - this is a personal view - for that person then to go selling their story. If they do choose to do that, I still think they are entitled to some element of privacy, even though, as you pointed out, aspects of their lives have been drawn up in court. It is not by their choice and especially in the circumstances of the case you have given, they should be entitled to some degree of their own private lives around their family, for instance. If somebody starts going through their rubbish bins and starts pulling out private letters, if those private letters show that this person was committing a crime, or planning to commit a crime of some sort, I think that it would be perfectly in order for a newspaper to publish that information. If what came out was information about their emotional life, I do not think that is anybody= s business. To publish that oversteps the mark. The problem at the moment is that we do not have that line drawn, so it is seen as a licence by the press to publish anything. You can just see the edges getting pushed further and further and further. That is what frightens people, especially when they do get caught up in a news event: they do not know what it is about; they do not know what is going on; they have been involved in a railway accident or something. When people start asking questions, they have no idea how much of their private lives will end up in the public domain, like the woman in the Paddington train crash, who suddenly discovered that anything goes. I do not think she should have to have that worry.

John Thurso

216. In a way carrying on from your point, Chairman, to ask what your views are with regard to the effectiveness of the Press Complaints Commission. There is the argument on one side, which you really largely put forward, that it is very much in the hands of the editors and the owners and therefore it will always tend to try to push the limits as far as possible. The argument put forward in favour of it, is that it provides a relatively cheap and easy method for the ordinary person to have redress and as there is no possibility for most people to be able to afford the kind of libel costs that these cases tend to generate, it means that ordinary people can have some redress. Clearly over ten years the PCC has evolved. If one were to say we are not yet quite ready for a privacy law, what would you see as being done to the PCC or, a better way of putting it, what could one ask it to do to itself, that might make it more acceptable?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) I do not think I am a suitable commentator on the PCC. I can only tell you what my experience was at the Press Council. Firstly, complaints about privacy formed only a tiny fraction of the complaints which came to the old Press Council. Most of the complaints were about inaccuracy, distortion; article 1 was the only article which really occupied our attention. Privacy was a very small element and I think the reason for that is that once publication has taken place, there is nothing left really to complain about. If there were some form of hotline, which at the time the Press Council went out of existence we were beginning to put in place, if it were possible for somebody to come along and say a newspaper is going to publish on the weekend something which is very damaging to my private interests, would you have a word with the editor, then there would be some value in that. Once the publication has taken place, that is the end of it. What I would say in favour of having a statutory law which said A unwarranted invasion of privacy@ , is that every editor who makes a decision about publication would stop in his tracks before he actually published. That is the remedy, the best remedy that a free society can provide.

(Mr Jempson) To answer the specifics of the Press Complaints Commission, one of the problems is its credibility. It likes to bruit about that it has great credibility, but every time it does, it rings more and more hollow. I talk to editors who themselves will admit privately that it is a fig leaf but say they cannot say it publicly. I do not know how many editors and former editors, senior journalists have said that to me. You ask why they do not wait until the mike is switched on to say it. They all know that it has this fig leaf role. It needs to do something about its capability. First of all, it is about time that working journalists were involved, both in developing the code and in policing it. At the moment it is senior executives and the Great and the Good and it is editors on the PressBof Code of Practice Committee who take the lead in devising the code. This is about the relationship between the public and the media. It is a very important relationship. For me, as a journalist, the trust between the readers, the listeners, the viewers and the work I do is the most important link in a contract. I do not see why the public should not be involved in it either. We have seen in broadcasting the idea of some sort of quality bond or the notion that it might affect a company= s bottom line if they got things wrong and that needs to be reintroduced in print. For instance if the PressBof Committee were to say A Look, if you are so sure that no breaches of the code are going to occur, put up a quality bond@ . Then, if it is breached, let us compensate the people who are hurt, not with tens of thousands of pounds but a sliding scale so that if it is a serious breach of the code the cost will be X and it will be paid out. I know it actually does cost people to complain or to be on the receiving end of unwarranted inaccuracies or invasions of privacy. The last point I would want to make is that there needs to be some sort of a peer system. The PCC= s constitution is such that you can pretty much guarantee that you could not judicially review what they do because they can do anything. It says A We can do anything we like about anything@ . They have refused to deal with complaints. They have handled them in particular ways and you cannot challenge it. I reckon there are a few editors who would like to challenge it and there are certainly members of the public who would. We need to have a final court of appeal. Maybe that is a press ombudsman, which is what this Committee proposed previously, maybe it is Ofcom, but there needs to be somewhere outside that system of self-regulation where a challenge can be laid. At the moment the only thing you can do is go to court and most people do not have the money. If you do go to court, their constitution means they will win hands down. So that is a completely unacceptable system.

Alan Keen

217. Help me understand how it works. The Chairman alleged that many of the newspapers who were not successful in buying the Burrell story then started to rubbish Mr Burrell; the Chairman alleged really that they made up things about him to discredit him. Could you try to explain to me how it actually works within a newspaper group? Who takes those decisions? Presumably somebody must be telling lies and it goes into black and white and is sent round the whole of the country, round the nation.

(Mr Jempson) They are not going to tell you, because that is part of the mystique.

218. Could you explain how a group of newspapers works? Which people take the decisions to tell lies?

(Mr Jempson) Nobody said that people were telling lies always. It does not have to be lies.

Alan Keen: So, following what the Chairman said, they thought it was the truth about Mr Burrell.

Chairman: I myself did not say that the press were making it up. What I did say was that they were intruding on areas of his life which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the case brought against him or the story he sold to the Daily Mirror.

Alan Keen

219. Who in a newspaper will take those decisions?

(Mr Jempson) If we are talking about the sale of a story, somebody has made an offer and it has been picked up by one particular newspaper. The others are going to want their pound of flesh. What are you going to do? First of all, where does this person come from, who are the news agencies in that area, who is going to have background information? Who knows what clubs they belong to, where they have been, where they went to school? We need somebody down there who can get that information, dig out people who are willing to talk about themselves. So you go through the local news agency, you might go through a private investigation agency, you might go through hungry journalists on the local papers who want to make it up to the nationals. There are all sorts of ways of beginning to get information. Of course one of the problems is that once you have created a market for information, people will tell you anything for a few bob. The news agencies know that the better the story, the more money is going to be made from it. You do not have to make things up, you just tweak things a little bit, you present them in a certain way. Most people who have been involved with the press in a story know that it is never quite how they recollect something actually happening. Often that is all that happens. I remember in a case I should not perhaps go into because there is a trial coming up, people who knew the characters involved, who had been out with them for instance, began to tell stories about their sex lives, their sexual behaviour. What was interesting was that if you read that cold, it was nothing anybody could be ashamed of. Put in the context of the fact that this person may have committed some horrid crime, suddenly what would be described as vanilla sex in one person= s book becomes something deeply sinister and frightening in another. You first of all have to find people who have information, then you persuade them to tell it in a particular way, usually for money, and then you re-present it. At the end of the day, the person who gave the information does not recognise it, the person the information is about does not recognise it, but we have a great story. We have had lots of examples of that sort of thing.

220. Are you saying then that nobody is telling lies, they are getting facts from different people and it has been put together?

(Mr Jempson) No, not necessarily telling lies.

221. Who takes those decisions? Does the editor of newspaper X want to be as ethical as possible and does somebody else, the owner, say they want Fred here who will make sure they get the headlines and he is their axe man? Who checks this man? What I am trying to get at is whether there is a way of involving the owners of the newspaper groups in having to answer for anything? This is what I am trying to get at. Sometimes we get the impression that a newspaper group is not acting in an ethical way. Am I right?

(Mr Jempson) They are a business, so it is about competing with their rivals. First of all, at the end unfortunately the editor also has to be responsible for the profitability of the newspaper and that is true of a news agency. If you know that there is a story creeping about out there on which you might be able to sell information, you are going to want to get the hottest information and the quickest. It is nods and winks partly. If you know this story is running, what can you make out of it? Everybody is in the same boat. I do not know in the end whether you would say it is a news editor. It is probably almost certainly not going to be the editor-in-chief, nor will it be the owner. It is a nods and winks industry. We all know that we all have to compete and we all have to do better than the next person and out of that comes excess.

222. If somebody came to me and said they wanted me to be chief executive of this group of newspapers they would give me , 1.5 million a year for it, if I went in there as a business person who had to answer to the stock exchange and everyone else, am I able to insulate myself from what happens further down or should I have some responsibility for it? That is what I am trying to get at. I am looking at how we can try to get rid of the bad ethics.

(Mr Jempson) We have been involved in discussions with a variety of groups at the moment about this whole idea of how to imbue ethics into what is a commercial industry anyway. I do think it is possible to persuade executives that their product might be better if there were a strong ethical underpinning to what they are doing and that message can get through. I am not sure how you would do that in terms of rules and regulation but it is possible for the ethos of a newspaper to be determined by executives who want there to be a more wholesome ring about it, for instance. The nature of the beast is that there will always be problems. It might be possible - and I live in the hope that it is possible - to persuade senior executives that if they say A Hey, if we admit we are wrong occasionally, if we have a corrections column, if we beat our breasts and say this is nothing to do with press freedom, we were just trying to make a quick buck@ they would get more respect from the public and things would improve. The problem is that some of the editors put up a tremendous fight, even against the PCC. The public see an editor being criticised and then see them promoted. Somebody breaches a code in a particularly extreme way, and the case of Piers Morgan and Earl Spencer= s wife was the classic one, where it was felt he had overstepped the mark, his own employer had a go at him, the PCC had a go at him, but he is a hero. He remains in post and gets promoted elsewhere. That is what people find puzzling. It is when a breach is shown to affect somebody= s career deleteriously or the newspaper that the public are likely to believe that self-regulation is going to work. Then people will feel less frightened of the press. I do not want people to be frightened of journalists, I want them to trust them.

Ms Shipley

223. I would just say in relation to what you have just said that the public does not care one way or the other. The vast majority of the readership of a tabloid newspaper could not care less about what we are talking about now. The very few people who have had it happen to them, they care a lot. The very vast majority of the readership has no stake in this whatsoever, absolutely zero interest, it does not guide whether they buy or do not buy a newspaper at all. That is just my view. Going right the way back to when you first started speaking, you suggested that people should not take money for a story, if it should be in the public realm they should not take money for it, but you think they should have a right to take money for it. Why do you think they should have a right to? Why do you think someone should have a right, even though you would perhaps suggest they did not, to take money for selling their story? Why should that be a right?

(Mr Jempson) I am not talking necessarily about a legal right. People are free to do whatever they like.

224. Why should they have a legal right to?

(Mr Jempson) Because if I write a book and I am intending to market the information in that book, I am allowed to do that. It is freedom of expression.

225. I know you are at the moment, but why would you argue that they should have a right to? Why should you have a right to write something about me which is not public at the moment? Why should you have that right?

(Mr Jempson) I would not say that I have the right to write anything about you that is private.

226. But you say that people should have a right, even though you suggested they should not do this; they should have a right to sell their story.

(Mr Jempson) Everybody can do whatever they like.

227. They can, but why should they have a right to. Why should we as politicians not take that right away from them and say A No, actually you cannot do that unless you can show it is of public interest@ ?

(Mr Jempson) Because we live in a free society. We have an interesting type of example where, let us say we have been married and we have split up, I have a right to tell my story and you have a right to tell yours. We should be thinking very carefully about whether we should be publishing certain matters there, if motive begins to come into that. I am not denying that people have the right to ask for money for information: I am just saying that is very unfortunate.

228. No, I know you are not. I acknowledged that in my question. What you have not told me is why they should have a right to sell a kiss-and-tell story, for example, unless it is actually, demonstrably useful to the public for some reason. Why should they have a right to sell it?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) Freedom of expression. You have your personality. If part of your personality is to tell the world about it, that is your entitlement. If you can earn money from doing so, all the better.

229. That is a very useful definition. I am not at all sure I agree with it, but it is a useful one. At present you say no line is drawn as to boundaries, which is absolutely accurate. I am sure you are right. The editors would suggest, would say, that if you draw a line and they do not like it, they are going to withdraw from the PCC. That is a voluntary thing and they do not have to do it. Which way do you fall then? You draw a line, editors do not like it, you lose the PCC. Is that a huge loss or should you draw the line so low down that the editors do not mind, which is probably the present position?

(Mr Jempson) This is what they did before. When the old Press Council changed its spots, the industry decided to pull out and create their own organisation. So they have the ball and they will play how they want to. Linking the first question to the second question, where my freedoms begin to impinge upon yours, that seems to me to be where the line has to be drawn. If that requires a statutory definition of privacy, so be it. Even editors are subject to the law of the land. If they do not like it, what sort of a world do they want to live in? It seems to me that if there are problems about defining what is and is not acceptable in terms of invasions of privacy, we should try to define it. If you are not happy with that, you can challenge it in court, but otherwise we have to have some rules to play by. Editors themselves have said sometimes that we do not really know what privacy is, so it might be helpful - I think it was The Guardian editor who said once - to define what we mean. If you had that, and the PCC were happy to modify their role when the Human Rights Act came onto the statute book, why should they not now?

230. Ask that one of Paul Dacre, he might give you a different answer.

(Mr Jempson) Yes; indeed.

231. The sanction of the quality bond links into that. I see the way you are saying operate it, which is an interesting idea, but is there some way of making the newspapers be an alternative to legal aid, because legal aid is not going to help? Let us be absolutely frank, no point in bandying it about, it is not going to happen. So we have to find some other way that non-rich people can fund interventions if they wish to do it. Any ideas?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) I think legal aid is overplayed as an instrument. My experience - and it is only my experience - is that lots of people in fact do threaten newspapers with libel actions and for a very small sum of money to a solicitor a letter before action usually produces, if it is a clear case of libel, a settlement from the newspapers. One of the things I have always wanted to do was to research into the files of libel lawyers inside newspapers to see exactly the volume of actions threatened against newspapers which are settled and never come anywhere near the courts. I am not sure that one should put too much stress on legal aid. You can get your remedy from a newspaper without too much cost to you.

232. You are the first person who has said to us that money is no problem if you are challenging a newspaper. You are the first person who has said that.

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) I did not say it was no problem.

233. What are you saying?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) All I am simply saying is that in the field of libel, about which I know something, I know lots and lots of people who have gone to a solicitor and for a small fee have been able to get a letter before action written and it has produced a settlement in the terms usually of a fairly modest sum of money.

234. Presumably that is a small piece of something which is absolutely demonstrably wrong. They say I am a man and I am a woman, just completely obviously wrong.

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) Something clearly defamatory.

235. If you have something like a major invasion of privacy, which the newspapers are going to fight tooth and nail, then you have to have legal aid.

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) Quite. I am not saying legal aid is irrelevant. All I am simply saying is do not overplay it as necessarily the all-remedy.

236. How would you fund the other ones then?

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) Neighbourhood law centres would take it on. There are firms of solicitors who will do this sort of work quite cheaply. As you quite rightly say, it has to be a fairly clear-cut case, but at least you get your remedy pretty quickly.

(Mr Jempson) One of the things which is wrong, for instance, with the Human Rights Act at the moment is that it has never been backed up with a Human Rights Commission. What happens now on privacy matters for instance, is that the press attack the rich and famous for using the Human Rights Act as a way of restricting the activities of the press, or that is the claim, because at the moment only those people who have the money to fight a court case are going to do that. If we had a Human Rights Commission and I felt that my rights had been breached and I could take that to the Commission and ask whether it is a suitable test case which could be checked out, it would be perfectly possible for ordinary members of the public to get assistance in respect of their human rights by going to the Human Rights Commission. There is one in the north of Ireland; I do not see why there should not be one here which could deal with all manner of breaches of people= s rights.

237. As you have brought up human rights, do you think the notion of proportionality is a useful one?

(Mr Jempson) How do you mean?

238. The Human Rights Act allows for proportionality as an aspect of it. Other expert witnesses last week put this to us.

(Mr Jempson) Do you mean where freedom of expression overrides privacy?

239. No, where the media ought to restrain itself to allowing only the proportion of information which is relevant to the public to know. I could be really wrong there.

(Sir Louis Blom-Cooper) I do not think that is part of the jurisprudence of the European Convention. Proportionality is a doctrine which is well understood in public law generally, both European and now English and it pervades the whole of the law, not just human rights.

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 A significant@ . Who decides what is A 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.

Memoranda submitted by the National Union of Journalists and National Council for the Training of Journalists

Examination of Witnesses

MR CHRIS FROST, Chair of the Ethics Council, National Union of Journalists (NUJ), MR JOHN TONER, Servicing Officer to the Ethics Council and full-time official with the NUJ and MR RODNEY BENNETT-ENGLAND, Chairman, National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), examined.

Chairman

249. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to see us this afternoon. You have been listening to some of the evidence we just heard from the previous witnesses. You exist to represent journalists, to protect them. To what extent therefore do you believe you should have a role in maintaining a level of ethics among journalists and among proprietors?

(Mr Frost) Certainly amongst journalists we feel we have a very strong role. We have an Ethics Council which was set up after we became very concerned about the way the Press Council was going. We were on the Press Council from its inception, as I am sure you know. We have had a code of ethics since 1936, it has been changed over the years and developed and we take that position very strongly. If I may pick up the point Mike Jempson made earlier, things over the last 20 years have been very, very difficult for us, where we have been derecognised as a union, where we have not been able to represent our members in work places and that meant frankly that one of the first things which went was our support for our members in those workplaces for ethics. Where maybe 20 years ago we were able to go to editors and say it was not on, it was not acceptable, we have no longer been able to do that. I may also say that over the last 15 years or so, our contact with proprietors has become more and more minimal. Certainly our view is that one of the reasons the Press Complaints Commission was set up so quickly, was that the proprietors saw it as an opportunity to get the NUJ off the Press Council, as we had returned to the Press Council because we believed the Press Council was just about in a position to start being more useful.

250. When I first came into journalism on a national newspaper I was faced with a Catch-22 situation, namely that I could not be employed by the Daily Mirror unless I was a member of the NUJ and I could not be a member of the NUJ unless I had a job in journalism. It took quite a lot of ingenuity to solve that. The fact is that the Daily Mirror then was a union shop. Was all that smashed at Wapping or was it on its way out anyhow?

(Mr Frost) I have to say I was not aware that we ran a closed shop anywhere. We ran 100 per cent post-membership shops, certainly in my professional lifetime, but yes, that started to disintegrate during the 1970s and frankly by the time we got to Wapping it was already gone as far as we were concerned.

Mr Doran

251. You heard the discussion we had with the previous witnesses and in all of the evidence we have heard there seems to be a lack of professional standards. In your various positions you have responsibility for this either as the union representing journalists or as the training organisation for journalists. The problem seems to consist of two things. One is the relatively weak position of the union and I can accept that as a trade unionist myself. The other is the pressure under which editors now seem to operate in a highly competitive market. How do you resolve that?

(Mr Frost) I do not know that we have. We have done the best we can with our Ethics Council. Our Ethics Council goes out to colleges which teach journalism, so, like Mike Jempson= s PressWise we are going out, at the union= s expense, to talk to people who are going into journalism and attempting to talk through ethics with them. Our ability to engage with ethics in the workplace now is almost minimal and we are totally reliant on union meetings, branch meetings, our annual conference and, in common with most unions, not every member attends those kinds of meetings.

(Mr Bennett-England) It is very much the case that what you do not teach in college these days, people do not have much of a chance to learn as soon as they join the workplace, where they are obviously under great pressure in journalism and some of the smaller provincial papers may only have two or three staff, so it is very burdensome. Within the training of journalists, which is a pre-entry scheme mostly, we do teach ethics, we teach them the Press Council= s code of conduct, they have a copy, the PCC come to talk to the students directly at colleges and participate in other ways with all sorts of hypothetical stories and how they would react to them. From the very beginning today, most journalists would have inculcated in them early in their training the need for ethics and be aware of things like privacy. When they are on a newspaper the deed is often done before they have had a chance to think about it. It is a really thorough system and in fact we started it in 1993 after the last inquiry, so ten years= ago. We recruit about 500 journalists a year, so 5,000 journalists are now working in newspapers who have been brought up with a great awareness of the code of ethics. I also represent the Chartered Institute of Journalism and we, like the NUJ, have our own code of ethics too. It is dealt with very thoroughly and we do have a very good relationship with the PCC in that respect.

252. Just the way you have answered that question causes me a little concern though. We have had quite a lot of evidence submitted by individual newspapers and quite a lot of that has focused on the training of journalists and they have all mentioned the fact that over the past ten years training has improved, that the PCC code is part of the training and I understand that. It does seem to me that what they are saying is that the PCC code is now the ethics code and I should have thought that the ethics code for an individual journalist should be a lot wider than what seems to me a fairly narrow document which would guide an editor rather than an individual journalist.

(Mr Bennett-England) I do not think it would be restricted to the PCC code. Most of the people on training courses are not actually in the industry yet, they are trainees or they are students rather more than trainees; they are very often trainees when they start off with newspapers for a year or two. The experience they have in the workplace makes them need to know more than they would have known perhaps from the PCC code. Every day throws up all sorts of examples which may bring new challenges for them, so I would say not only the code of ethics but everything to do with journalism is learned on the job, you learn as you go along.

253. You seem to be accepting the point I am making that you learn on the job and therefore you learn more about what is required of you as a journalist in practice. My concern is that the PCC code is the sort of banner for the code of ethics and the code of ethics needs to be a lot more than just that. If that is what the industry is defending, then I feel a little concerned.

(Mr Bennett-England) There is no doubt that it needs adding to quite a lot. It is a question of time in a short course. Most trainees are on a one-year pre-entry course, except degrees which are staggered.

(Mr Frost) There are many degrees now and quite a lot of the training is done on degree programmes where the course is much wider and they have more time to teach ethics and the things which go with that.

254. Do you accept the point I am making from the NUJ point of view?

(Mr Frost) Absolutely. Certainly if we look back at the training of journalists 12 years ago, when the NCTJ pre-entry one-year courses were the only types of course, the amount of time available to spend on the training of ethics was tiny, perhaps a couple of afternoons during the course. Now courses tend much more to be degree courses there is much more opportunity to teach that, so there is a wider base, but they still need to learn that in the workplace as well, otherwise it becomes purely the education part and people tend to forget that and go on to what they see as being the job.

(Mr Toner) May I come back to the Chairman= s earlier point. Journalism is not a profession, it is a trade and we are trying to introduce ethical standards on the shopfloor that the employers are not prepared to live up to. If you compare the NUJ code of conduct with the PCC code of conduct you will find that the NUJ code is much wider, more detailed. There is a tension there between the individual journalists who would often like to behave more ethically than his or her employer is prepared to allow. I suppose that is what you have identified.

255. We put in place statutory provisions to allow you to represent employees even where you do not have recognition. Do you have many cases involving people being disciplined for refusing to do jobs on ethical grounds?

(Mr Toner) No, it is not something which has come up very often.

256. Did it come up a few years ago when you had recognition?

(Mr Toner) Yes, there were cases a few years ago.

257. Are you saying there are fewer cases?

(Mr Toner) Yes, there are fewer cases now because recognition in most places has just started to come in again over the past year now.

(Mr Frost) I was Father of Chapel for a number of years during the 1980s and certainly issues like that used to come up; they no longer come up. I am a member of NEC now and in talking to FoCs and branch officials it is not really coming through, but it used to. It tends to be dealt with very quickly at a local level. What often happens, particularly because a number of journalists are young, in their 20s or early 30s, particularly in their first jobs, is that they are nervous about saying to the editor that there is a professional problem. All too often, I would find that if you told the editor there was a professional problem, the editor would discuss it. If it never gets to that stage, editors do not have the opportunity to discuss the issue.

(Mr Bennett-England) One has to remember that my own council is basically training for the regional and provincial local press and is a very traditional way into journalism. You get your spurs and then you go on to Fleet Street - or up to Fleet Street, as the case may be. There are one or two London courses, which are a bit elitist, who probably are not the training system they boast. They go straight onto newspapers and therein lies the danger, because a lot of the national tabloids are the most guilty and, far from being a good example to young journalists who are training there, they are often quite the reverse. They do not know very much about ethics because they have not had the time to learn. When you are working on a local newspaper, all the time you are there, every day, the chances are you will come across something and discuss it with your colleagues as you go along. That thorough training on local papers to begin with obviously enhances the journalist when they get to Fleet Street.

John Thurso

258. Before I ask the principal question I wanted to ask, talking about numbers and closed shops and things like that, how many journalists practising on the tabloids would be members of the union? Presumably it is no longer 100 per cent.

(Mr Frost) No, certainly not on the national tabloids. Generally we would say that 60 per cent to 70 per cent of journalists working in mainstream news media are NUJ members, but we would have to say it is much lower on papers like The Sun; not so much The Star; the Daily Mirror is mixed.

(Mr Toner) Another journalists= union is involved in the Daily Mirror, which does actually have recognition.

259. The point is that whereas 10, 15, 20 years ago you would have had considerable influence, that influence is much weaker now. What I want to come back to is exploring the issue of how we deal with the conflict between the individual right to privacy on the one hand and the broad right to freedom of expression on the other, which you addressed in your paper. You said A Self-regulation of privacy as seen under the PCC clearly does not work@ . I am picking my quotes so correct me if you think I am not expressing what you are saying. Later on A A self-regulatory body that is so tightly focused on editors is bound to be seen by many as being in the interests of only those who own or run the media@ . One gets the feeling one is building up towards possibly a privacy law. A However, the NUJ does not believe a privacy law would provide the support the public deserves without damaging the right to freedom of expression@ . Can you perhaps say how you would like to deal with the first two quotes I used without coming up with going into the law which was the third one?

(Mr Frost) I can certainly pick up the second one; partly because I cannot remember the first one, I am afraid. Which was the first quote?

260. You said A Self-regulation of privacy as seen under the PCC clearly does not work@ .

(Mr Frost) Certainly the evidence I have seen and anecdotal evidence as well, suggests that privacy is not working. During its first ten years the PCC dealt with 23,000 complaints, but it only actually adjudicated on something like 220 privacy complaints and found in favour of 34 per cent of those, which makes for a number of around 60 complaints that it has found in favour of. That means during its first ten years, it only adjudicated in favour of the complainant 60 times and that seems to me to be extremely unlikely, when we have a press which all of us would say is to a greater or lesser degree intrusive. If we then look at the kind of self-regulatory body which we have, it is a very small club. Although there are lay members on there, they are picked by the chairman of the council, who is himself - yes, exclusively himself - picked by industry luminaries and we believe that they, linked in with the editors, make for a very tight and exclusive club. Clearly we believe we should have been involved in the Press Complaints Commission from the beginning. We are certainly in a situation now where we almost certainly would not join if we were invited. We think it is a body which has proved itself to be virtually worthless and therefore we should consider starting again. However, we would be very concerned about a privacy law. We have not been able to think of a way of operating a privacy law which would not damage press freedom. That does not mean to say we do not believe people= s privacy should not be protected. It clearly should. One of the tests is whether or not what we are writing is in the public interest rather than interesting the public, which I tend to find is often much easier to define than one would think, but would be almost impossible to define, I suspect, in any kind of law. We also then run into the problem that if there is such a law, and it has been mentioned before, it is much more likely to be used by the rich and famous. We already see quite significant indications that the ordinary average person is being much more affected by invasive stories than used to be the case and it is not all about celebrities. The newspapers are starting to look at those kinds of stories and one which grabbed my eye lately was a front page story in The Sun over three separate issues over about three or four weeks about a man who ran away from his wife with his mother-in-law and then returned. The headlines were A Is this Britain= s bravest man?@ . Whilst quite clearly it is the kind of story which interests us all - who would run away with his mother-in-law? - should it be on the front page of a tabloid newspaper? I would say clearly not.

261. I am certainly not going to comment on my mother-in-law. You said, which was very interesting, that you would not join the PCC now if you were asked.

(Mr Frost) I suspect we would not. Obviously we would have to go to our union= s conference and they might say no.

262. If, on the other hand, for whatever reason, the PCC were to agree to reform itself and were to accept from an outside body recommendations as to how it might do that, and if, as part of that, you were asked to become involved - and, you picked up the point that at the moment it is a club where membership is offered by the chairman, if, for example, and you might like to comment on this, they used Nolan rules to appoint the outside membership, if these kinds of things were done, would you then feel that the NUJ might like to become involved again?

(Mr Frost) I would think so. Certainly if we look back to when the Press Council did something similar in 1989, our conference decided that we should rejoin the Press Council as they had shown, under Sir Louis, a desire to reform in a way we thought was acceptable. In fact I was one of the members appointed by the NEC to fill those places, but we arrived a bit late and the Press Council was closed down. I suspect, and I would certainly, we would change our minds and support a move to go back, if we were confident that it was the kind of reformed organisation that could start to do something serious with a code of practice.

Rosemary McKenna

263. My personal contact with journalists, local, national, UK-wide and in Scotland, is that the vast majority are decent ethical people who want to do a good job. It would appear therefore that what we have is a small number of people who cause very substantial problems to ordinary people by distortion, exposure in the media. Whom to blame? Is it editors, owners? Has the existence of the PCC actually damaged the reputation of journalists?

(Mr Frost) I do not think the PCC has particularly damaged the reputation of journalists. It has been almost ignored. Where people generally accept that the PCC exists, they do not necessarily understand what it does or how it works or whether it has any benefit at all. To ordinary people the PCC is an irrelevance. Whilst they might complain if they appeared in a paper, most people do not appear in the newspapers on any kind of regular basis. It is very difficult to decide where the blame is. The market is there. Clearly newspapers and magazines are commercial organisations. This does not happen so much with broadcasting. They are commercial organisations, which need to sell copies and the kind of material we are talking about sells newspapers. Those stories are gathered by people who want to develop their careers, they are run by editors who want to raise the circulation. The blame can be shared out, but at the end of the day, I would say it is editors who decide what goes in the newspapers. Whilst our members often have to go and get stories they do not think are right and it is not professional for them to gather, it is not their decision to put that material in the paper. I wish we had the power to turn round and say we will not go out and get that story because it is unethical to do so, but at the moment that is just setting journalists up to be sacked and most journalists frankly are not brave enough to turn down even the fairly poor salaries that most of our members earn in order to do that.

(Mr Bennett-England) It is the fiercely competitive nature of the tabloid scene which is part of the problem. We see them outbidding each other for stories which run for days if not weeks sometimes. A Cheriegate@ ran for ever. Very, very commercial considerations often probably mean that care is not taken all the time, that they are not going to be guilty of invading privacy when what is private is in the public eye. We get that argument all the time that it is public interest. Fair enough. One has to draw the line at some things and I would say the people on the tabloids who currently go for the sensational stories - the tabloids have always been a bit sensational - are very few in number. 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.

264. That is exactly what the public see as the journalist. It is what they see on the front page of the tabloids. That is the public face. Behind that are the very hard working, very decent journalists in all the other papers throughout the country. It is in journalists= interests to try to sort that out, to help us if they can.

(Mr Bennett-England) That is very true, but you will find that the provincial evening and daily papers which our students would go on to as trainees are very accurate. There are not many complaints against them. They are working newspapers which see themselves as community servants. As part of the community they write on all kinds of things from improving amenities to righting wrong and everything else. Generally speaking the provincial journalist sees themselves more as a community servant and therefore would not want to include them. In my own career there was one case when I was with the Sunday Express when I was taken to a family up in the North of England who had had three sons who were really healthy and all captains of their team at 19, who suddenly died at 19. I went up and my local correspondent had arranged an interview for me the following day. When I arrived at the house, they were sitting waiting around the coffin for the hearse to arrive. I regarded that for my own part as a gross intrusion of their privacy and grief. I wrote them a letter and had an extremely nice letter back saying how much they had valued being able to talk about it at the time. It is a difficult thing to measure.

(Mr Frost) It is one of the banes of the local journalist= s life to have the nationals come up for a big story, because it means no-one will talk to you for six months after that.

Ms Shipley

265. Is training not a huge red herring in all of this? Loads and loads of people write to us and come in front of us and say there is lots and lots of training and this, that or the other and what is going on is a fig leaf. Is it not so that training is very helpful for a journalist to know what libel is, so they can protect themselves and right and proper and there may be some spin-off for the public in that they will not get libelled because journalists are aware what libel is so they are careful. In terms of ethics, journalists know what they are doing. You do not get onto a national newspaper without being extremely bright, extremely able, very good at what you do, right or wrong; they are very able people. No amount of training is going to make a hap= orth of difference. What will make the difference? Clearly those who overstep the mark, not the minor infringements where they make a mistake but those who really overstep the mark, which is what we are talking about here, not mistakes but knowing intrusions, knowing they are doing what they are doing, are ignoring the ethics of it, ignoring it, either because they want to make a name for themselves one way or the other or they get good money for it - I do disagree, I think senior journalists writing these stories are getting quite good money C

(Mr Frost) The senior ones are, certainly, but most of them C

266. Not the juniors on the local press.

(Mr Frost) Not the juniors but the seniors.

267. The ones who are making these high street stories we are talking about here are making money out of it alright. So the pressure is on. People say to us that there is a market out there. Who creates the market? Of course the newspapers themselves create the market, do they not? Of course they do. They identify bits and pieces which they can pull together and make a product which they can sell. Then they would maintain that by the way they do it and clever of them. What do you think about that then? What is your view on what I have said?

(Mr Frost) There is so much there, so much of which is just wrong, that it is difficult to know quite where to start. The suggestion that people would go into any trade, profession, without any educational training and be able to pick it all up like that is just clearly bizarre. You scrap the whole of our school system and the whole of our education system.

268. We are talking about senior journalists on major newspapers. We are not talking about little local journalists learning their trade.

(Mr Frost) Where do they learn it? They start in training establishments, they usually go on to local newspapers or local radio stations.

269. Those are not the ones we are discussing here. We are not discussing those.

(Mr Frost) But where do you think those people come from.

270. We are talking about major tabloids, major broadsheets, we are not talking about the locals.

(Mr Frost) But where do those people come from?

271. It is a fig leaf to keep on talking about training then, because we are not talking about that.

(Mr Frost) They are trained initially and then they go onto a local newspaper, a local radio station and if they are interested in going forward to the national papers, they go on from there. The number of people who go direct onto a national paper from nowhere, whilst it does happen occasionally C

272. I have been known to write for a national newspaper as well.

(Mr Frost) People have been known to write for them, but not necessarily be employed by them as a journalist on a regular basis We also need to remember that a lot of the people who may be writing these stories work from news agencies who are hoping to get jobs on those newspapers and hope that by giving them a good story that will lead to development in their career.

(Mr Bennett-England) When I started in journalism 40 years ago you had to be indentured, you had to be articled and you had to undertake a proper training. The reason why the industry preferred pre-entry, the whole thing about the NCTJ system, is that it is an evolving one. It is always up to date and editors and senior journalists are involved in the whole process from beginning to end and increasingly realise that if you do not know it when you join a paper, you have not got much time to learn it when you are on the paper. We have a national examination called the NC, national certificate, for journalists after two years on a newspaper. We are very concerned at the low pass rate in recent years; 35 per cent got through which meant that 65 per cent of trainees were not even capable of knowing their basic skills.

273. Do you think any of this has an impact on the major tabloids and major broadsheets?

(Mr Bennett-England) I think it does, because they increasingly employ younger people; a lot of them do work placement and then get jobs on the paper.

274. Okay, so you can have an effect, they know all their ethics, but they are ignoring it, clearly some of them are ignoring it because they are doing these things.

(Mr Bennett-England) Some of them. Let me make it absolutely clear that it is some of them.

275. I keep saying some of them. The ones we are discussing who are doing this. With whom does it lie? I think it lies with the editors. The editors create the sources of the magazine or the newspaper or any other commercial outlet in that manner. They create it, journalists work under that, no amount of training whatever is going to make a hap= orth of difference. It is down to the editors and then it is whether we control them or not. Do we control them by putting in an ethics measure? I cannot see how. Or do we decide this cannot be done?

(Mr Frost) I do not see how you can put an ethics measure into a newspaper to control an editor. One of the things we are very keen on - and I shall say it again - is that NUJ members or all journalists should be allowed within their contract to say they are not doing a story because it is unethical. It would then be wrongful dismissal to get rid of them. Journalists would then feel safe about confronting their editor - or reasonably safe - and saying they are not doing that story because it is wrong. The only thing we know for certain is likely to happen if a journalist does that is that they risk being sacked. Actually, there is more likely to be a dialogue if journalists did approach the editor, but over the last 20 years an attitude has grown up in newspapers that you do not argue back. You do not say, you are a professional just the same as they and your view is just as justified as theirs, in fact frankly it might be better because you have only just come out of training and they have not and therefore it needs to be discussed. A decision might need to be made on both sides at the end of that, but very often that is not the case.

(Mr Toner) I also think you have to look beyond the editors. You have to look at the owners, who are ultimately taking decisions. Because of the industry, because there is no real control of how much is owned by media owners and because that is about to be relaxed even further, then you now have people owning newspapers and broadcasting stations who believe they are more powerful than government and in some cases they actually are the government as well.

(Mr Bennett-England) The most insecure job in journalism has for several years been being editor of a tabloid newspaper where there have been so many changes there is virtually no stability at all.

276. Do you think employment legislation is viable as a way of projecting ethics as they impact on the public? That is an interesting route.

(Mr Frost) Yes, it certainly is. I must admit that I am not too well up on the detail, but as I understand it, this works in Scandinavia and one or two other European countries, Whether it is wrongful dismissal or some other form of the law I do not know, but there is protection. Journalists can at least say A Hold on a minute. Let= s talk about this@ without feeling they are putting their careers at too much risk.

Ms Shipley: That is interesting. Thank you.

Chairman

277. Before we talk to Mr Kelner, though we are about to have a division, we have had an administrative slip-up, inadvertent, as any error this Committee ever makes is. Mr Jempson would like to have a word on the record about it.

(Mr Jempson) In compiling our evidence from PressWise, we contacted a large number of people who had come to us for help and advice. We assured them that if we used their stories, this would be done discreetly and we advised them that if they wanted to give evidence themselves to contact the Committee. We supplied a proof of evidence with appendices containing 30 pages or so of examples that we had agreed to provide to the Committee for your eyes only. I just want to point out that despite the fact that is what it says on the top of the document, these were handed out to members of the public and the press when they came into this room, which is an appalling invasion on the privacy of the people who were giving evidence to an inquiry into privacy and media intrusion. I am beside myself. I know the Committee Clerks have collected in the ones they could, but our commitment to members of the public, whose lives have already been messed up by the press, was blown completely when that information was just put into the public domain without any consultation at all.

Chairman: I have given you the opportunity of saying that, but I think it is very unfair to the Clerk= s office, who did what they did in total good faith and would never have breached any confidence and never intended to do so. Anyhow, you have put that on the record and I apologise on behalf of the Committee for the mistake which has been made. Thank you very much indeed, gentlemen.

MR SIMON KELNER, Editor, The Independent, examined.

Chairman

278. Mr Kelner, you have been sitting incredibly patiently waiting to give evidence. We shall be very happy to start with you, but I do say that the division bell is likely to go at any moment, so I hope you will not think we are being rude if, when the bell goes, we interrupt you. By curious happenstance, we are debating the Communications Bill and it is these very issues which are before the House of Commons. We do not know when the bell will go, so if the Committee agrees, we will start. Is that acceptable to you, Mr Kelner?

(Mr Kelner) Absolutely.

Mr Bryant

279. You probably agree that prevention is better than cure and on the whole, once Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall, it is pretty difficult to put him back together again. This is one of the terrible difficulties with all media intrusion into the privacy especially of ordinary people: once it is done there is no redress, in the sense that you can provide. Correction only perpetuates the exposure of the issue and you get back in the newspapers again. What do you do in your newspaper to make sure that inappropriate intrusion does not happen?

(Mr Kelner) All our reporters have a copy of the PCC code of conduct in their contracts. They are directed very closely by me and by heads of department and in situations where there is a fine judgment to be made, I make the judgment.

280. Have you ever fired anybody for breaching the code?

(Mr Kelner) I have been editor of The Independent for five years and we have had two complaints against us upheld by the PCC, both I would say over relatively minor infringements. No, is the answer to that. If you are asking me whether I would, we are in the realms of hypothesis then and I would not be able to answer.

281. I will ask you the question then. If there were an adjudication against you from the PCC, would the journalist concerned be fired or disciplined at all?

(Mr Kelner) You are talking about a huge difference between the parking fine and the grievous bodily harm. There is no clear answer to that. If it were a very, very serious breach of the code, I would be distraught that that would get into the paper anyway, but there are circumstances in which it may get into the paper. If there were a very clear, flagrant and serious breach of the code, I think the journalist might be disciplined.

282. You seem to be a bit hesitant about it. Last week we had Mr Dacre before us and he was very proud of the fact, exactly as you said at the beginning, that the PCC code of conduct is written into everybody= s contract. But that does not mean anything if it is just there to lie in the contract but there is no discipline and you are very hesitant about whether you would discipline anybody at all.

(Mr Kelner) I think mine and The Independent= s record stands by itself. I should not like to hazard a guess at how many complaints have been lodged against the Daily Mail and how many have been upheld during Paul Dacre= s editorship.

283. We heard evidence, which I cannot really refer to today because it was in private, which was to do with a case which affected The Independent and there part of the issue seemed to be that some of the sources of a story would not be your journalists, they would be an agency journalist or it would be a story which had appeared in the local newspaper. Then, when it comes into the national newspaper, somehow it is all adrift from the facts. How do you make sure that does not happen?

(Mr Kelner) By the same way that you try to make sure that every single story which goes in the paper is accurate, fair and clearly reported. I do not see what the discrepancy is there.

The Committee suspended from 4.20 pm to 4.30 pm for a division in the House.

284. Headlines. Sometimes the grief which can be brought for individuals and for families of those involved can be caused far more by the headline than by the text. Sometimes when there is a complaint to the PCC, the newspaper will reply that it was all in the text and you should not read the headline independently of the text, but clearly people do. How do you respond to that?

(Mr Kelner) It is a very fair point. When I said we had two rulings against us during my editorship of The Independent, one was about that very thing. Frank Field complained about a headline and he was right. The judgment was upheld. We know the pressures we are under and sometimes, very often, we have to distil a rather complicated argument in six words and sometimes it goes wrong. I am afraid that is one of the realities of the life we live and the pressures we are under.

285. A classic instance seems to be that a story appears in a local newspaper and there is plenty of space and there is no sub-editor with the kind of cutting edge of somebody in a national tabloid newspaper and it is admirably and correctly covered in the local newspaper. It gets condensed when it is taken up by a national newspaper and then a headline gets bunged on top of it and the end of the story is that the family is distraught, the person is distraught and it is impossible for you to recompense those people because you have done the damage. What do you think one could do to strengthen the PCC code to ensure that less of that happens, not necessarily in The Independent but elsewhere?

(Mr Kelner) Sure, I understand that. The answer to that question is what can be done to strengthen the PCC rather than necessarily strengthen the PCC code. The PCC code is a very sound basis for the ethical dimension of the newspaper industry. Whether it is being administered well enough, whether the PCC is a strong enough body, is an argument I should like to develop because I have strong opinions on this. I do not have any problem with there being some sort of press ombudsman who sits above the PCC, possibly under the umbrella of Ofcom, because there are real problems with the PCC, real problems in terms of public trust about PCC. There are two things. The first thing is that there is no court of appeal. Once you go to the PCC and your complaint is either rejected or upheld - they are nearly all rejected actually - there is no court of appeal unless you have the means either to go to the High Court to seek judicial review like Anna Ford did, or you go to Europe like Sarah Cox did. For the average complainant to the PCC - and they make a huge play of the fact that the majority are not celebrities there, they are ordinary members of the public - there is absolutely no court of appeal. I think it is entirely right that they should have a court of appeal, because there is not an awful lot of transparency about the PCC. I did not even know until a little earlier how members of the code committee were selected. If we want to build public trust in our industry, there has to be a greater transparency of the PCC and a greater accountability. To have an ombudsman who acts as a court of appeal and acts as a scrutineer over the PCC= s judgment can only have an upside; I do not see what the downside for our industry is.

Chairman

286. The old National Heritage Committee, when we looked at this 11 years ago, suggested a backstop of the kind you are talking about. If you are talking about an ombudsman, are you talking about one which is set up through the PCC structure or a totally outside body? As I said when we were discussing complaints procedures with other witnesses, the Law Society has its own ombudsman for complaints against solicitors and my view is that that ombudsman is totally useless. All it does is endorse whatever it is the Law Society has decided.

(Mr Kelner) It has to be independent of the PCC, otherwise it is just another arm of the PCC. It has to be totally independent and it could add a level of trust to people= s perception of the PCC and add a level of trust to the perception of our industry.

287. I do not want to interrogate you, but you are making what I personally regard as an extremely constructive proposal. What I should be interested in, if that structure is to be independent, is who is to set it up? Is it something Parliament should set up, not the government but Parliament totally independent of government, in the way that we have our own ombudsman which is independent of the government?

(Mr Kelner) Yes. It has to be under the Ofcom umbrella.

288. That is being debated at this minute.

(Mr Kelner) Yes, I know. I do not see that we have to fear from that. It can be seen as hypocritical for the newspaper industry to fight to the last for self-regulation when we spend all our time pressing for more scrutiny and regulation of other trades and professions. I accept that. I do think that a privacy law, such as the one which operates in France, which seems to me to be quite good for members of the public, but works primarily to the advantage of celebrities and politicians, would be terribly damaging for a free press. I do not think that is the way we should go. We have to go some way to making the industry more trustworthy in the eyes of the public. There is no question about that. There are elements of the press which disturb me greatly and I do not blame people for not finding us trustworthy.

289. Is there any circumstance in which your newspaper would out a major celebrity or, equally importantly, report that another newspaper had done so?

(Mr Kelner) No. We were the last paper to name John Leslie. We had a very clear rule on that, that we would not name him until either he was arrested or he made a public statement on his own account. That is another area where we have a strong PCC. At the moment it acts like a complaints clearing house. If you complain to the PCC, they take up your complaint, it is free and it is quick and in that sense in 90 per cent of the cases it works pretty well. I should like to see a body which was more proactive and not just wait for complaints. They say they can only work when they get a complaint. It is not entirely true. We saw in the Prince William drugs bust that they were quite capable of being proactive. I think they should have been proactive during the News of the World paedophile name and shame campaign. They should be proactive now in the way that some newspapers cover asylum seekers. They should have been proactive over the Matthew Kelly and John Leslie cases.

Mr Flook

290. You said earlier than in your five years as editor only two complaints have been upheld and they were of a fairly minor nature. No doubt The Independent has been involved in some quite aggressive journalism. Would you say that was fair?

(Mr Kelner) I should like to think so.

291. No doubt not all of your stories arrive in the laps of your journalists without some help from intermediaries who are not purely members of the public. Would that be fair as well?

(Mr Kelner) Do you mean MPs?

292. It could be MPs. It could be people with a potential grudge against an individual. Is that fair?

(Mr Kelner) Yes, it is possible.

293. I am thinking really of a chap called Brian Morgan, whose name may or may not escape your memory. Do you ensure that their allegations are substantiated?

(Mr Kelner) Yes.

294. So they provide you with a story, let us say in balancing that story that you do balance it fairly well, but who writes the headlines which go on top of those stories?

(Mr Kelner) It depends where the story is in the paper.

295. Front page.

(Mr Kelner) Front page. I write quite a lot of them myself, my deputy writes some and senior people. Let us just say senior people in the paper, which may or may not include me. It usually does include me.

296. Certainly senior editors would have a say in it.

(Mr Kelner) Yes.

297. Do you think those headlines should reflect the words underneath?

(Mr Kelner) Yes.

298. Do you think that always happens?

(Mr Kelner) I would be distraught if it did not always happen.

299. The reason for mentioning that is that my colleague, Mr Bryant, mentioned that this morning we did indeed have a gentlemen come to see us who was keen to have a matter publicly aired and, for various reasons, as a committee we decided otherwise. It relates to the headline A Investigation ordered after 28 babies die in hospital experiment@ from the front page of 18 February 1999. I am sure, having now seen that, you are aware of what I am talking about. You have headlines six days a week but the headline, particularly A 28 babies die in hospital experiment@ , was not completely accurate. It was a story which had been promoted by this gentleman, Brian Morgan, who has a grudge to bear, it would appear, against this particular Professor, for whatever reasons. Although the trials finished in 1993 and this paper was printed in 1999, you put right at the end what the hospital= s view was, that in fact rates of death and disability among the 122 babies who received the experimental treatment were no different from those who received conventional treatment. That was what the hospital was able to say to you the night before this came out on 18 February. Yet apparently a report was written by the hospital into this in 1995, some four years earlier, and, according to letters you had written to the gentleman who came to see us earlier today, not only are you proud of that story, but also in many respects you would have thought this headline was not a fair reflection of even the story or the fact that you gave the hospital the opportunity to come back and say in fact it was not A 28 babies die in hospital experiment@ , it was 50 in total. Yet they were all premature and there is a mortality of 20 to 25 per cent, so you would expect something along those lines. This headline has been very emotive and the gentleman who, shall we say, gave it to Mr Jeremy Laurence, your health editor, has been implicated in other aspects. It seems a good story, nicely written, but not a particular deft headline. Are you still proud of that?

(Mr Kelner) All I would say to that, is that was February 1999. I have edited 1,400 editions of The Independent since then and I am afraid I do not have the actual details surrounding this story to hand. I did not expect ... I am perfectly happy to submit some written evidence at a later date to answer your questions on this. I do not have the particular individual circumstances of this case to hand and I apologise.

300. I accept that apology, because I could not possibly expect you to remember the details. A year later, we have another one A Parents were misled over hospital trials which killed premature babies@ - killed. Do you not think that is a bit over the top and emotive?

(Mr Kelner) The fact that three or four years later we are still talking about the story means it is obviously a story in which emotions run high. I do not want to comment on the particularities of that headline and the semantics of the headline itself.

301. In conclusion, I accept what Mr Kelner is saying, that he cannot possibly remember three or four years ago. The point is that most of us who listened to this earlier today were impressed by the way it was presented to us, that the headlines are emotive and bear no resemblance to the story, that they have done a lot of damage to the hospital and doctor concerned. Our question was mainly whether the Press Complaints Commission were strong enough in coming back to you. You said at the beginning that two complaints were upheld, but they were minor. I think some of us earlier today would say that this was quite an aggressive form of journalism. You are not on trial, but what I am really saying is that you said you were proud of that when it was written in response to Press Complaints Commission inquiry and I am just saying from my personal C

(Mr Kelner) The PCC rejected the complaint.

302. No, no, it is a lot more complicated than that. From my particular perspective, I can see why the individual who came before us today was justifiably upset and angry on behalf of doctors and professors.

(Mr Kelner) I am not proud of anyone being upset and angry at a story in which we have got the facts wrong. I should like to go back. All I would say is that Jeremy Laurence is an award-winning journalist, he is one of the most experienced and senior journalists and most respected journalists we have. I would much prefer to go back and look at the particularities of this case rather than comment on them.

Mr Flook: Chairman, would the Committee appreciate hearing further from Mr Kelner in writing?

Chairman

303. Yes, please.

(Mr Kelner) I am very happy to submit a written answer to that.

Mr Doran

304. You heard the discussion we had with earlier witnesses on the subject of ethics and I should like to explore that with you a little bit. It seems to me that the PCC code is now becoming the basis of ethics in the newspaper industry. The NUJ representatives and the representatives from the training college also added some other elements, learning on the job and the NUJ code itself, but we heard about the weakness of that. Is that something you would accept as an editor? What worries me most is how we would develop ethics in the situation we are in, if this code, which appears to be fairly rigid, at the same time seems, perhaps not frequently, but often broken.

(Mr Kelner) I do not want to get on my high horse about the PCC but if we had a stronger PCC, if it were not seen - and I am talking now within the industry rather than without the industry - within elements of the industry as a slightly cosy, not terribly strict body, the application of ethics and the promotion of ethics within how we do our job would be greater, no doubt about that.

305. Where does your code of ethics come from as a journalist and an editor?

(Mr Kelner) Training. I am a trained journalist. I did an NCTJ course and I served indentures as well. That is where it comes from. I should also like to consider myself a human being.

306. That helps.

(Mr Kelner) I know some of my staff might not feel that.

307. We will separate the journalist and the manager. In terms of the training of your journalists, do you have any extra training which you provide as far as ethics are concerned?

(Mr Kelner) No, because, as a national newspaper, we would expect journalists who join the paper - it is not always the case - to have already been trained and obviously ethics is an important part of their training.

308. One area of ethics which has always concerned me is that my understanding is that in America, for example, it is not ethical to put a quote into a paper without giving the source, whereas here in the UK, and as a politician I regularly read political columns, the source seems to be A a friend@ or A a Downing Street source@ or someone connected with whoever is being abused in a particular story, or is the object of the abuse. I find it difficult to understand why in that sort of area we still allow reporting in that way, because it seems to me as a politician that it just opens the door to malice, malcontents and people who are pursuing their own agenda, but we accept it as perfectly ethical in all our newspapers here.

(Mr Kelner) Perhaps we should start with politicians leaking anonymously.

309. I accept that there is responsibility on our side. I cannot say I have done it myself, but I probably have at some time in the past given a quote which I did not mind being quoted but not giving the source.

(Mr Kelner) The question is whether the story is true or not. That is the test really. Is the story true, are the facts right, have you done your checking?

310. Do you think the American broadsheets and journalists go in for overkill?

(Mr Kelner) Sometimes the brand of journalism which is very prevalent, particularly in the quality broadsheet papers in America, is rigorous to the extent of bleeding the story dry. The responsibility on journalists, and particularly journalists at The Independent to get stories right, to get them sourced, to get the facts right, to make sure they are true, is the real test of a story. It is a proper ethical test.

311. On the basis on which you are presenting that, the test of whether it is true or not depends on the status of the person who is giving you the anonymous call.

(Mr Kelner) Yes. That is a judgment which the individual journalist has to make, an individual journalist working to an editor, whether it be a desk editor or the editor of the newspaper.

312. You mentioned earlier your dissatisfaction with the PCC. You are the first editor I have heard - we have had submissions from various editors and you are the second one to give evidence - if I understood you correctly, say that you would be quite happy if Ofcom took responsibility in this area.

(Mr Kelner) No, not take responsibility in this area, be a backstop, be a court of appeal and a scrutineering body.

313. That is a statutory body, it is a public body, or will be when the legislation which is going through this afternoon has finally gone through all its processes. It seems to me that the one thing the rest of the press has a fear about is any public sector, which would be interpreted as government, interference in the running of the press. That does not seem to worry you as much as it worries other editors.

(Mr Kelner) No, it does not worry me. Why would an editor who has nothing to fear be worried about it?

314. Would that be tied into the strengthening, the toughening up of the PCC?

(Mr Kelner) Yes. I do not see why working editors should serve on the PCC. I do not see that at all. This idea that the PCC have that lay members outnumber working editors is nonsense. One Paul Dacre arguing powerfully and passionately is worth 12 lay members.

315. He would be very pleased to hear you say that.

(Mr Kelner) I am sure he would. They make the point that working editors give a practical dimension to their discussions which is very important and relevant. I understand that. But you could have ex-editors, you could have people who have worked a lifetime either in broadsheet papers or tabloid papers on the PCC, who do not have the same tribal loyalties as working editors do. I do not see the need for it. I also question the way in which members of the code committee are appointed. I do not see why there should not be an independent appointments commission. In fact, ironically, Lord Wakeham suggested that for the second stage of the House of Lords report.

Alan Keen

316. The press have had some criticism since we started, but could I say as chairman of the all-party football group, your paper does a wonderful job exposing the financial shenanigans which go on, particularly in the Football League clubs which go in and out of administration.

(Mr Kelner) Thank you.

317. I have put a question two or three times to other people. Is there a way of involving the owners, at that level rather than just at the level of editors and journalists below? Surely the owner should take some responsibility for the stuff the newspapers put out and cannot really claim they are above it, or can they?

(Mr Kelner) I think the owner of The Independent would claim he was above it because he has absolutely no interference in the editorial policy direction or production of the newspaper. You cannot have it both ways. I want to be an editor free of proprietorial control, but then I cannot expect him to carry the can if I get it wrong.

318. I am really talking about ethics, not the rest.

(Mr Kelner) I am talking about that. If I transgress any ethical code, there is no reason why he should be brought to book or brought to account.

319. Maybe it would not be necessary in your case, but in the case of other papers who do transgress on a fairly frequent basis, it does not seem right to me that the owners should be able to remain ...

(Mr Kelner) That is a little bit like complaining about the weather. We are in the most competitive newspaper market in the world and the tabloid sector is the most competitive part of that competitive market. We are very much driven by market forces. I am as well.

320. Providing there is a level playing field. You have said this afternoon, that the standard of ethics needs to improve even further. As long as we have a level playing field, papers would not be able to take advantage of their competitors by transgressing, would they? I accept your answer that you feel the owners should have no party in the ethics, good or bad, of the newspapers.

(Mr Kelner) It would be terrific if you could get Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, Lord Rothermere and Tony O= Reilly in a room and get them all to agree to abide by a very ethical code for their newspapers that not one of them would transgress. That would be terrific. I think it is slightly unlikely.

321. If I were financial controller of the Ford Motor Company, I would have to take responsibility if my production director were letting cars go out which were not up to the required safety standards.

(Mr Kelner) The other side of being driven by market forces is that the market decides as well. I do not know whether you remember in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster The Sun under Kelvin McKenzie ran a front page story about Liverpool fans robbing people who were dying on the terraces. People in Liverpool stopped buying the paper. That is the other side of that particular coin of being driven by market forces.

Alan Keen: Most people do not think deeply enough. How would they be able to co-ordinate their efforts not to buy a certain newspaper. In the football world it is much easier to co-ordinate efforts on something like that.

John Thurso

322. One of our earlier witnesses, Max Clifford, whilst giving us a master class in the publicist= s art, said that he reckoned that our media were savages. When I pushed him regarding broadsheets, as to whether or not he made a distinction between the two, he did stop and pause and say that he probably excluded the broadsheets. Coming on from some of the comments you have already made, it would seem to me that there is actually a clear distinction emerging that the broadsheets appear to be going down one route, which is broadly to say yes, there is a problem, yes, we should like to see it dealt with. The tabloids are going down an opposite route, saying there is absolutely no problem, leave everything alone, it is working absolutely perfectly. I notice that there is no broadsheet editor on the PCC.

(Mr Kelner) No broadsheet daily editor.

323. I wondered therefore whether you would like to comment about the fact that these two obvious strands - maybe it is so obvious it does not need comment - appear to be emerging and how we might go about resolving that dichotomy?

(Mr Kelner) That is a big question. I agree with you that there is a very clear division now between the standards of the tabloid press and the standards of the broadsheet press. It saddens me greatly to see what is happening these days, but I totally agree with you and I do not see any way in which that really is going to change. It is a factor. We are all fighting harder and harder and harder for a smaller and smaller audience. Even within that I would say that the standards of the tabloids have had a dip over the last 18 months, but until the last 18 months, 10 or 12 years ago, when Kelvin McKenzie was running The Sun it was pretty well lawless. He drove a coach and horses through every code, every aspect of the libel laws you would care to mention. We have moved on from there, but certain things over the last 18 months in particular have worried me about the way the tabloids have covered certain stories, going back to the paedophile name-and-shame which I thought was scandalous, the John Leslie case, the Michael Barrymore case, Matthew Kelly - I know these are all celebrities, but they are all slightly different nuance cases - and the coverage of asylum seekers at the moment.

324. The interesting thing, if you go back to the previous bad times we have talked about, and that was roughly around the time when David Mellor made his famous remark about drinking in the last chance saloon and look where that got him, the emergence of the PCC really following on from that, it could be argued, has therefore been a great contributor to that improvement. Therefore is one not better, if we are actually looking as a committee to recommend things to people which are likely to come to pass, rather than a kind of Nirvana which we might aspire to, ought we not to be recommending reasonable improvements that the PCC could look to implement, rather than going to things like adding a layer like an ombudsman and things like that, which they would resist.

(Mr Kelner) However you want to structure it, we are basically agreeing. I feel there should be a greater transparency of the PCC, it should have more teeth, it should be less cosy, there should be an element of scrutiny. How you bring about those things you could argue about. An ombudsman is a fairly simple way of doing that, fraught with the dangers as it is. I am not saying it is the only way of doing it. There has to be a recognition that there are these problems. There is a problem of transparency, there is a problem of the cosiness. How can we have confidence in a PCC whose director lives with someone who is very close to Prince Charles, who goes on holiday with the editor of the most complained about newspaper in Britain and does his first interview in seven years on Monday just before he announces he is about to leave the job. It is a joke.

Chairman: There is that; yes.

Ms Shipley

325. I like the way you described the PCC as a complaints clearing house. That is really quite handy because it deals with all the other stuff that we are not talking about. What we are talking about is the other ten per cent; you said 90 per cent clearing house. You mentioned the News of the World and the paedophile coverage and the name-and-shame. When Mr Dacre came in front of us, he did get to the point - he must have been in a really nice mood - of agreeing with me that actually you had not reached the policy issue yet and the PCC and the tabloids are not actually dealing with this and it is not just a celebrity story, it is a very serious one, because if you get this one wrong, you can end up with a lynch mob mentality and somebody gets killed. It could go down a very nasty road and we are all agreed on that. I should like you really to tell me, if you can, because I am sure you have given this one a fairly large amount of thought, what you do about it? PCC is not enough. Even Mr Dacre agrees it has not controlled what needs to be controlled in this particular area and the tabloids have not managed to self-police themselves in this area, so what should we as politicians do, given that scenario?

(Mr Kelner) I am sort of beginning to repeat myself. The members of the PCC should be C

326. You said more teeth, less cosy, transparent and an element of scrutiny, all of which I would agree with, but I will tell you that the PCC will not agree with it. So given that they will not agree with that, what do we as politicians do?

(Mr Kelner) You have made a huge step in the right direction if you got Paul Dacre to agree with you.

327. It is on the record.

(Mr Kelner) There is a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the industry. Paul agreed. If we agree that self-regulation is the right way to go and we agree broadly that the PCC is not fulfilling the job it should be fulfilling, then it is a fairly short step to winning hearts and minds. Then you are talking about a modus operandi. I am not saying the PCC is absolutely useless. With some real thought and effort put into reconstructing it in some way, which gives it more transparency and more teeth and makes it less cosy, and we find some way of holding it to scrutiny and giving ordinary members of the public a right of appeal, there is every reason why a form of the PCC as it is constructed at the moment could work and could work very well.

328. When you used the word A we@ ?

(Mr Kelner) I meant the industry.

329. I asked you what politicians should do. So you, the industry, should do all of that. We the politicians should stand back from it and watch you?

(Mr Kelner) No, I think you should exert as much gentle pressure on the people who are making these decisions within the industry as you possibly can. You know who is on your side and who is not on your side and you know where the battles have to be fought and won. It is a question of fighting the battles and winning.

330. Hearts and minds is one sort of battle, legislation and statutory sanctions are very, very different. Would you advocate the latter?

(Mr Kelner) No.

331. So we have to fight the hearts and minds and we have to do that through the media. There are not many outlets for us to do that through the media, are there?

(Mr Kelner) No, I think there are. I do not see the evidence of much. I know we are in the middle of a discussion about privacy, but once you get to the point where you form your conclusions, there is every chance you could start a battle to win hearts and minds and have the chance of winning them. If Paul Dacre, who is on the code committee, accepts that it is not perfect, you are half way there. I am sure we would all have different ideas about the remedy for that, but you are half way there and then it is a question of moving the game on.

Miss Kirkbride

332. I have to say that listening to Paul Dacre= s evidence, it seemed to me that he thought the PCC was pretty perfect, before you go away with the wrong impression.

(Mr Kelner) I was slightly surprised.

333. It was only with respect to Debra= s questions about the outing of paedophiles and whether they were paediatricians or paedophiles and the risk that had been taken on that front that he had some qualms. He did not have other qualms particularly. Just as a matter of record, you said you had had two complaints upheld against The Independent by the PCC since you have been editor. I wondered what page you put the complaint on.

(Mr Kelner) I shall have to look at my notes. I shall have to get back to you on that. I do not have the page.

334. Could we expect The Independent and its wonderful editorial integrity to put it on the same page as it appeared on in the first place? Or is that unlikely?

(Mr Kelner) I should think that is what should happen.

335. We look forward to hearing from you then.

(Mr Kelner) I will let you know. I am sorry, I do not have that detail to hand. I know what two they were.

336. Amongst your helpful suggestions as to how we might beef up the PCC, would you also recommend that corrections or apologies go on the same page as the information appeared on in the first place?

(Mr Kelner) Where at all possible, they should, yes.

337. Everything is possible if you are the editor. It is a question of whether you want to.

(Mr Kelner) One of the stories we had, one of the two judgements which were held against us, was a story which was on our Review front. It would be very difficult to run a correction, apology, judgment on the front of our Review section. That is what I mean by A where possible@ .

338. In other words that sanction would have real beef, because you would not want a correction to have to be given the same prominence.

(Mr Kelner) We are not talking about prominence, we are talking about the same page. If it was on the front page of the newspaper, I think it should go on the front page of the newspaper.

339. I do think you have given us some interesting ways forward to beef up the existing structure. As you rightly point out, the reason why I have become fairly unhappy about the prospects of changing hearts and minds taking us a great way forward is what you also said about the sheer competitiveness of our newspaper market, which is one of the reasons why it is so invasive of people= s privacy in a way that other markets are not. Would you just comment? Earlier we were hearing about the rights of kiss-and-tell in that if you are a party who has some interesting and salacious information about a public figure or someone who is in the public eye for whatever reasons it might be, you are entitled to sell your story because it is your right to do so, even though it is someone else= s story as well and they would feel unhappy about it appearing in public print. Do you have any views on whether that should be allowed, how ethical it is, what we do about it, can we do anything about it at all?

(Mr Kelner) How do you stop it?

340. I just wondered whether you had, because that seems to me at the end of the day part of the problem.

(Mr Kelner) I find it distasteful, invasive, intrusive, as many adjectives as you want me to mention, but I do not see how you stop that.

341. But that is what the newspaper industry is interested in selling to us, is it not?

(Mr Kelner) It is not all the newspaper industry.

342. That is basically what many of your competitors, certainly the tabloid end of the market, are selling to us, peddling to us.

(Mr Kelner) It is not all they are selling to us. In the most competitive sector of the most competitive market they stand and fall by whether their readers want it or not. If their readers are not interested in the tittle-tattle of a first division footballer= s sex life, then they will not buy the newspaper, will they?

343. No, they will not.

(Mr Kelner) I would love them all to come to The Independent because of our more principled stand, but I am fairly realistic.

344. Without being cruel, given the circulation of your newspaper and that of the Daily Mail, it is obvious what the public wants and what the public buys and there is precious little you can do about it.

(Mr Kelner) It is an invidious comparison between us and the Daily Mail because there is a huge number of reasons why the Daily Mail sells what the Daily Mail sells and The Independent sells what The Independent sells. I am talking about within the tabloid market. The diet is not that dissimilar, particularly on a Sunday; the diet within the paper is not that dissimilar. If you get one story here and one story there, the reader decides which celebrity, politician, businessman, they are interested in reading about. It is as simple as that.

Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr Kelner. This is a tidy moment to finish. We are grateful to you for being so tidy. Thank you.