Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

TUESDAY 6 MARCH 2007

MEDIAWISE TRUST AND NATIONAL UNION OF JOURNALISTS

  Chairman: Good morning, everybody. This is a special one-off session of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, to examine the self-regulation of the Press and the efficacy of the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice. We have decided to hold this session in the light of a number of incidents which have occurred in the last few months which have raised question marks over the extent to which the PCC Code is being kept to by the Press. We have a number of witnesses and we need to get through relatively swiftly, so could I ask all witnesses to keep their answers as brief as possible. In our first session, we have the Director of the MediaWise Trust, Mike Jempson, Professor Chris Frost, the Chair of the Ethics Council, and Jeremy Dear, the General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists. I will invite Nigel Evans to begin.

  Q1  Mr Evans: Thank you, Chairman. MediaWise Trust states that "there is a rich seam of excellent journalism in Britain's newspapers and magazines, but there is also a faultline of tawdry and slipshod journalism driven by competitive pressures." Is that where we are, that we are seeing this once great institution descending into the murky waters? Or is it that generally standards are very high but with just a few exceptions?

  Professor Jempson: No. I think the feet have always been dabbling in the gutter, because that sells papers. You are always going to get that cross-section which we have tried to describe there. I am saying that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater but it would be nice if they cleaned up their act occasionally. One of the difficulties, of course, is that it is all about making money and so people will do what is necessary, especially if the conditions for journalists are such that they are fighting, like the newspapers are, competing with each other for jobs and reputation.

  Q2  Mr Evans: Are some newspapers worse than other?

  Professor Jempson: Some are bound to be worse than others, yes.

  Q3  Mr Evans: Do any come to mind?

  Professor Jempson: Whatever you say you are going to get shot but—

  Q4  Mr Evans: So go on then!

  Professor Jempson:—on occasions, the News of the World scrapes the bottom of the barrel, but then you also get other newspapers indulging in practices which we are somewhat suspicious of. In the last couple of weeks, for instance, we have been approached by a number of complainants. One of them was somebody just out of prison, who had been approached by a newspaper—I am not going to name it for the minute—offering to buy his story. As we know, there is an inquiry about whether or not this should be made a criminal act. When the matter of money was raised, they said, "It would be a bit off for us to pay you direct but we could pay you into an offshore account or pay you through a friend." It is quite clear what the rules are about this, but this was a respectable newspaper. Another client we were dealing with was dealing with a terrible tragedy in a family and was persuaded by a number of separate journalists to give information which was very private—and persuaded to do this for money. Once having done it for money, they were persuaded that the only way to protect themselves was to sell the story again, which of course made them very vulnerable, and then, once there was interest in the story, you had a journalist insisting that they sign up as an exclusive deal with a journalist as an agent. These sorts of things when people are in extremely vulnerable positions do not strike me as sticking to the spirit and the word of the Code.

  Q5  Mr Evans: Chris or Jeremy, would you like to comment on that?

  Professor Frost: Certainly some newspapers are worse than others, without a doubt. We need to remember that all newspapers are businesses. Part of that business is journalism. Some newspapers carry out their journalism better than others, but they are there to sell, to entertain and to attract audiences, and that inevitably is going to lead to problems on occasions. That is why we need a code of ethics and some kind of regulatory mechanism. If they were not those kinds of businesses, we would not need that.

  Mr Dear: Also, we put forward the idea that individual journalists should have an individual right to refuse assignments that breach PCC codes because there are these pressures on individual journalists because of the commercial interests of the papers and companies for which they work. That individual right for the journalist is an added bonus to that ethical code of practice.

  Q6  Mr Evans: The sort of antics that we see happening which you have mentioned, Mike, does it only happen in the United Kingdom or is this a world phenomenon? Clearly the media in a lot of countries, including the United States, are very competitive but the reputation in the United States does not seem to be the same. People talk about the paparazzi and antics of journalists here in a different vein. Is it a British phenomenon?

  Professor Jempson: I do a lot of training all over the world and people are really shocked at what they learn about the British media. Everybody looks up to British journalism but they are also horrified by some of the ways in which stories are covered in the newspapers here. The phenomenon is beginning to appear, particularly, for instance, in Eastern European countries, where western commercial publishers are beginning to move in. The yellow Press is really spreading there and you are getting similar sorts of stories. But I do not think anything quite as—my words—"sophisticated and debased" as some of the things we have seen happen in the papers here. The problem is that journalists have always been curiously inquisitive folk and their managers, being desperately keen to make money for their employers, are always going to push the envelope and very often it is going to break. For me, it is not about demanding that everybody act as angels but first of all recognising the human consequences of some of these stories, which can be appalling, and also being willing to admit that mistakes have been made. If we look at the Goodman case, you had to wait until somebody was jailed before people held their hands up and said, "This was out of order."

  Professor Frost: I think it would be wrong to assume the UK is particularly worse than anywhere else, but the approach is different. We have a very different newspaper industry in this country, say, from America, where there is not the range of national papers all chasing the same level of market. We are more applicable to some other countries, such as Australia, for instance, where they often do have fairly similar problems. Mike is right about Eastern Europe, but, again, if you look at the Eastern Europe newspapers, the kind of ethical problems they are having there are just as bad from our perspective but different and the expectations of their publics are different. Where you are selling a product, part of which includes journalism, you are always going to get these kinds of problems. The only way to prevent it is not to make a commercial product, but clearly that is not an option here—and quite right, as many would say.

  Mr Dear: You also have in the US a better and more robust Freedom of Information Act, which allows investigative journalism to happen in different ways sometimes than it does in the UK. But clearly we are also concerned about proposals from other quarters to restrict the Freedom of Information Act here by increasing charges or by aggregating the demands from individual news organisations. You also have in some other places stronger public interest defences and therefore we may be seeing less in terms of numbers of complaints but not that much difference in terms of journalism.

  Q7  Chairman: It was suggested that Clive Goodman was a senior reporter who had previously achieved some very good stories but was now struggling to do so. There were young Turks snapping at his heels and therefore the pressure was on for him to get exclusives and that as a result, perhaps, he went beyond the terms of the Code and, indeed, the terms of the law. Does that sound familiar to you? Is that something which your members might commonly experience?

  Mr Dear: Certainly we receive complaints from lots of members who are put under pressure to breach PCC and NUJ codes of practice and codes of ethics in pursuit of a story.

  Q8  Chairman: Put under pressure by their editors?

  Mr Dear: Yes.

  Q9  Chairman: In breach of the Code?

  Mr Dear: Absolutely. In an intensely competitive newspaper industry, in which single photographs can be sold for £250,000, when that is the case you are going to get a photographer who thinks: "This time I'm going to breach the Code because this may well be my making." You are also going to get that in terms of journalists investigating stories. I think that is at the heart of it. It is not, as I think the PCC's own evidence to your Committee suggests, that these are individual mistakes. I am sorry, I do not accept that they are individual mistakes; they are the result of pressure applied on journalists to deliver more and more exclusive stories in order to boost circulation levels.

  Q10  Chairman: You are telling us that the editors who have the job of enforcing the PCC Code are saying to their journalists, "We'll turn a blind eye if you can produce good stories."

  Mr Dear: Some of them certainly are.

  Professor Frost: There is also a culture of expectation amongst journalists, of trying to pursue stories where, because there is no specific direction to say "We will not do these kinds of things," the temptation is to do them, because they feel they are obliged to provide the stories that their editors want. That is the reason why we want this conscience clause, so that journalists feel much more prepared to say, "I'm not doing that. That is not acceptable," and we can move the debate on a stage. We do not anticipate that there will be a large number of people somehow going to law or going to the PCC saying that they have been instructed to do something that breached the Code of Practice but it would give journalists the courage, if you like, to be able to say to their office that they do not feel that is the right way to behave, without fear of being dismissed or of damaging their career potential.

  Professor Jempson: The other point about the Goodman case is that this was not something which just happened recently. Mulcaire had been supplying information on a contract to the News of the World since 1997. The methodology for collecting information which may or may not be useful for a story has been used for a long time. We know that a contract signed by Stuart Kuttner of the News of the World was found as part of this investigation just for one year's dealings—but he had been doing it since 1997. That indicates that this is not something that has suddenly come out of a bit of a mid-life crisis in one journalist's career.

  Q11  Paul Farrelly: I am possibly the only member of the panel here who has been an investigative journalist in my time. I think the Goodman case is just a sideshow really because he was doing stuff that was just about gossip and nonsense. When Government routinely taps, sometimes legally, journalists pursuing serious stories, when is it justified to use the same tactics back?

  Professor Frost: We are talking about the public interest and the level at which we are providing stories which the public needs to know about. On occasion that might be true. The line we take as the NUJ and as the Ethics Council is that journalists should only use unstraightforward means of that sort if it is the only way of getting the story. There may be occasions when that is the only way.

  Q12  Paul Farrelly: Even if it is illegal?

  Professor Frost: Then it becomes much more difficult. If it is illegal, we would certainly advise them not to do it.

  Q13  Paul Farrelly: Have you ever been an investigative journalist, Professor Frost?

  Professor Frost: Not at that level, no. I am not saying that people do not do it and should not, but we would advise against it.

  Q14  Philip Davies: It seems from what you have all said that you think self-regulation is a busted flush, in that there needs to be some kind of statutory control, whether it is an Ombudsman or some kind of privacy law. Do you think there are any dangers in going down that line, that people, perhaps some unscrupulous people, might be protected by that kind of regime?

  Mr Dear: I certainly do not think that self-regulation as a concept is a busted flush. Self-regulation, as it is currently operated, is failing journalism. Public distrust of journalism shows that is the case. Someone who is prepared to pay £1,000 for information is not going to be put off by a speech made by Sir Christopher Meyer—no matter how great that speech is—admonishing them for doing it. There has to be a system of penalties and greater adjudication and greater guidance that goes alongside the self-regulation—and it is 15 years now that the PCC has been in charge of self-regulation—rather than just the kind of warm words that we hear every time there is the kind of scandal you are talking about. We think very much that there needs to be a system of penalties that penalises those who breach these codes—which they all voluntarily sign up to and, yet, when there is a significant commercial interest to them, whether that is adding to circulation or adding to profit levels of their companies, they are prepared to breach.

  Professor Jempson: It is also true and worth pointing out that, during the history of the PCC, each time there has been a crisis, apart from the early days, there have been quite significant changes and it is now a much more comprehensive organisation. Its website is a much healthier and more helpful document, they have become more aware of the way in which they need to relate to their public, but at the same time it is quite clear that for that part, if you like, of the public relations role of self-regulation, it is the only real industry in which they expect to be judge and jury. They are always coming up with arguments against penalties, for instance, or compensation, because they say it might get the lawyers involved, but in fact just getting a rap on the knuckles does not really make any difference to anybody, especially if you can bury a complaint or a correction deep in the newspaper and get away with it. It is really a toughening up of both the way in which adjudications or investigations are embarked upon and the sorts of sanctions that can be imposed. But I think the other point we need to be thinking about right now is this business of the fact that all the media are merging. Newspapers are now running TV stations on their websites and you can get audio podcasts or whatever off the websites of newspapers. You have the PCC gaily saying, "We're now going to be adjudicating and regulating those items" whereas in fact broadcast items are supposed to be caught by a completely different system of regulation which is a statutory system. Where does that leave the journalists? By which code of conduct are they now supposed to be operating when they are carrying a webcam, for instance, for a newspaper?

  Q15  Philip Davies: Some members of the public think that newspapers give a big splash on a false story and then bury a correction on page 35, underneath the classified adverts. Is that a fair criticism, that public perception?

  Professor Frost: The PCC's figure suggests that apologies and corrections are run further up but I think the perception is there because there is some evidence to support it. The difficulty is around issues of privacy. The Committee is very concerned—and quite rightly—about privacy. The way self-regulation is working at the moment means that privacy is not handled extremely well. The number of complaints that are sent into the PCC has remained consistent as a percentage overall for its 15 years of existence and yet the number of complaints on privacy on which the PCC adjudicates is tiny. I also wonder how many of us, if our privacy were to be invaded, would choose to go to the PCC, when the only penalty—the only penalty—they are able to give is to publish an adjudication in the paper which merely reminds everybody that it has happened. Even if your name is anonymised, clearly the only penalty is to remind people of this breach of your privacy. There has to be another way to deal with that. I think it is possible to do that through self-regulation but it is not in the present system.

  Q16  Philip Davies: We are having a picture painted here of the holier than thou journalists who are being bullied into submission by these horrible, unscrupulous editors, and that if these horrible editors were not about we would just have nice stories, fluffy stories about knitting and all the rest of it. Would you not say that the people who are chiefly to blame for what is going on in the papers are your members? Because your members are the ones trotting out all of these stories.

  Professor Frost: Certainly a lot of our members write those stories. We would also claim there are some journalists who are not our members—and it would be nice to think they are the ones who are trotting out this kind of story, but I am not really that naïve. I am saying that by having the conscience clause we are able to shift the balance a little bit, we are able to move the debate a bit more, we are able to talk to our members about what would be appropriate and what is not without them feeling scared of losing their jobs. Certainly some will continue to produce those kinds of stories because there is money in it. Just as newspapers make money out of those stories, yes, so do some of our members. We have to understand that. That is why we need a self-regulatory system. If all our members were perfect and all editors were perfect there would be no need for the PCC, because nothing would ever go wrong. We need a self-regulatory system and we have to look at one which deals properly with invasions to people's privacy. It is no good just having a PCC that really just insists that editors print corrections of small, factual errors. Frankly, that is all we have at the moment.

  Q17  Philip Davies: In your submission you made a differential between what was in the public interest and what would interest the public. Do you not think the Code of Practice in its present form already makes that distinction? Do you blame the general public, who on the one hand complain about the invasion of people's privacy but on the other hand rush out to buy the paper that has just invaded people's privacy?

  Professor Frost: I think the Code of Practice of the PCC, by and large, is pretty good. I have made reference to the one exception to that. Its public interest defence is also a reasonably sound one. Defining the public interest is quite difficult and the way the PCC does it is as good as any other. It would be foolish to blame the public for wanting to read the kinds of things that the public want to read. I am not even suggesting that we should not provide that on occasions, but if it means invading someone's privacy, damaging their personal right to privacy in a way that is unacceptable, then we should not be doing that and the PCC should be making it easier for the media to understand where that divide comes. That means they need to adjudicate much more often than they do. There were 22 cases adjudicated last year and only five of them were upheld. Admittedly they print the resolutions, but it is quite difficult for the Press to get the lessons that come from these adjudications if there are only five of them. We need more guidance, we need to make it clear where that divide is, and there need to be appropriate penalties.

  Mr Dear: It is not that there should not be the kinds of stories you refer to; it is about the methods for getting those stories. If the methods that are used are outside the standards normally expected then there has to be an overriding public interest, and in our paper we define that public interest. It is the kind of information that allows citizens to make decisions about political issues, about the exercise of power and so on. It is more about the methods than about what the stories are.

  Professor Jempson: The problem is that when the methods are raised by complainants the PCC almost always refuses to deal with that. They look to the editors on their panel for advice. They almost always take their side over and against an ordinary member of the public who is saying, "The way they got the story was unpleasant. They did this and they did that." The PCC's line always tends to be, "It's your word against a reputable journalist" and they will go with the journalist, thank you very much, and yet it is the methodology that is often the problem.

  Q18  Paul Farrelly: Sadly, in my life, I have always worked for organisations which would not (Reuters) or could not (The Independent or The Observer) pay to get stories. But if you asked me who I would trust to bag a criminal on the Costa del Crime with a bag of cash, a Sun reporter or someone from The Sunday Times, like David Leppard, or a team from the Met Police, I would back the reporter any time. Sometimes you have to pay a criminal to catch a criminal. The police do it all the time. If that happened, Professor Frost, on your Ethics Council, and Mr Big from Costa Del Crime came and said, "This is really unethical. You've paid a small-time crook to finger me," how would you adjudicate that?

  Professor Frost: Quite clearly I am going to say I would need to see the case itself and go through the evidence. We are talking about extremely difficult areas, where the public interest has to be measured against the invasion of someone's privacy and their human right to privacy and the newspaper/reporter's right to freedom of expression. The balance then has to be made, looking at both the methods of doing that and the final result. It may be that the final result is so much in the public interest that the method used—

  Q19  Paul Farrelly: That the end justifies the means.

  Professor Frost: It may well do and I would not want to rule that out. That is why it is important that the PCC should adjudicate more, to give us more guidance on where that divide actually falls. We simply do not get that at the moment because a lot of cases do not come to the PCC, particularly in relation to privacy. The other thing to remember about the PCC is they are very limited in the number of third-party complaints that they make. If, for instance, you want to complain about Jerry Springer the Opera appearing on BBC Two, people wrote to the BBC in their droves—56,000 springs to memory. If you want to complain about the way the News of the World use their false sheikh, for instance, in stories, then you cannot complain to the PCC. They will not accept it. It is a third-party complaint. Again, that limits complaints. We have not mentioned that in here but it is something the Committee should remember, that it is quite difficult for members of the public to complain about the way newspapers behave unless they are involved as the subject of the story.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2007
Prepared 11 July 2007