Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
TUESDAY 6 MARCH 2007
MR ROBIN
ESSER AND
MR EUGENE
DUFFY
Q120 Chairman: This is self-regulation.
It is not sufficient to say that they have not been prosecuted.
You are supposed to be administering a self-regulatory system.
You say that they may not remember what they paid for, but I would
imagine that they would probably remember if they were paying
somebody and, by doing so, were breaking the law.
Mr Esser: As far as we are concerned
and as far as we know, they did not break the law. As I say again,
none have been accused, none have been charged, and none have
been brought before the courts for breaking the law. We use agencies
for all sorts of reasons, for finding information quickly—legitimate
information which is in the public domain.
Q121 Chairman: The whole purpose
of self-regulation is that it is supposed to sit on top of the
law. It is supposed to enforce higher standards than those which
are required by law. Surely it requires the editorial management
team of a newspaper to enforce it? Then, when you have 91 journalists
who apparently were employing somebody who has since been convicted
of breaking the law, surely self-regulation requires you to go
and ask the journalists why those names appear in this man's client
book?
Mr Duffy: One of the points on
Mr Thomas's report is that he has listed hundreds of transactions,
involving journalists on the Mail and every other newspaper,
my own included, and the implication—
Q122 Chairman: You actually come
out top. There are 95 from the Sunday People and the Daily
Mirror combined.
Mr Duffy: The implication from
Mr Thomas is that every single enquiry that those journalists
made was illegal and was in breach of the Data Protection Act.
What he does not make clear is that he has forwarded none of the
transactions to my newspapers; no names of journalists have been
provided to my newspapers by him; so I have not examined, nor
can I examine, individual journalists or individual transactions.
What we are doing, through self-regulation and trying to improve
it, is reinforcing with our journalists that—as Mr Thomas
says in his own report—any journalist he suspects of committing
breaches of the DPA in future will be subject to prosecution.
We will deal with those people in the future, should they breach
the DPA. What we are doing now at the Mirror titles, very vociferously,
is that each individual journalist has the Code of Practice contained
within their employment contract. This summer we are introducing
meetings of each individual journalist with their head of department,
where the requirements of the Code of Practice and the Data Protection
Act will be reinforced with them. It has come down from the highest
levels of management within the company that we now have a zero
tolerance policy on any breach of the Data Protection Act or the
Code of Practice, where enquiries of the sort referred to by Mr
Thomas have been carried out where there is no public interest
justification on that investigation.
Q123 Chairman: It is all very worthy,
your setting out these rules, but are you saying to us that Mr
Thomas told you that 95 journalists from either the Sunday
People or the Daily Mirror featured in the book of
this man who was convicted of an offence, and you did not do anything
about it?
Mr Duffy: No, we have done something
about it. Because we do not have the details of those transactions
nor do we have the names of those journalists from Mr Thomas,
we have taken a forward-looking view and we will endeavour to
prevent any future breach of the DPA or the PCC.
Q124 Rosemary McKenna: So that practice
can continue? As long as they do not get caught, that is okay?
Mr Esser: If Mr Thomas would kindly
forward the names of the journalists and copies of the invoices
to us, we will ask each one of them what they were doing at the
time; but he has not.
Q125 Chairman: It is very simple.
Why did not both of you say to your journalists, "Did you
ever employ this man who has been convicted of an offence? If
you did, what did you employ him to do?"?
Mr Esser: Yes, and all say that
they were asking for information which was in the public domain.
Q126 Chairman: So you could ask them
whether or not they employed and, if they said yes—
Mr Esser: We have asked all our
journalists this.
Q127 Chairman: So you know who the
people are?
Mr Esser: No, we have asked all
our journalists, all 400 of the journalists who work for us.
Q128 Chairman: Whether or not they
employed—
Mr Esser: Whether or not they
used this particular agency and for what reason. We have been
assured by them all—most of them, of course, say they did
not—
Q129 Rosemary McKenna: They would
say that, would they not?
Mr Esser: We have been assured,
by those who do remember from five years ago, that they were asking
for information which is in the public domain. Also, we have reinforced
to them the need to be extra vigilant from now onwards; to try
to understand the Data Protection Act; to obey the laws of the
Data Protection Act; to examine and be familiar with the PCC guidance
on the Data Protection Act. Compliance with the Data Protection
Act and the PCC Code is part of the employment contract of the
Daily Mail.
Q130 Chairman: Can I just be clear?
The Daily Mail, on receipt of the information about the
number of your journalists who employed the people responsible
in Operation Motorman, went to all of your journalists, you found
out which ones did pay this person, and you satisfied yourself
that in each case there had not been a breach of the Code.
Mr Esser: As far as memory from
five years ago is concerned and can be relied upon, yes.
Q131 Chairman: You got this information
quite recently, because it was only published a few months ago.
Mr Esser: We took this action
right away; but, as I say, we have not actually had a list of
the names and the invoices from the Information Commissioner,
and that would enable us to make an even more rigorous examination
of what happened some five years ago.
Q132 Chairman: Mr Duffy, have you
done exactly the same with the Mirror Group?
Mr Duffy: No, I have not been
to each individual journalist employed on the three papers. Bear
in mind that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, on the
evidence given to them by Mr Thomas, that there is no public interest
in prosecutions against any of the journalists he has identified.
Bearing in mind that, as Mr Thomas has spelt out, he will take
action against any of those journalists he believed committed
an offence under Motorman who, in his eyes, re-offend in the future,
my job is to ensure that they do not re-offend and that is what
we are doing in my company.
Mr Esser: As we are at the Daily
Mail.
Q133 Rosemary McKenna: Can we move
to the things that are not covered by the Data Protection Act
and the other methods that are used by journalists? For example,
you seem to think that all public figures are fair game and that
it is okay to rifle through the refuse outside people's homes,
and to employ people to trawl through their backgrounds going
back 20 or 30 years, paying for information which is of no public
interest at all.
Mr Esser: We do not go on fishing
expeditions like that. All our staff are forbidden to tap phones
and are forbidden to indulge in any of the so-called "blagging"
activities—specifically forbidden.
Q134 Rosemary McKenna: But to go
and speak to people and ask them, offer to pay them for information?
Mr Esser: We are too busy with
news stories that break on the day to go wandering around the
place on speculative stories. We do not go on fishing expeditions.
Q135 Rosemary McKenna: Mr Duffy?
Mr Duffy: First, we do not go
through people's bins.[14]
We have never found much material there worth publishing!
Philip Davies: So you do go through!
Q136 Rosemary McKenna: I am sure
that shredding machines have made a difference to a lot of your
activities, but never mind.
Mr Duffy: As Robin said, when
we send our journalists on investigative stories it is with a
purpose. It comes to mind with Ian Huntley, where we threw a lot
of journalists at the Ian Huntley story and many of the enquiries
we carried out led to women who had made complaints to Humberside
police about Huntley, many years prior to the two murders that
he carried out. It was only through the journalistic work of papers
like myself, the Mail and others that the true background
of Ian Huntley came out, and Humberside police had to put their
hands up and admit they had not done their job properly.
Q137 Rosemary McKenna: I am sure
you are to be congratulated on that, but I have one other point.
Can I ask you about the growing practice of notification late
on a Saturday night, about a story you are going to publish on
Sunday?
Mr Esser: On the Daily Mail,
I am glad to say, we are at home on Saturday night.
Q138 Chairman: And the Mail on
Sunday?
Mr Esser: I cannot answer for
the Mail on Sunday, I am afraid.
Q139 Rosemary McKenna: Perhaps Mr
Dacre could come along. Will he answer for the Mail on Sunday.
Mr Esser: No, the Editor of the
Mail on Sunday will answer for the Mail on Sunday—Mr
Peter Wright.
Mr Duffy: I can answer for the
Sunday papers at Trinity Mirror. I am interested that you say
a "growing practice", because I worked on the Sunday
Mirror 20 years ago and the practices carried out then are
the same as are carried out now. We go to people in good time
on a Saturday, and you also have to accept that papers, particularly
in the Sunday market, want to protect their stories. You can go
too early to the subject of an exclusive on a Saturday afternoon
and, if he does not like your paper, he can feed it to the opposition.
Our editors work under fair practices, and that is normally to
give people sufficient time to prepare their answers.
14 Footnote by Witness:[unless there is a public
interest justification.] Back
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