Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
480-495)
MR NICK
DAVIES AND
MR ROY
GREENSLADE
21 APRIL 2009
Q480 Alan Keen: Yes. I am saying
also that it should be transparent, they should have to declare
what their interests are before they start.
Mr Davies: You deal with that
with code of conduct stuff rather than by introducing Freedom
of Information legislation. I think that is right. If I am writing
a story about a company and I own shares in the company then I
should declare it. Actually, I should not be writing the story,
they should give it to another journalist.
Q481 Alan Keen: I understand that.
I was asking about lobby journalists.
Mr Greenslade: Should lobby journalists
have a declaration of interests similar to that which MPs have?
Q482 Alan Keen: Yes.
Mr Greenslade: That is interesting.
I have never really thought about that but it does not sound to
me to be a bad idea. You mean shareholdings et cetera?
Q483 Alan Keen: Yes.
Mr Greenslade: I am a bit of a
purist; I do not think journalists should have shares.
Q484 Alan Keen: There is a woman
who has frequently been on television and in the press who appears
to me to be a campaigner for freedom of information, an American
I think.
Mr Davies: Heather Brooke?
Q485 Alan Keen: Yes. Does she earn
a living from this?
Mr Davies: She is a journalist.
She is a specialist in freedom of information. I think she is
actually British and she worked in America and used their Freedom
of Information Act, came back to this country just as ours was
about to come into force so wrote a book which is a guide.
Q486 Alan Keen: I have seen her being
interviewed.
Mr Davies: You are wondering whether
she has some vested interest.
Q487 Alan Keen: Yes, because I have
seen her on television being interviewed.
Mr Greenslade: I know her quite
well. She teaches the students at City. She is a single interest
journalist in the old tradition of having one niche interest and
following it to its logical conclusion. She lives, in monetary
terms, on the margins.
Q488 Adam Price: You seem to be moving
towards a kind of reformed and enhanced self-regulatory system.
You talked about the inherent fuzziness of the concept of public
interest and the nub of the problem. Is that not an argument actually
for statutory definition? It seems to me that the press's definition
of the public interest is what the public is interested in. You
mention as well the issue of the two presses within the UK which
again is part of the problem because on the one hand all of us
would want to defend serious investigative journalism and yet
that defence against privacy laws or against the current libel
law is then used to defend prurient, gutter journalism. The Mirror
taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights defending
the freedom of right of expression but it is citing the Naomi
Campbell case which is bizarre. For whistleblowers we have
the Public Interest Disclosure Act. Could we not have a statutory
definition of public interest so that we could all be clear about
it?
Mr Davies: That would still require
case by case interpretation. At the moment, where the code of
conduct is concerned, it is being interpreted by a body which
is not functioning in an independent, fair-minded, even-handed
way. By all means let us try to clarify what we mean by public
interest but the most important thing is to accumulate all these
changes we have talked about with the PCC and let us expose them
to the Freedom of Information Act. I would be particularly interested
to know the grounds on which they reject these particular complaints.
Let us have some independent investigators in there who may be
professional journalists. That requires a bit more funding. I
would say, let us get the editors off the Commission so that it
functions more like a jury that has not already got a bunch of
people with a vested interest, and let us review all the rules
within which they operate (the third party the rule; the "you
cannot complain if you are suing" rule). Then we might have
some chance of taking these difficult concepts and making sense
of them, applying them independently and fair-mindedly.
Mr Greenslade: Let me come at
this from a different angle. It would be said by anyone defending
the idea of a statutory control that judges themselves would take
everything on a case by case interest. Indeed, that is what Mr
Justice Eady—much maligned—does on every occasion;
he treats everything on a case by case basis and so that would
seem to fall in line. However, think of the consistent cost to
publications (many of which, by the way—Guardian, Times,
Independent—lose money already, that is without the
extra costs that would be involved) if every single story was
challengeable in the courts because of the statute you would find
that an immensely chilling effect. Even though I follow the logic
of your argument, in the end the case by case can be dealt with
through bolstered self-regulation whether or not you agree with
Nick and I about the composure of the Commission. That is a far
better way of offering greater opportunities for everyone to take
part because you would still be in the situation, if you created
the statute, that up and down the length and breadth of this country
people who complain about local papers would find they needed
to go to court which would be impossible for them to contemplate
and we would have more dramas about CFAs and so on. In the end
their best chance of justice, if you call it that, would still
be through self-regulation.
Q489 Adam Price: The closest comparator
maybe to England and Wales is the Republic of Ireland where they
do have a self-regulatory system, they have a press council, they
have a press ombudsman. They have introduced a new definition
bill which the media have actually supported because that, for
example, will allow a newspaper to apologise without admitting
liability. The media have supported that but as a countervailing
measure—about which the media industry is not so happy—they
are proposing now a privacy bill. Their solution is that instead
of having judged based law making they have decided to take those
two rights that we have under the European Convention—the
right of freedom of expression and the right to privacy—and
flesh out the tension between them by having two statutes running
in parallel. The privacy one is not just about the press and media,
it is also about privacy in terms of public authorities, it is
about data protection surveillance, it is about privacy per se.
Would that not be a better way rather than having case by case
judicial activity?
Mr Greenslade: The Irish are very
late into the concept of self-regulation. The creation of the
ombudsman and so on is fairly modern. The setting up of that was
a trade-off and the trade-off was that they would reform the libel
laws. However, the imposition of a privacy in law I think will
inhibit the press in Ireland and will be inhibitive. The next
bit of the trade-off in Ireland has to be the quashing of the
very idea of a privacy law.
Q490 Chairman: Can I just come back
to the McCann case because that was one of the main reasons for
our inquiry. That is probably the most serious libel committed
by a large number of papers although only one finally reached
the court in recent times and has caused deep concern. First of
all, do you think it was a one-off, that it was such an extraordinary
case, that that kind of thing could not have happened elsewhere?
Secondly, given what has been revealed by the extent to which
papers were just making up stories do you think that they actually
learned lessons? Did they sit and take a long hard look at themselves
and say, "We must never allow this to happen again?"
Mr Greenslade: I do not think
so. I do not think the lessons are easily learned in that matter
and indeed many newspapers have got away with things because they
were not sued. They just chose to go for the most obvious examples
in the Express newspapers. By the way, when you talk about
the McCanns you must include Mr Murat as well who was severely
libelled throughout. I think it was an extraordinary case but
which brought to light what goes on at a lower level day after
day after day, which is irresponsible behaviour and the publishing
of stories which are inaccurate. In that sense, although it was
an extraordinary story and an extraordinary episode in the life
of the press, it was not one which in some ways was an aberration
and will never happen again and that was an aberration that had
never happened before. It is in fact part of the on-going culture
of popular journalism in Britain.
Mr Davies: I would agree. You
have to look at the underlying drivers here. There was a similar
case with that guy who was killed in the bush in Australia and
his girlfriend was blamed by the press. The guy who died was called
Falconio. Do you remember that case? It is rather similar. There
is a crime, we do not know what the answer is; okay, we will blame
one of the players. There was a ghastly press campaign against
this poor girl and she was completely innocent. The underlying
drivers are what I wrote the whole book about, the underlying
drivers commercially driven organisations desperate to sell papers
and get ratings, feeding off each other's sources of information,
not checking. It is that commercial pollution that has occurred
which is very, very common. The McCann case was particularly big
and particularly cruel but not unusual in the drivers behind it.
You ask about lessons learned, there is no reason to think that
lessons have been learned because, if anything, commercial drivers
have become more powerful because of the financial problems than
now encroach on newsrooms.
Q491 Paul Farrelly: The tabloid press
has said that the McCann case was a one-off so that is a refreshing
counter-argument. There are inaccuracies that may not affect people's
whole lives; with the McCanns of course it did affect their lives.
There is also the question of whether it is accurate or is irresponsible
and I just wanted to read into the record another case recently,
the way the British tabloids treated the daughter, Elizabeth Fritzl,
and the Sun in pursuing her to her new home, published
a pixellated face. Then on 11 March the Daily Mail actually
felt the need to publish the name of the village where she lives.
The Austrian press referred to our press as "Satan's reporters".
Florian Klenk of the Falter newspaper in Vienna, in the
case of Elizabeth, has said that their new existence has been
destroyed thanks to the British reporters who have divulged the
name of her village. Is that not another example, when there is
such a big story like this, that every new fact, every new angle
is a fresh lead and a fresh headline, and nobody steps back to
ask, "Should we be doing this?"
Mr Greenslade: That is a very
good example of Mr Whittingdale asking whether they had learned
any lessons. That would suggest that no lessons at all have been
learned. By the way, just to add to your record is the fact that
the chequebook came out and there were offers to Mr Fritzl for
his story which completely runs against the spirit and letter
of the code of conduct.
Mr Davies: As a secondary point,
the Mail disclosed the name of the village on 11 March;
two days later the Express did the same and the Independent
followed by Scotland on Sunday. So it is not as if it was
just the freakish Mail; they led the way but others were
perfectly happy to follow.
Mr Greenslade: This is a really
good example of how feeding frenzies take off in that one paper
does something and the others feel they have to catch up or at
least feel that this is in the public domain therefore we are
justified in doing it. In no time that creates a vicious circle.
In many ways the McCanns—the case which was an extraordinary
example—is merely the tip of an iceberg in the sense that
this is fairly common stuff. I have great respect for the Independent
and I know that Nick does, but is it not disgraceful that a newspaper
of that sort would feel able to do it and it felt able to do it
because it would use the defence that it was already out there.
That is not responsible. It should actually have been critical
of the Mail for having done it in the first place.
Chairman: We have reached the end of
the questions, but Mike Hall just wants to raise one issue.
Q492 Mr Hall: Nick, in answer to
my questions at the start of the session you made a rather unfortunate
remark about me. That is an example of how a story could actually
run and get out of hand. I would like you to put on record that
what you actually said was without any foundation whatsoever.
Mr Davies: Are you serious?
Q493 Mr Hall: Yes.
Mr Davies: Then of course I would.
We were talking purely hypothetically. I would be just as happy
to say, "Let us just imagine a newspaper wants to run a story
saying that Nick Davies is a paedophile"; we are talking
hypothetically.
Q494 Mr Hall: To have it reported
would be very, very damaging.
Mr Davies: The trouble is, once
information falls into the hands of organisations who do not put
honesty as a priority all of us are at risk and anything could
be taken out of context and misreported. It really is worrying.
I hope I have put on the record what needs to be put on the record.
Mr Greenslade: Can I just say
one thing? I just want to read to you about what Mr Dacre said
at the Society of Editors Conference in November last year: "If
the News of the World cannot carry such stories as the
Mosley orgy then it and its political reportage and analysis will
eventually probably die". That is an extraordinary statement
when you actually think about it. What he is saying is that papers
like the News of the World should have the right to break
the law, to intrude into personal privacy in order that their
political reportage will go on and that they will continue to
exist. In other words, newspapers should be allowed to be law
breakers and be famous simply so that they can exist for the general
public good with the odd bit of political reportage. I just wanted
to put on the record that that is a disgusting idea.
Q495 Chairman: We are hearing from
Mr Dacre on Thursday.
Mr Greenslade: I hope I will be
here.
Chairman: Thank you both very much.
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