Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1740
- 1752)
WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2008
Mr Roy Greenslade
Q1740 Baroness Thornton:
Can I ask you your view about the social implications of the fact
that people are not reading news and what do you think that means?
Mr Greenslade: Obviously I am
worried about that. On the other hand, I think that is a cultural
phenomenon that is true in the affluent West. People no longer
feel that their lives are dependent on items of news. They are
well off—relatively well off—they can live their lives
without knowing what the riots are in Kenya; they will inform
themselves if our soldiers are at war, of course, but only in
a very general way. And they are not scared; we are largely a
nation no longer fearing invasion and no longer fearing even the
nuclear bomb, so we feel safe and we therefore feel that we can
live without news. Of course I am worried about that; I think
if you are going to be a part of a mature democracy you should
have information and knowledge enabling you to make the rights
decisions when it comes to elections and to involve yourself in
your local community. On the other hand, you cannot force people
to do that.
Q1741 Baroness Thornton:
That was not what I was supposed to be asking you about, but thank
you. What I wanted to explore, leading on from other questions,
is about the regulatory regime because you have written about,
for example, the Hollinger International's sale of The Telegraph
titles in 2004 and the tests that are applied by what was then
the DTI and the way that the Enterprise and Communications Act
work together. If I might ask you a couple of questions about
that? Does it concern you that the tests about a media merger
and public interest are largely subjective? That is one thing
I would like you to talk to us about. Also, whether you think
there is any better way of dealing with the subject of media merges?
Mr Greenslade: One of the terrible
things about being a journalist is you also forget what you write.
Did I really say that? I was probably concerned with the fact
that the other bidder, if I may remember rightly, was the Daily
Mail, was it not, at the time, and how one reaches the decision
that one is a good buyer—I thought the Daily Mail
would have been a wrong buyer for the same reasons that I said
Rupert Murdoch was a wrong buyer previously because they had two
fantastically profitable, healthy titles. They are good at the
job of doing newspapers but would they be right to minimise the
number of voices? I thought that would be wrong. It seems to me
that some of the reasons advanced for why people are allowed to
bid and others are not need to be very transparent, very upfront
and they need to be spelled out in as—I hate to use this
word—an objective a way as possible. I thought that the
Barclay Brothers were not particularly necessarily going to be
a bad set of owners for The Telegraph, even though in my
short number of months at The Telegraph a year or so ago,
unlike Andrew Neil, I felt they did interfere in my press freedom,
and obviously my experiences with them are different from his,
but then he works for them. As long as you set down sets of objective
tests then it is fine.
Q1742 Baroness Thornton:
Do you think that the Secretary of State should be bound, for
example, by the findings of the Competition Commission?
Mr Greenslade: Yes. I think that
the Competition Commission have investigatory powers and they
take all the evidence and I think that for a Secretary of State
to stand out against the Competition Commission would be wrong.
After all, going by my test, they are more likely more objective;
they are dealing with the commercial reality rather than political
reality.
Q1743 Chairman:
So you would take the Secretary of State out of the final judgment?
Mr Greenslade: I would. By the
way, I think the Secretary of State might enjoy being taken out
of it because I think it puts immense pressure on the Secretary
of State from internal politics and external pressures and the
Competition Commission can make a rational decision.
Q1744 Baroness Thornton:
Should Ofcom be able to issue an Intervention Notice independently
of the Secretary of State?
Mr Greenslade: I saw that question
and, do you know, I do not know anything about it; I do not know
what an Intervention Notice is. You have an expert in front of
you who does not know; I do not know what it is.
Q1745 Lord Inglewood:
Can I ask you briefly to back to the Press Complaints Commission?
The criticism that I have often heard about the Press Complaints
Commission is that at the end of the day it has no teeth and a
big, robust newspaper if it has to make an apology is rapped on
the knuckles on day one and on day two it has forgotten all about
it and goes on its old evil ways. Do you think that is a fair
criticism?
Mr Greenslade: No, I do not. First
of all, having been there, as it were, editors really do not like
having to put something in their newspaper which says that they
got it wrong; that is the first thing, and it is a greater pressure
than you might imagine. The other important thing to understand
about the PCC when you look at their judgments is that gradually—and
this has been gradual, in the 1980s when we felt we needed to
construct a Press Complaints Commission because I was on the committee
that set it up, the 1980s were hugely reckless in what newspapers
were then publishing compared to today; you might not think so
but it is true—since 1991 when it started until now you
can see that papers have gradually got better behaved and have
not made the same kind of mistakes, the same kind of breaches
endlessly; so they are not now interfering in people's lives in
the way that they did in the 1980s. There are bad moments, terribly
bad moments when you think, "Why ever did they do that?"
but I think, by the way, that Rupert Murdoch's admonition for
Piers Morgan in public, when the Sunday People editor intruded
into the privacy of Sara Cox by taking nude pictures of her on
honeymoon, those kinds of things are not going to be repeated.
We are not going to put cameras over walls in clinics, which Piers
Morgan's paper did, which led to the Rupert Murdoch admonition;
we are not now going to take nude pictures of people on private
beaches. By the way, a recent case by a magazine was quickly dealt
with for that reason. So it is not perfect but it is as perfect
as anything can be.
Q1746 Chairman:
That really is quite a claim, is it not—as perfect as it
can be? Do we not have Mr Blair talking about feral beasts and
all that sort of thing?
Mr Greenslade: I think his feral
beast is not about the Press Complaints Commission though, is
it?
Q1747 Chairman:
No, it is about the people.
Mr Greenslade: His complaint is
about the coverage of politics, which he feels is cynical—that
it has moved from sceptical to cynical, and about feeding the
24-hour news cycle. I think that is slightly different from what
the Press Complaints Commission do.
Q1748 Bishop of Manchester:
There are two areas I want to explore a little further in relation
to a couple of answers you gave earlier. One was in your reply
to Lady Thornton, and this is what you said, "The Barclay
brothers did interfere in my press freedom." Could you amplify
that and give us a couple of specific examples?
Mr Greenslade: It is a very definite
example. I was hired by the Daily Telegraph editor at the
time, Martin Newland, to write a media column on a weekly basis.
After I had written my first column Mr Newland called me into
his office and said, "There is a lot of nervousness upstairs,"
and I said, "Why?" and he said, "They do not want
you to write about media personalities." I said, "What
am I supposed to write about?" and he said, "They would
prefer it if you wrote about media business." I said, "Business—not
the personalities of business, just business?" He said, "Yes,
I think that would be how they would see it, how they would prefer
it." A week later I happened to be up on the management floor
and I was introduced to Aidan Barclay, who really runs the papers
on behalf of his uncle and father, and he said to me, "I
have a great story for you about our success at The Telegraph
and I would like you to write about that." I said, "I
must take that on board," as it were. After a couple of weeks
of attempting to write this column and Mr Newland consistently
pointing out to me that that had not particularly pleased them
it was agreed that I should leave, and I departed. So the interference
was that really in the end they did not want to write about the
media—and you may have noted that since my media column
disappeared from the Daily Telegraph no media column has
appeared. So clearly that is the way they wanted it. Let me reveal
that there is a Fleet Street pact between Associated Newspapers
and Telegraph Newspapers that they will not write about each other,
so that they ensure that they at least are free from criticism
in either paper.
Q1749 Bishop of Manchester:
Thank you, that is very interesting. Can I very briefly—and
this does not require a large answer, I am sure—go back
to the Ofcom point and your comment about removing the Secretary
of State from it, do you feel that if the Secretary of State is
removed from that intervening background power is Ofcom as it
is currently constituted, in your view, a sufficiently fierce
body in terms of takeover?
Mr Greenslade: I do not think,
to be absolutely honest, that I am in a position to be able to
certain about that. I do not think that it has been tested, to
be honest, in the heat of battle so I cannot be certain. It certainly
seems to me to be a fairly fierce body in dealing with broadcasting
but I do not think they have had to face the difficulty of a switch
of newspapers.
Q1750 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
You have already said a little about the future and your view
of how it may be in the future, say ten years on. You have indicated
possibly one danger, that there might be less diversity as things
go online—diversity of ownership. Given that the BBC, Andrew
Neil said was a good public service benchmark, as it were, in
lots of other directions for reliability, independence, impartiality,
do you think that by that stage the newspapers will still have
the same quality mark and political mark, if you like, that each
of them has today, or do you think that the whole thing will have
blended into a much less public service broadcasting style of
newspaper? And will there be any newspapers left, as such?
Mr Greenslade: I am on record
as having said that I think we are heading for a non-print future.
When that will be I do not know. You will get various American
academics who will say it is 2043—October 3 or something!
And people will try to make this kind of forecast. But it is quite
clear to me if you look at the trend in newspaper reading and
newspaper buying that at least in terms of national newspapers
and indeed some large regional newspapers that there will come
a point at which it will not be profitable to go on publishing
a newsprint version. We might see hybrids, we might see all sorts
of different forms, we might see the growth of more free newspapers—I
know it has been mooted that The Independent might go free,
much denied; that the Sun might go free, also denied—but
it must be on the minds of people that perhaps they can combine
a presence on the Net with free newspapers. To go to your second
part, will that be good or bad in terms of the output? I think
when you look at the current output online it is pretty good and
in fact you could find anything on line that you want. If you
want to ogle Page Three girls the Sun site provides that
for you; but if you want serious news there are masses available
and analysis and comment. In my view we are in the middle of a
revolution, the digital revolution, and we do not know, we cannot
have any idea where it is going because ten years ago we did not
know that we would be here today, and in ten years' time we do
not know what it will like. But I think we can look to a point
at which newspaper publishing in the newsprint form will be a
rarity rather than the norm.
Q1751 Chairman:
That does not mean that there will not be a Guardian, there
will not be a Times, there will not be a Daily Telegraph?
Mr Greenslade: No, it just means
that they will be in a different form.
Q1752 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
But might they, if you are not right, have lost that quality and
really blended in?
Mr Greenslade: If you look at
the current state of their online offerings there is masses of
quality there. I do not think one needs to worry about the quality
of the journalistic output because it comes from a different platform.
Chairman: I am going to cut it short
at this point. Thank you very much, Mr Greenslade, for coming;
what you have said has been interesting and perhaps again if we
have some further points we could write to you about that?
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