Examination of Witnesses (Questions 2320
- 2339)
WEDNESDAY 26 MARCH 2008
Mr David Montgomery
Q2320 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
So, on the side of the Sky battle?
Mr Montgomery: And I was a director of Sky at
a certain point.
Q2321 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
During the period that you were editor of the newspaper?
Mr Montgomery: Absolutely. The four or five
channel satellite system was launched and clearly you know the
economic effects on Rupert Murdoch's business—that endeavour
almost brought him to his knees. I and my fellow editors were
hugely enthusiastic about bringing new television services to
the UK and we believed in it. I think that we believed in it without
any pressure from Rupert Murdoch who was an inspirational leader
in terms of business, but I think all of us believed that more
freedom of choice for the British television viewing public was
a good thing.
Q2322 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
You were really locked into it in your own beliefs on any view
of it apart from being a director, so you were no doubt helping
the push in that direction.
Mr Montgomery: Absolutely. I personally believed
in it and I made suggestions about how to promote it. The Today
newspaper gave away satellite dishes to its readers. From memory,
I think that we gave away something like 10,000 satellite dishes
to help to promote Sky. We were evangelical about it but I think
that we believed that this was a good thing. It helped to promote
newspapers as well which was helpful, but I think that we all
believed in it. I do not know if it a mixture of whether Rupert
Murdoch had a great vision and we followed it or whether we simply
believed that it was generally a good thing to introduce more
television choice and mixture.
Q2323 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
What you say is very interesting because obviously it happened
on that occasion that your view of how the market should be developed
in satellite broadcasting coincided very, one might say, conveniently—and
I do not imply any criticism there—with that of your proprietor.
Had you, for instance, been convinced of the merits of BSB at
the time before it became anything else, how difficult do you
think it would have been for you to take an independent line on
that given that obviously it could have been very difficult as
you were a director of Sky, but suppose you had not been? Supposing
you had been in the position of editing a newspaper owned by a
proprietor who was also developing interests in the television
market which you, as editor of that newspaper, did not necessarily
support. Do you think that it would have been possible for you
to run a different agenda from your proprietor on that occasion?
Mr Montgomery: It was never put to the test
and I suppose that when editors disagree with something that their
management want, they have a pretty simple choice to make.
Q2324 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I am asking the question—and hypothetic questions are very
difficult and not very helpful and I accept that—because
I am really interested in whether or not you felt yourself at
the time constrained in any way by Rupert Murdoch's commercial
interests and whether you are aware that the commercial interests
of a proprietor in a field where there is a great deal of consolidation
may, or should perhaps be, influential on the way that editors
edit individual newspapers because that is something which people
are preoccupied and concerned about.
Mr Montgomery: I can only generalise here. We
deal with these situations on a daily basis across many prestigious
newspapers in Europe and we have a written charter which affects
all of our newspapers and the editor in chief is absolutely the
final arbiter of what goes into the paper and there is absolutely
no management interference. You should not forget that journalists
are very good whistle blowers. I mentioned earlier that we had
a scandal involving a peer in the UK and I was put under tremendous
pressure not to publish.
Q2325 Chairman:
Pressure by whom?
Mr Montgomery: By his legal advisers and the
gentleman himself. The reality was that they were wasting their
breath because, had I caved into that, all my journalists would
have known about it and it would have ended up in Private Eye
or some other newspaper.
Q2326 Chairman:
We are talking about Lord Archer?
Mr Montgomery: We are, yes. It is quite obvious—and
we see this time and again—that if you run a newspaper in
a democratic country, you cannot prevent publication of information
that the public desire and should have. I know that we have had
the recent incident in the UK where Prince Harry's whatever it
was, eight or ten-week sojourn in Afghanistan was very effectively
suppressed, but it is highly unusual and, if an individual newspaper
editor or indeed proprietor tries to suppress something, it will
end in failure because, as I say, journalists are whistle blowers,
naturally trained whistle blowers, and they will get the information
out by some means. Twenty years ago it was more difficult but
now you have the Internet and, within a few minutes, the information
will be disseminated.
Q2327 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Would I be right in thinking that you would expect the role of
the proprietor in a consolidated media business to be one of ensuring
that the business ran effectively and that it delivered for his
overall interests sufficient profit, prestige or whatever it was
that he was after, but that you would not expect such a proprietor
to try and influence directly these days the way that content
of those newspapers was developed?
Mr Montgomery: You would be immediately caught
out.
Q2328 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Because it would simply not be an effective way of operating with
the proprietor?
Mr Montgomery: And it would not be a commercially
sensible way of operating. There is a lot of glamour attached
to newspapers and newspaper influence but the reality is that
the people who operate them are experienced professionals who
are not blinded by the glamour or the influence. The people we
appoint as editors or managers are seasoned publishers. Indeed,
one of the things that we have done in our company in the last
two years is that we have cleared out most of the non-publishing
management and four out of five of our country chief executives
are journalists and editors. So, we have a very strong publishing
tradition which guards against this heavy-handed influence to
which you are referring. However, there are occasions where editorial
decisions spill over into the commercial or worse. We have had
the recent republication of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark which
was a very serious thing for the editor to decide on but she alone
made that decision, that rather lonely decision. She obviously
informed the group management because there was a security implication
and indeed the police in Denmark were concerned for her personal
safety as a result, but she made the decision. Commercially, it
could be seen as possibly an issue for management as well because
we have many staff in many countries we need to protect. Nevertheless,
we were alerted to it and we made certain arrangements and the
editor was able to exercise her right to publish the cartoon.
Q2329 Chairman:
I want to bring in Lord King on this but, before I do, I want
to follow up on one point that Lady Howe was making. You said
that when an editor joins a newspaper, he or she understands the
tradition of that newspaper and the tradition of the News of
the World was as a Conservative newspaper. That is skating
over a number of issues. First of all, traditions change. In 1987
when you were the editor of the News of the World, certainly
there was no question but that the News of the World and
the Sun were supporting the Conservatives. Moving ten years
forward, we find that certainly the Sun and, from memory,
the News of the World are both supporting Labour. A certain
amount of acrobatics seems to be done by some of the editors.
Mr Montgomery: Without going into the history
of who was editing the paper ... I should know who was editing
the paper when the Sun went pro-Labour and indeed it was
a great disappointment to me that it went pro-Labour because I
was the Chief Executive of the Mirror Group and I would have much
preferred the Mirror to have been on the winning side and
only the Mirror to be on the winning side. The reality
is that I have moved between the two organisations in the UK and
indeed I have been fortunate enough on two occasions to preside
over newspapers in Northern Ireland which had diametrically opposed
political views, the Derry Journal and the Belfast Newsletter.
Q2330 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You cannot get more diametrically opposed than that!
Mr Montgomery: Exactly. So, I have been in the
position where it is possible to commercially manage businesses
which—
Q2331 Chairman:
I do not dispute that but the point I make is that a certain amount
of flexibility on the part of an editor may come in quite useful
when the proprietor changes his mind.
Mr Montgomery: Yes, but the country changed
its mind as well in 1997. Of course, I see where you are going
but we fortunately do not have these problems in Europe.
Q2332 Chairman:
We will come on to Europe shortly.
Mr Montgomery: We did not have them in Northern
Ireland either. Sometimes people from a different background were
in charge of the newspapers in Northern Ireland, so they were
able to adapt to the cultural and political tradition of the titles
concerned.
Q2333 Lord King of Bridgwater:
I am really interested in your last remark that you do not have
these problems in Europe as though somehow Europe is a tolerance-free
zone. You have given us some extraordinarily interesting information
about what you are doing in Europe—it s a most interesting
exercise—and, as you rightly said, each one of them is a
bit different in one way or another. For instance, talking about
the political approach of the newspapers, did you say that your
Polish newspaper is 49% owned by the Government?
Mr Montgomery: Yes.
Q2334 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Does the Government approve the appointment of the editor in chief?
Mr Montgomery: We have management control and
the editor is approved by the supervisory board, but it is our
nominee and we just have to go through a transparent process and
a very rigorous process to attract a suitably qualified person.
Q2335 Lord King of Bridgwater:
We have not heard anything about your board. The thing that interests
me about how much political influence or power you are exposed
to or you as the Chairman would seek to impose any political approach
on your papers. One of the questions that you were asked by one
of the journalists in our brief—and I cannot remember which
country this was—was "Can you read our newspaper?"
You have Danish, Dutch, German, Polish and you have Ukrainian.
I know that you are a talented man, but I do not think you are
multi-lingual.
Mr Montgomery: Of course I cannot read the papers,
but I sort of know what is going on.
Q2336 Lord King of Bridgwater:
How do you do that?
Mr Montgomery: I clearly get a brief of what
is happening in the papers on a daily basis. Not all the papers
because there are 300 papers, but I certainly see Berliner
Zeitung, Rzeczpospolita and Berlingske Tidende.
I see the main papers.
Q2337 Lord King of Bridgwater:
In translation.
Mr Montgomery: In summary and, when I look at
them, I have a very strong idea of what is going on because Berliner
Zeitung, Berlingske Tidende and Rzeczpospolita deal
in high-grade national and international content, so clearly I
am aware of what is happening and I can make judgments about their
design. However, I am not responsible for any of the editorial
side, but clearly I need to see that the papers are of a marketable
quality and I can make judgments about what sections they have,
what supplements they have and so forth. So, it is important to
have a journalistic eye and that is why we have encouraged editors
to become managers in our organisation and, as I say, four out
of five of them are. So, with that line-up of talent locally,
it is not necessary for me to be involved in the minutia and indeed
it would not be right that I would be involved in the minutia
of journalism.
Q2338 Lord King of Bridgwater:
When you visit these newspapers, do you meet the Prime Ministers
of these countries?
Mr Montgomery: I occasionally meet politicians,
but again it is for the chief executives of the local organisations
to deal with the political side of life and I would not put myself
up to meet people but occasionally, just through social contact,
I might see them.
Q2339 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Have you had representations/complaints made to you such as, "We
are very worried about the way in which your responsible publication
is going"?
Mr Montgomery: I do not think that our newspapers
would be doing a good job if they did not get complaints from
politicians who disagreed with some of the comment.
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