Like an interminable tragicomedy, the phone-hacking story rumbles on with
much of the audience dozing in their seats. Every now and then a scene
arouses their interest, but the twists and turns of the plot are beginning to
puzzle them and many may slip away quietly before the final curtain. The
encounter in which one of the principal actors, James Murdoch, faced again
the accusers in the Culture, Media and Sport select committee on the stage of
the Wilson Room in Portcullis House turned out to be disappointing.
Murdoch had mastered his part and appeared to be immaculately rehearsed,
frustrating the efforts of his chief adversary, Tom Watson, who flirted with
turning from good guy to villain with an attention-seeking line about the
Mafia. Nevertheless, one of the supporting cast, Paul Farrelly, was able to
score a very palpable hit by pointing out that the supposed “rogue reporter”,
Clive Goodman, could hardly have had the head of a footballers’ trade union
as a contact on his beat as a royal correspondent and that the boss should have
spotted the fact. Farrelly got his laugh. And soon afterwards the chairman
announced that this was the committee’s final performance.

Across the road, however, in the more spacious QEII Conference Centre,
Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry had already opened its public sessions with
two days of seminars, to which, incidentally, a number of members of the
BJR editorial board contributed, either in presentations or from the floor.
Not all the participants were on an elevated level, as you can see in the
transcripts on the inquiry’s website. For instance, the final presentation on
the subject of press freedom came from Kelvin MacKenzie, easy to find from
the index to the day’s transcripts if you look up the word “arse”.

Having rejected attempts to expand the personnel of his inquiry panel –
advocated by the BJR, among others – to include people with expert
knowledge of newspaper practice, Lord Justice Leveson has now proceeded
on the long task he has been set by taking evidence from the victims of phone
hacking. That is likely to take the next three months, and then other
witnesses will come before the inquiry, probably filling up the rest of a year.

In the meantime, the police investigation surges – or perhaps limps –
forward. Where the law has been broken, the police must continue a rigorous
and relentless investigation, which most of us in the media can observe with
fascination coupled with a degree of relief that we have not been tempted
into transgressions that might have resulted in our own collars being felt. But
we also have a task to pursue while we watch. We need to do our best to repair
the damage to the public’s confidence in the press, which had seriously begun
to decline long before Messrs Goodman and Mulcaire had been banged up.

The scandal must remain separate from the state of the industry, where
the vital questions to be addressed are about ethics and regulation. At
present the most solid suggestion we have comes from Paul Dacre, editor-in-
chief of the Mail group, who made a significant speech on regulation which
could show a way forward. Dacre called on Parliament “to compel all
newspaper owners to fund and participate in self-regulation”. And to tackle
accusations that the Press Complaints Commission has been toothless, he
proposed an ombudsman for newspapers, with powers to investigate,
summon journalists and editors, name offenders and impose fines. Lord Chief
Justice Igor Judge weighed in with condemnation of statutory regulation, as
did such luminaries as Lord (Chris) Patten, Ken Clarke and the new chairman
of the PCC, Lord (David) Hunt, at an illuminating Society of Editors
conference at Runnymede.

There is no guarantee that any of their proposals will be accepted by the
rest of the industry, particularly by Richard Desmond, who has taken the
Express and Star papers out of the PCC process and has been exchanging
insults with Dacre. (Desmond, however, has paradoxically told The Guardian
that he is not against statutory regulation, as with Ofcom, which regulates
his Channel 5.) But Dacre plus the trio of peers and Mr Clarke are to be
congratulated on hopefully setting in motion an industry-wide move to make
the changes necessary to head off the kind of stringent constraints on press
freedom recommended by many critics.

The negotiations, based on what Dacre suggests, should begin
immediately to keep the industry in pole position as the police phone-hacking
inquiry continues – the numbers get bigger all the time – and Lord
Justice Leveson proceeds on his own long and potentially mind-numbing
journey towards who-knows-what. Such are the ingredients of a drama that
really belongs on Shaftesbury Avenue. This one is guaranteed to run and run.

— BH