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

At this point, thankfully, I recovered from my little fantasy. Why do you want to know? I asked. A rather unconvincing and ill-prepared tale ensued about a parcel from a friend of a friend which had to be hand-delivered, at the end of which I was sufficiently in command of my wits to ask the obvious question. Are you a journalist? Clearly lacking the subterfuge of, say, a Paul McMullan, she responded with a rather sheepish yes (while still fluttering her eyelids). But, she added quickly, it was a very important assignment.

I closed the door, wrote a scribbled note to warn of the impending intrusion, satisfied myself I wasn’t being followed and pushed the note through XYZ’s letter-box on the way to the pub. The subsequent answerphone message of thanks stayed on our machine for months, replayed many times by my children as evidence of the exotic company I keep. I have never spoken to XYZ before or since. This particular journalist was seen skulking round our street for several hours (in tandem with a less fetching male accomplice) and some days later a garbled piece appeared in a tabloid newspaper linking XYZ romantically to a sporting celebrity in a story which was 45 per cent complete fabrication, 45 per cent wild exaggeration and 10 per cent approximately true. The names were spelt correctly.

It is important to stress at this point that XYZ has never courted publicity, never been featured in OK! or Hello!, never been involved in any corruption nor infidelity nor public drunkenness nor any other misdemeanour which could possibly justify press interest. This celebrity’s name was made purely through having a superb voice and an exceptional talent for songwriting, providing genuine pleasure to – literally – millions of concert-goers and music lovers around the world.

I have no idea whether this person has had a mobile phone hacked, health records stolen or bank details blagged. Since clearly regarded as legitimate fodder for the tabloid press, it would be surprising if XYZ had not been targeted by others. But it does raise a fundamental question about the kind of journalism we want to foster and the kind which, frankly, is little more than prurient gossip-mongering disguised as public interest information.

In light of the revelations about phone hacking and some of the criminal and immoral practices which were endemic on the News of the World – and probably elsewhere – we are warned in threatening tones that injunctions, regulatory bodies and, God forbid, any kind of statutory regulation would risk returning to Soviet-like authoritarian dictatorship. It is, goes the argument, only complete journalistic licence which stands between a free democracy and totalitarian autocracy.

This is an argument which confuses two entirely different models of journalism. On the one hand is the caped crusader – the Clark Kent figure who is committed to rooting out corruption, standing up for the bullied and the downtrodden and confronting evil. On the other hand, there is the famously evocative image from Spitting Image in the 1980s in which pigs in raincoats carrying shorthand notebooks turned over unsuspecting victims while cravenly sucking up to their foul-mouthed editors and bullying proprietors.

In the aftermath of phone hacking and the very clear message from politicians (and the public) to the Leveson inquiry that something must be done to prevent these obscene journalistic practices from taking root again, we have heard many plaintive cries that the caped crusader must be protected at all costs. No one could possibly disagree with that.

But we have to ask ourselves – not just as journalists, but as people who care about the nature of our public life and the sort of society that we aspire to – how many of these plaintive cries are actually camouflaged attempts to protect the pigs in raincoats. Because it may just be time to accept, as many other healthy, vibrant and informed democracies around the world appear to do without the slightest damage to their democratic freedoms, that perhaps we should finally call time on the mucky side of the trade.

Yes, people may enjoy reading about the private life of XYZ, not to mention the many other skilled, talented and gifted actors, athletes, entrepreneurs, artists, architects, dancers and so on who light up our lives. But we are not entitled to gatecrash their private lives simply because they have an exceptional talent or have achieved something extraordinary. And we are certainly not entitled to pursue the kind of vicious, brutal, destructive and ultimately stultifying journalism which became the hallmark – in particular – of many stories in the News of the World. In other words, this is not just about the techniques of good journalism. It’s about the definition of good journalism.

If Leveson is about anything at all, it should be about understanding the difference between freedom of speech and freedom from abusive and intrusive speech. This is the chance for journalism professionals to protect the caped crusaders while also defending the legitimate right of XYZ and others to live their private lives in peace. And if it needs an independent body with statutory teeth to make it stick – well, it doesn’t seem to have fettered our television journalists.

Steven Barnett

The writer is professor of communications at the University of Westminster. His book on television journalism is being published in November.

When in despair, just raise a glass
      and drink
To the enduring power
      of doublethink.
            (Mine, not Orwell’s)

There is certainly one area of BBC News, which is looking for savings of 20 per cent, where less actually would be better: that is the expensive and wasteful practice of sending its presenters somewhere near the scene of a news event and pretending that this adds value and authenticity. Helen Boaden, the director of news, confessed in a recent speech that, although this had become “etiquette” on major news stories, in some cases it had been unnecessary. She singled out the appearance of Huw Edwards outside the home of a suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, with “poor old Huw saying: ‘This is the guilty hedge’ – I look back at that and think with hindsight that probably wasn’t the best use of our money”.

The advance of the anchors dates back some 30 years, to the time when newsreaders were replaced by proper journalists. It was not an instant success. Even John Simpson was a newsreader for a while in 1982, until sent into temporary exile in Montevideo. Those who remained liked the exposure and higher salaries, and maybe the relative comfort and safety too. But they chafed at their new and limited role of reading words off an autocue. So they stopped being newsreaders and became “anchors”, a title suggesting depth and gravitas. And they sought to push the boundaries.

The first step, initiated by ITN, was the live two-way interview with the correspondent in the field. I would gently enquire of my warzone rivals whether, at the end of their report, they had been “Well-Trevored”. That was because their first answer to Trevor MacDonald, the all-knowing anchorman in London, would invariably begin with the words “Well, Trevor…” All they were doing was reworking their report for a second time, but without the benefit of pictures. The theory was that the newsreader, however marginally, was involved in the day’s events. The contagion of the two-way spread rapidly to Sky News and the BBC. I objected, but was overruled.

In due course TV journalism became not just a reporting but a performing art. The BBC’s Vin Ray, an experienced hand who secretly admired the old ways while defending the new, described it as “being in the moment”. There was actually a style coach. Reporters were taught to walk and talk and wave their arms at the same time. One distinguished correspondent was told she had to acquire “a new set of hand signals”. Farewell journalism, hello semaphore.

Then the carpenters moved in. Presenters’ platforms were built on hotel rooftops, in green zones, outside military bases and even in the gardens of the broadcasters’ own bureaux. At that point the anchors descended in all their vainglory, fronting news programmes (or parts of them) from what appeared to be, but seldom was, the scene of the action. They applied make-up and lip gloss and even hairspray – and that was just the men. A new breed of sub-anchor appeared. Tom would announce the news from London, then pass the ball to Dick on his platform, who in turn would throw it to Harry, who was doing the actual reporting. Harry, the lowest paid and best informed of the three, would aspire to be a Dick and ultimately a Tom.

With the advent of rolling news, which usually shows more than it knows, the outcome of all these proliferations was not so much news as newsak – the appearance without the reality. It was expensive too. Anchors and sub-anchors don’t travel at the back of the plane.

There was also the question of what did they actually know? Journalists in the field, tethered to platforms and satellite uplinks, used to be described in the trade as “dish monkeys”; but they were not paid peanuts.

Occasionally good journalism survived: George Alagiah escaped from etiquette captivity after the tsunami in Sri Lanka to file a memorable report from his home village near Batticaloa. But such opportunities were rare. Many good reporters choose at one point in their careers to go “inside” and are clearly yearning to come out again. But there is no middle way. Either they are there or they are not. Marooned on a hotel rooftop in Ruritania, they know no more at first hand than if they were in the studio in White City, Osterley or Gray’s Inn Road.

Reporters should also be wary of the creeping symptoms of correspondentitis. This is an affliction of the mind that occurs when they have been around for a while, believe that they have unique insights to offer, and file reports that are chiefly about themselves. The roles of anchor and sub-anchor play to this weakness with devastating effect. Within the BBC’s College of Journalism, there is scope for a School of Humility. Budget cuts may yet deliver it.

Martin Bell

The author is a former BBC foreign correspondent and later an independent MP.

The smooth running of daily news programmes requires the same clear chain of command as an army unit and, like an army unit, television news has traditionally been dominated by men – and usually gruff, no-nonsense alpha men at that. That said, the world of TV newsrooms is a good deal more gender-enlightened than the world of TV sports judging by recent events at BSkyB, and equality issues are now on the agenda of most major TV news organisations. Taking a look at the on-the-ground picture, I would argue that news reporting, especially the hard variety such as war and disaster coverage, is still a male preserve, albeit with a fairly long list of notable exceptions. There are some terrific women reporters out in the field, but, that said, the roster of men in Kevlar vests – plus the male camera operators who accompany them – is still much longer.

In the studio it’s a very different gender story, and my impression is that over the past decade the female newsreader has achieved ascendancy in this formerly middle-aged male preserve.

For my money, the big name stars of the noughties have been presenters such as Fiona Bruce, Kirsty Young, Natasha Kaplinsky, Julie Etchingham and Kay Burley. True, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News would tell you their top anchors are blokes such as Jon Snow, Mark Austin, Jeremy Thompson and Huw Edwards, but the best-known stars are unquestionably now women. This is partly due to the ever growing personality-led culture of our main TV news programmes, and the fact that magazines and newspapers are much more excited by female news presenters than male ones – especially when they dress up for Comic Relief or brave the challenges of Dancing on Ice or Strictly.

The stature of female newsreaders has also risen in recent years with the classic Frank-and-Selina formula of older man and younger woman, now thankfully largely moribund – and I’ve yet to see the reverse combination of older woman and younger man on British TV news. Behind the camera, women have made less headway since 2000. Walk into any newsroom and you will find the male/female ratio roughly two-to-one or higher, and in the senior posts, say at editor level, it’s probably higher still.

Again, there are important exceptions to this generalisation. The two top posts in BBC News are held by Helen Boaden and Mary Hockaday. At ITN Deborah Turness is editor of ITV News, and Dorothy Byrne is head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, but I would still argue that men dominate the key operational roles in television newsrooms. This is partly because the working hours are still family-unfriendly, but also testosterone is still apparently seen as an almost indispensable attribute.

The curious background factor here is that over the past 15 years or so news audiences have skewed more and more towards the female. Last year every single major terrestrial news programme had more female viewers than male. On the daytime shows this is perhaps not surprising. Across 2010, 72 per cent of the ITV Lunchtime News audience was female, as was 62 per cent of that for Channel Five News at 5pm and 59 per cent of the ITV News at 6.30. More unexpected maybe is that the 10pm flagship news programmes on BBC and ITV and Channel 4 News also averaged more female than male viewers last year – and yet TV newsrooms in Britain are still largely run by men. Another feature of TV news audiences is their rather elderly profile, with most viewers 55 or older – not that you would guess it from the average age of on-screen news reporters and presenters.

In the last couple of years the gender debate in television has merged with, and to some extent been overtaken by, the age debate. It’s pretty obvious that older women are particularly under-represented on TV news, and men, unfairly in my view, definitely have more longevity. On the sensitive subject of “looks”, women presenters and reporters are judged more harshly than their male counterparts. There are – let’s be honest – some very plain blokes on TV, but for men their professional qualities, experience or on-screen personalities apparently outweigh such shallow and prejudicial considerations.

In drama and film, a director or producer has the right to pick the cast as he or she sees fit – young or old, female or male, black or white – without fear of being sued for
discrimination.

That is not the case when “casting” a TV news programme, which legally must be done on the basis of merit, not gender, age or race. Despite this we’ve ended up with a situation where some kind of discrimination is clearly practised, consciously or unconsciously, and the newsrooms I visit still don’t reflect the society at large or even the audiences looking in.

Chris Shaw

Chris Shaw is editorial director at ITN Productions and the former senior programme controller at Channel Five.

Nobody dare assert that matters of public interest were not involved in
the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the Abdication, and the duck house. But the same
cannot be said of the exploits of the mobile-phone hackers. So far nothing has
emerged to provide them with a public-interest defence for their activities.
They are simply a disgrace.

They are not alone, of course. The staffs of many newspapers,
particularly those that rely heavily on investigations, contain one or more
ambiguous figures whose roles and responsibilities are shadowy and illdefined.
One reason for their presence is the need to keep an exclusive story
secure from leaks. Another is that some of the methods used would not bear
too close a scrutiny. Many an inquiry that might lead to swampy ground has
been entrusted to a freelance who can later be claimed to be working without
the paper’s knowledge. Sometimes subterfuge can be justified if the results
turn out to be valuable contributions to public knowledge, not just to
circulation figures. But not always.

Developments in technology have created new opportunities for
revelations which in earlier times would have been available only to someone
who sidled into the servants’ hall at Downton Abbey and bribed a footman to
attach his ear to a keyhole, or a kitchen maid to open the master’s morning
post in the steam from the kettle. It probably is nothing worse than a
temporary embarrassment to Cherie Blair that the world knows that, on
eBay, she sold her husband’s signature on a bookplate and bought a sign
warning against hen poo. BBC political editor Nick Robinson must regret
seizing an anti-war protester’s placard and smashing it after his own
broadcast had ended, only to find that he was still on camera and quickly on
YouTube. Again, the incident will fade into unimportance. More troubling
was Google’s acknowledgement that its Street View cars had inadvertently
collected personal data, such as emails and passwords, when mapping
wireless hot-spots. The assurance that the data would not be used was a
relief.

As the phone-hacking story rumbles on – occasioning yet another
downturn in the public’s perception of the media – it is tending to focus
simply on Andy Coulson in his present job: in other words, it will be an
opportunity to inflict damage on No. 10 through its director of
communications. Some will seize the chance to associate No. 10 with the
ambitions of Coulson’s former employers in the Murdoch organisation to
acquire control of BSkyB. But although it is hard to separate these political
and commercial aspects, they are not the central issue so far as journalism is
concerned. It is clear that papers other than the News of the World have been
involved in phone-hacking. Far more important than any political pointscoring
is its elimination by newspapers and other media.

It is a particular shame that this disgraceful matter should be casting a
cloud over journalism at a time when there is at least a hint of sunlight
peeping through the general gloom. There are even slight signs of an
advertising recovery. One survey has shown a heavy preference among
readers for printed publications over electronic versions. Something
embracing both now looks a possible viable answer.

This, then, is no time for the industry to have its collective collar felt,
particularly when, on the back of the success of the free Evening Standard, the
Lebedev father and son entrepreneurial team has taken the bold step of
launching a cut-price miniaturised version of The Independent for sale to
commuters with restricted chances of reading on a journey to work. This
follows a recently-launched Portuguese daily with the same aim and name
and, even though its title looks lonely when it finds itself at the end of a
sentence, there is a distinct message of hope in i.

– BH

War reporting requires physical stamina above all else. So why is
the partially paralysed Frank Gardner allowed on the front line?

Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, stood in a military
compound in Afghanistan telling us about “the track record” of the
American General David Petraeus. It was Petraeus’s predecessor Stanley
McChrystal who is the four-miles-before-breakfast runner so why, I thought,
was the well-educated Gardner resorting to the hackneyed “track record” to
describe Petraeus’s military successes when “record” was enough. After all,
Gardner was reporting from a war zone, not at an athletics stadium.

Not for the first time, I pondered the wisdom of Samuel Goldwyn: “What
we need is some new clichés”. But then a question, far more serious than why
the average British TV and radio journalist slavishly adopts American
phraseology, popped into my head: what was Gardner doing there anyway?
Partly paralysed as a result of being shot in Saudi Arabia in 2004, dependent
on a wheelchair, he was managing to stand in front of a British armoured
vehicle by leaning on a Zimmer frame. Had the Taliban started lobbing
mortars into the compound, Gardner would have been in greater peril than
anyone else there. He would have been incapable of running for cover and
somebody else would have had to have helped him to safety, possible at risk of
his or her own life.

Gardner is clearly a very brave man. No one would have blamed him if
had he decided to quit journalism after the unprovoked and cowardly attack
by an al-Qaida gunman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, whose bullets damaged his
spinal nerves and killed his cameraman Simon Cumbers. By Gardner’s own
account, they had stayed too long in a dangerous part of the city. But Gardner
was determined to return to his job. It was the same determination that made
him resolve, at the age of 34, to leave his comfortable life as an investment
banker to become a journalist, in much the same way that journalists briefly
desire to be investment bankers when they read how much they are paid for
playing with other people’s money.

As a former Territorial Army officer, Gardner is obviously made of the
right stuff. And I raised a quiet cheer for him when, after a long time in
hospital and 14 operations, he rolled back into the BBC TV news studio to
resume his duties, commenting from his wheelchair on terrorism, war and
associated mayhem. That is all very good. But it is crazy, beyond
irresponsibility, for the BBC to put a man who is partially paralysed into the
line of fire. If it were safe for him to be in Afghanistan, then why was he
wearing a flak jacket? But if the whole of Afghanistan is a war zone, as we are
informed, then why was he being exposed to the possibility of violent death,
possibly even “live” on our screens via satellite? No amount of special
pleading about his need to see for himself could justify such a risk when the
information he required could be acquired on the telephone from an office in
London and transmitted from a studio in Shepherd’s Bush.

The British military wouldn’t do it. During the Falklands war, the boy
who grew up next door to us was in the Royal Marines. He won the rare
Distinguished Conduct Medal, but in doing so sustained terrible injuries to
both legs. He declined to have them amputated but was left unable to walk
without crutches. The Marines kept him in uniform and put him in charge of
the stores at Arbroath. They didn’t send him back to the front line, not out of
concern for his self-respect but because they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, take the
risk that a disabled Marine, anywhere near combat, would have presented to
his comrades.

I can understand Gardner’s wish to go back to the front line. One
Saturday afternoon in Belfast in 1976, I and the BBC cameraman Peter
Matthews were badly beaten up by a Loyalist gang in a street just off the
Shankill Road – in Downing Street as it happens. I could not wait to get out of
hospital and back on the screen. So, at the first opportunity, I was standing
outside the Maze Prison with my cracked ribs, a fat lip and an assortment of
facial bruises, doing a piece to camera on the story of the day. “That’ll show
those people”, I thought. I was wrong. I should have followed the example of
Matthews, who was taken off by his loyal sound recordist Bill Norman to a
quiet hotel in the Irish Republic in order to recover so his wife would not be
too alarmed by his appearance when he eventually returned home.

“Those people” who I had vainly hoped to show what was what wouldn’t
have been moved by anything, least of all my petty defiance of their boots
and fists. Of course, if violence had broken out outside the Maze when I was
filming that piece to camera, I could have run away as fast as my long legs
would have carried me, just as I would have got out of the way in Downing
Street, had we not been trapped when we were jumped. On most occasions, it
is better to flee than fight. That’s not, of course, a choice Frank Gardner
would be in a position to make in hazardous circumstances, whether in
Afghanistan or elsewhere.

In Lebanon in 1976, a BBC camera crew and I came under fire from a
regiment of Syrian T62 tanks. Without pausing for consultation, all three of
us managed to crawl through a tiny hole to find refuge under a partially
demolished house. Before the Syrians opened fire, I hadn’t noticed the house
let alone the life-saving hole. But I found it instinctively when I thought I was
going to die. What cameraman Bill Hanford and sound man Albert Charlton
would have done had I been accompanying them in a wheelchair I cannot
imagine. As it was, when we eventually crawled out and looked at the tiny
hole, none of us could work out how we all managed to get through it in less
than five seconds. Adrenalin, I suppose.

An unnecessary risk

Frank Gardner could not have got through that hole. Can he go anywhere
to a war zone without back-up? If not, how many people does he need to get
him to the place where he can do a 30-second piece to camera? Is the standard
military helicopter “wheelchair accessible”? If not, how many men does it
take to haul him on board and what goes through the minds of the squaddies
as they load and unload him? Isn’t it all an unnecessary risk?

Too many times, in wars big and small, I hit the ground hoping it would
swallow me up while men with automatic weapons emptied magazines over
my head. I believed I had a duty to get the story, whatever the danger, even
though I was married with a small daughter and loved everything about life. I
once expressed my thoughts about duty and the dangers of violent death to a
BBC colleague who was a brilliant reporter but an even better cynic: “We are
not officers and gentlemen,” he declared. “We are just hacks.”

He was right. We weren’t being paid to put our lives at risk. Our bosses
would have bent over backwards to have avoided giving that impression to us,
not because they cared much for us as men, but because it might have exposed
the BBC to financial claims should anything have gone wrong. They wanted
the story but were not at all keen on having to pay compensation. We all knew
that the BBC was relying on our willingness to put ourselves in harm’s way to
get the story. But it was never acknowledged. Risk comes with the job. In
television, it is not possible to phone a war in from a bar stool at a five-star
hotel one or two time zones from the front line. We had to be close. And we
wanted to be. We were all competitive. We asked to be sent. We wanted the
big stories, and most of those involved people killing each other in exotic
locations.

On the selection board for some job or other, I was once asked by a senior
BBC person, whose entire career had been spent at Television Centre, what
“man management skills” I possessed. None really, I replied, apart from the
fact that sometimes I had to convince two other men, who had five children
between them and large mortgages, that it was a good idea for them to drive
with me in an un-armoured car down a dirt road in Africa that we all knew to
be mined. And they did it. I didn’t get the job.

The BBC has always been very leery about taking responsibility for
people who are killed or injured on duty. There is a closing of ranks on the
management floors whenever such things happen. After the expressions of
official grief and a good turn-out of the top brass at the funeral, or a
succession of hospital visits to the injured employee, it all comes down to
pounds and pence: liability and how to avoid it. Sympathy and human regard
for victims and their families is not followed by munificent generosity. In
terms of large sums of financial compensation, the BBC is deficient. The
initial concern is swiftly stifled by the obligation to safeguard the licence-payers’
cash.

In August 1974 in Cyprus, the BBC reporter Chris Morris was blown up
and badly injured in a Turkish minefield. His sound recordist, Ted Stoddart,
a 34-year-old family man, was killed. Morris had to battle with the BBC long
and hard to secure even the modest sums that were eventually forthcoming
to compensate for the injuries he bears to this day. When John Harrison was
killed in a car crash in South Africa, the BBC initially maintained he was off
duty at the time. But Harrison was being driven to a satellite point in order to
refresh an earlier report with new footage. His widow wasn’t intimidated by
pressure not to take legal action and held out for the sort of settlement that
should have been offered immediately, on a golden tray, with the BBC’s
undying gratitude for her husband’s life and work.

And then there is the awful case of Kate Peyton, the 39-year-old freelance
working at the BBC’s Johannesburg bureau in 2004. Following an interview
with her BBC boss who accused her of “lacking focus”, she believed her
contract would not be renewed if she refused to go to Somalia to work on
some feature stories. She was shot in the back the day after she arrived in
Mogadishu and died six hours later. I went to see her mother Angela and
heard how she, and Kate’s brother and sister, had become rapidly
disillusioned by the way the BBC treated them, as the family tried, without
much help, to get to the truth about Kate Peyton’s death and the pressures
she had felt under to enter a place of extreme danger. The Ipswich Coroner
who conducted the inquest into Payton’s death said he wasn’t criticising the
BBC, but he sent them a copy of his verdict which pointed out the dangers of
putting pressure on employees to work in dangerous places. The BBC
responded by sending round a memo pointing out that anyone could refuse a
dangerous assignment.

Lacking human concern

My injuries in Belfast were minor but I will never forget the telephone
call from a news executive when I got out of hospital. It became clear he was
trying to find out whether or not I would be seeking any compensation. His
questioning about the circumstances of the unprovoked attack, when we
were not filming and didn’t even have the camera with us, was entirely
lacking in human concern. He made me feel as if I had somehow caused the
attack and was responsible for Peter Matthews and me ending up in the
Mater Hospital with three nuns to look after us. And when I contracted
hepatitis in the Guatemalan jungle during that country’s confrontation with
Belize, and was off duty for three months, the single “home visit” I received
was to find out when I would be back at work. I instructed our family solicitor
that, should anything happen to me, he was not allow anyone from the BBC
near my wife, and to sue the Corporation until a dumper truck arrived to
deposit a large sum on money on our front lawn.

The BBC now sends people who might be assigned to war zones on
courses that are usually run by ex-military types, who are paid to train
reporters, camera crews and producers how to stay out of danger. In truth,
that is not possible. If you are covering a war or any armed conflict, the
precautions you can take are minimal. Blind luck is probably as good as any
formal protection.

I never rose to even the lowest rung of the BBC news hierarchy. I didn’t
write memos and avoided attending meetings in the belief I had been hired to
be a reporter rather than a news apparatchik. But I did make one
contribution to BBC bureaucracy. At the end of one arduous overseas
assignment, I was asked to take a look at a draft for a job advertisement for a
new reporter. There was the usual stuff about “relevant experience” and
“sound news judgment”, with “a knowledge of foreign languages” being
“desirable”. I observed that the first and essential requirement for a reporter
or correspondent was physical stamina, because without it the job could not
be done. A successful candidate had to be able to work flat out for 72 hours
upon arrival in a foreign country, be able to drive 300 miles over a mountain
range to get to the scene of an earthquake, live rough for several days and, at
the end, still be able to function as a skilled reporter.

I believe that in advertisements for BBC reporters, “physical stamina” is
still listed in the qualities required. These days, with satellite phones and the
facility for live transmission from all but the most inaccessible places, the
human factor is still vitally important. There is no substitute for health and
strength, and that is why TV reporting in conflict zones is a job best done by
youngish people. But it is instructive to see how few new reporters last long
at the sharp end, most turning up before long in studios or in foreign bureaux
where danger of war is remote. No one today will ever match the war
reporting record of Martin Bell.

Frank Gardner is 49. Courage he has aplenty, but his BBC bosses are
doing him no favours by pretending to the world at large that a partly
paralysed man can be a war correspondent. He should not be expected to be
one. He should not be encouraged to be one. He should be prevented from
being one. He should be told that there is much valuable work that can do
away from the front line. Just think of the row in the press and even in
Parliament if he were to be injured on one of his “in theatre” visits. And, say
someone else “bought it” while saving him. It doesn’t bear thinking about,
does it? And that is before financial damages are factored in. I cannot believe
someone in the BBC hasn’t thought of that.

— Michael Cole

Michael Cole was a reporter for BBC TV News from 1968 until 1988, during
which time his work won two Royal Television Society awards. He now runs his
own public relations company and broadcasts on the BBC and elsewhere.

It is time to admit that the two disciplines of journalism and PR are two sides
of the same coin and that there is now complete freedom of movement
between them. What’s more, with PR generally being better remunerated
and flourishing, whereas journalism – print and broadcast – seems to be in a
constant state of crisis, has public relations emerged from being seen by
journalism as a poor and distant relation to taking on the role of a rich and
powerful cousin?

With the continuing growth of jobs in the PR industry – in business,
politics, government and with exploding demand for PR online – more and
more students who might have been attracted to journalism courses are now
opting for PR degrees. Drawn to London, as the centre of European media,
they arrive in increasing numbers from all over the world. At Westminster
University, some 65 per cent of undergraduate PR students are foreign. In
the MA (PR) course this year, that figure is 100 per cent. A typical
undergraduate applicant is approximately 18 years old, female, and from a
Middle Eastern or former Soviet state. She has zero knowledge of, or prior
interest in, the British media, the pool in which she must learn to swim if she
is to win her degree, let alone become a successful practitioner. At some point
early in the first semester, our student, failing to understand the nuanced
persuasion of gift bags, drinks, or a day at the tennis, asks: “Why not just pay
them to write our story?”

To help sort out such confusion, public relations courses on offer need
journalism as their stablemate. PR students benefit from taking journalism
classes, learning to report and write, and hearing from teachers who know the
media’s daily routine and requirements intimately, while witnessing their
continuing efforts to instill integrity. No one else has the authority – and
credibility – of a tutor who has done time on the beat.

It is equally true that today’s young journalist, schooled at university,
will deal with public relations operators many times in the normal course of a
day – for her entire career – whether she likes it or not. In this world of
mutual dependency, some formal study of the other discipline is obviously
desirable, if only to appreciate the sophistry of persuasive techniques the
budding newshound will encounter. But students of both disciplines will
also soon see for themselves that there are more (and better paid) entry-level
jobs in public relations, and that a significant number of high-profile
journalists cross over into PR. What’s more, there are journalists-turned-
PRs, as well as those who started out in public relations, now occupying the
public high-ground: David Cameron and Peter Mandelson come to mind.

Recently it has become a truism that “good communications, positive
media relations and a proactive reputation management strategy are critical
to all modern organisations in public, private, or third sectors”, says the
Chartered Institute of Public Relations 2009. From church to State to sports
clubs to industry, from the socially beneficial to rapacious marketers, it is
almost impossible to find an organisational exception to this rule. Bill Gates
famously said he’d spend his last dime on PR, and now all who can afford it
seek intermediation when facing journalists. This astonishing fact is hardly
due to the saintliness and bottom-line effectiveness of public relations per se,
but more likely to the widespread conviction that the press is always out to
get you, it always has an (unspoken) agenda, and there is a perceived need to
try to level the playing field. An even more profoundly held belief, or fear, is
that all reporters and journalists are of Jeremy Paxman-like proportions. The
lure of appearing live on television for a business or charity leader is thus
undermined by a dread of looking foolish. Someone else needs to smooth the
way, hand-hold, and if necessary, take the rap. And who better than an exjourno?

The idea has form as shown by a galaxy of stars, from Andrew Gowers,
who left editing the Financial Times to head marketing and communications
for Lehman Brothers, now conspicuous in a similar role at BP, to Amanda
Platell, making the more unusual return voyage from editing the Sunday
Express to political spin and then back to journalism. The list of tabloid
editors crossing over to public relations – David Yelland, Stuart Higgins, Phil
Hall and Andy Coulson being the more recent examples – emphasise the
drift. Along with the so far exclusive Piers Morgan brand of editor-celebrity,
all contribute to the new PR-journalism hybrid.

Across all sectors and embedded throughout public relations agencies –
including on their boards – former press lions reap the rewards of their
well-known faces and bylines. Michael Cole went from BBC TV to Harrods, from
where he handled the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, victims in
one of the biggest stories of the last decade, and on to set up the public
relations agency Michael Cole & Company. Sir Nicholas Lloyd, former editor
of the Daily Express, also started an agency whose website states: “Brown
Lloyd James has unmatched personal contacts with major news editors”, and
whose clients are The Daily Telegraph and The Really Useful Group, among
others. Clarence Mitchell moved from BBC TV to the Foreign Office and
then on via the Madeleine McCann campaign and Freud Communications to
the Conservative Party, where he joined a leader and many colleagues from
the public relations industry.

PR is now ‘accepted as necessary and legitimate’

Nothing new there. Governments of recent decades all used journaliststurned-
public relations operators to bridge both worlds at the interstices of
politics. But how do these men (and fewer women) justify their new
existence? What, apart from the obvious, makes them sleep at night, having
jumped from the noble ship of journalism to its seamier cousin? Here, the
greatest exemplar, Alastair Campbell, provides some insight. Looking down
his nose he made an expression of disgust when, in 1995, having left the Daily
Mirror to become Tony Blair’s press secretary, he was welcomed to the ranks
of publicists. But fast forward nine years and the legendary spin doctor told a
riveted audience at the International Public Relations Association annual
summit: “There is a revolution going on, a lot of it driven by 24-hour news.
As the media have grown and adapted, so PR has grown and adapted. PR is
now accepted as a necessary and legitimate thing to do. The problem is not
with PR, the problem is with politics and spin.”

While doubtless Campbell had many reasons for his U-turn, he
nevertheless illustrates a change of heart typical of those on a similar
trajectory. After working in both fields, it is easy to see that journalism and
PR are not so very different. Both rely on research, fact-digging, and the
ability to put across the story to gain maximum impact. Whether it’s simply
relations, is introduced to PR students early, but curiously not to budding
journalists unless they are taking PR modules. He repays some thinking.
Bernays, like most democrats, maintained that the efficient running of
society relied on the media to argue agendas and counter-agendas. A man of
strategic insight and tactical masterstrokes (think Alastair Campbell and Sir
Tim Bell combined, with a dash of his distant cousin Matthew Freud), he
further promulgated the beneficial social role of professional persuasion.
Airing alternative and minority viewpoints that the press may overlook
could change society for the greater good, he argued. It is hard to look back
dispassionately on his 1928 Torches of Freedom march in New York City
to get your own by-line on the front page, or to sell more copies of your paper,
or to sell your client’s product or service, many of the same skills are
required. With more and more journalists operating as freelances, add on the
necessary skill to pitch to an editor and that’s exactly the same ability as PRs
need – thick skin and all.

So where does this leave the student of either craft? Unlike journalism,
there is a scarcity of PR literature to draw on for prospective students
seeking informed opinion (in itself, unlikely) and many students apply with
only a vague notion of the course on which they’re embarking. Applicants in
interviews sometimes cite influencing public opinion – occasionally for
social benefit – although more usually they opt for clients’ commercial gain.
But few have any idea how well informed they must be if they are to be
effective.

Edward Bernays (1891-1995), often described as the father of public
relations, is introduced to PR students early, but curiously not to budding
journalists unless they are taking PR modules. He repays some thinking.
Bernays, like most democrats, maintained that the efficient running of
society relied on the media to argue agendas and counter-agendas. A man of
strategic insight and tactical masterstrokes (think Alastair Campbell and Sir
Tim Bell combined, with a dash of his distant cousin Matthew Freud), he
further promulgated the beneficial social role of professional persuasion.
Airing alternative and minority viewpoints that the press may overlook
could change society for the greater good, he argued. It is hard to look back
dispassionately on his 1928 Torches of Freedom march in New York City
where, in a defiant political gesture that challenged the rights of women to
smoke in public, he persuaded suffragettes to march – smoking – down Fifth
Avenue. Bernays’s client, Lucky Strike, benefited, as has the entire American
tobacco industry ever since. Smoking became a gesture of freedom and
demand for equality among young women, an association that persists even
today.

Bernays maintained that in a fractured society – one we might call
multicultural today – social causes need publicity, and wrote: “Symbols need
to be attached to proposals… to make them less abstract and more
marketable. Circumstances need to be created to dramatize their importance
and also get the attention of newspapers. The press is vitally important
because newspaper coverage can re-translate these pro-social ideas so that
they become fact with [the] power to influence large bodies of people.”
Branded “the assassin of democracy” and vilified for manipulating the press,
Bernays’s reputation, along with other publicists in the first half of the last
century, took a direct hit after the Second World War. Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter is said to have described Bernays as a “professional poisoner
of the public mind, exploiter of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest”.
His brand of public persuasion was seen as the inspiration for Nazi
propaganda, and Bernays himself, acceding to this ruinous post-war view,
said that effective propaganda must have, at its core, the truth: “But, it is
more than that. It is also about shaping or creating events to demonstrate
that truth.”

A veneer of respectability

But PR’s ability to change perception, presaged by Bernays, is now
commonplace: Unilever’s resoundingly successful commercial Dove soap
“Campaign for Real Beauty” and, in social marketing – with society as the
beneficiary rather than the initiating organisation – anti-smoking,
contraception, AIDs, and drink-driving campaigns, among countless others,
give PR a veneer of social respectability. Interestingly, it is in some editorial
suites that the last bastions stand, and public relations is still verboten. Daily
Mail editor Paul Dacre famously never lunches with PRs, although some of
those operating on his behalf beyond his door occasionally do, even if holding
their noses. Nevertheless reporters need data and contacts and publicists
need reporters. It works both ways. A widespread modus operandi exists
among professionals based on a shared understanding of the omnipresent
pressure of an insatiable 24-hour media market. Given their proximity, the
consequent growth in free movement between the two disciplines is hardly
surprising.

With luck and time, the workplace reality will be reflected in higher
education, particularly in journalism schools, where students facing an
uncertain future could benefit from greater appreciation and integration. In
its latest employment survey (March this year) recruitment specialists
Reed.co.uk’s figures show that demand for those working in marketing and
PR bucks the general trend and continues to rise; a glimmer of hope in an
otherwise adverse story. CBI figures corroborate the finding, showing a
continuing steady rise in these sectors. As professional purveyors of
information, it is surely good news for those on both sides of the ancient
divide that part of the market is buoyant, offering jobs for both prospective
journalism and public relations practitioners.

Trish Evans is a former journalist and PR strategist who runs the BA Public
Relations degree course at the University of Westminster, London.

Sometimes a practising journalist wonders whether his or her current project
is investigative. There’s a good practical answer: if you’re scared, it might be.
If you’re not scared, not. As in other occupations, scale effects apply. It’s all
right for small investigations to be just a little scary. But a big one has to be
terrifying, to be genuine. Naturally, this is one of those necessary-but-not-
sufficient things. Fear – which you must never display, of course – doesn’t
prove you’re in the right, or doing the right thing. Only, if it’s not anywhere in
evidence, either the story is a phoney, or society will be improved if you are
put into another line of work.

Under our libel law as it stands, the latter event will probably occur
automatically, rather soon. But there are worthy people who would like that
to change. In the opinion of the Financial Times, of many practitioners
elsewhere and, a little more surprisingly, the recently-departed Director of
Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald QC, the law is far too frightening for
journalists. It should be so altered as to assume that a journalist who makes
damaging allegations about some individual or organisation is revealing
truth to the public. It will be up to the accused to demonstrate that it ain’t so.

Underlying this proposal is a proposition: that many latent investigators
exist who would arise and expel the moneychangers from the temple – if only
the activity was not so daunting. Well, the temple surely needs hosing out.
But my submission here will be that the FT/Macdonald plan is an auto-
destructive means to this admirable end. Its inspiration is a blend of self-pity
and delusion.

Many journalists now believe that an incubus called the “burden of
proof ” has been laid on them, asymmetrically, by the British courts.
Allegedly a presumption exists that if a reporter is sued for libel, he or she is
guilty until proven innocent. Such sad victims lack even the common
criminal’s prerogative – to be assumed innocent until the State proves
otherwise, and under strict conditions. No wonder the land is sick, that
robber-barons despoil the public, and terrorist financiers can operate
virtually undisguised. The Financial Times argues, with widespread support,
that we can’t cure our society’s ills because we threaten to shoot any
messengers who might tell us what’s happening.

Mostly this vision links with one in which the U.S. is a palladium of open
discourse, troubled only by “libel tourism” – American malefactors, that is,
slinking into London to ambush paladins they fear to tackle in any place
where freedom reigns. Complainants vary on when and how this cruel
circumstance arose. Some say it’s ancient, that the Star Chamber never did
really shut down. Others see more recent evil, especially in the works of Mr
Justice Eady – the most sinister lawyer since Robespierre, sure to end under
his own guillotine if only Paul Dacre can have his way. Appraised as fantasy
this maybe lacks the grandeur of Lloyd Blankfein’s claim that Goldman Sachs
and its playmates are doing “God’s work” – but it is no less distant from
reality. To start with, it is long since sensible parallels existed, in English-
speaking law, between libel and criminal guilt.

Not-guilty option is unavailable

Libel and slander now are issues in civil litigation, which has no
presumptions, and no demand for proof beyond reasonable doubt. Such
things apply to crime because a liberal-democratic state, if worth the name,
grasps that conflict between its enforcers and the individual citizen is deeply
unequal. To make conviction of the innocent less frequent, the enforcers are
handicapped: without absolute one-way proof there’s no decision. And they
can’t use hearsay: that is, evidence about which witnesses lacks direct
personal knowledge. Libel, a civil matter, is quite otherwise. It is a quarrel
between individuals, in which the State has no interest beyond providing a
neutral court to decide the matter. (Yes, individuals vary in type and power;
that’s an issue to discuss elsewhere.) But if the parties won’t settle, the court
must decide. The not-guilty option isn’t available (though the issues may be
dismissed if clearly trivial.)

Such civil decision is not made beyond reasonable doubt, but on the
balance of probabilities. And the court must start without presumptions
either way. Once, judges seemed to presume evil in any newspaper a copper
sued for libel, but lately the boys in blue have rather mislaid their halo effect.
Distinct from criminal prosecution, British civil courts can use hearsay
evidence to test the probabilities. And can give defendants extensive powers
of disclosure against plaintiffs. Much of the evidence that sank David
Irving’s attempt to show that the Holocaust probably didn’t happen – well
anyway, not much – was, in the fearful nature of the thing, hearsay. Disclosure
finished him off, because it led to his nauseating personal diary being read out
in court.

Strictly, the court can order disclosure against either side, but in libel it is
chiefly a defendant’s weapon. The media side will have – should have –
exhibited its essential knowledge in the allegedly unlawful publication.
Plaintiffs typically dread disclosure, put much effort into obstructing it, and
often bolt if unsuccessful. Having to show that serious allegations are
probably true (rather than probably false) can’t, in a democracy, be called
denial of free speech. There should not be freedom to lie.

Sadly the United States, which rarely grasps democratic principle quite
so firmly as orthodox imaginations fancy, has decided that in public
discourse, untruth should have equal rights with truth. There are things to
admire in U.S. law, but the (increasingly) broad usage of Sullivan v The New
York Times – the Supreme Court case that established the actual malice
standard which has to be met before press reports about public officials can
be considered defamatory – isn’t one of them. Its effect is that a public figure
– say, a doctor offering women the right to choose – can’t get libel judgment
against someone calling him a murderer without showing that the idiot does
so maliciously. The malice might seem obvious, but it can be rendered
innocent if treated as confusion – something like the “invincible ignorance”
which Catholic theologians devised so their God would not have the
embarrassing obligation to send all Protestants to hell. Sullivan’s ill-effects
are easier to see if we understand how defamation principles should work.
Pedestrian lawyers don’t like it – because there’s easy money in devising
fudges – but the efficient weapon for journalists fighting a libel suit is exact
clarity of expression.

The typical plaintiff is a con-man (con-corporation, perhaps) deploying
basic shtick: confusion, illusion and uncertainty, blended to generate doubt.
This, for obvious reasons, can be very effective in criminal defence, and it will
serve libel plaintiffs where defendants hesitate to tackle intricacies head-on.
It was a very crafty lawyer who once advised my colleagues and me: “This
business is appalling and incomprehensible. The only account the jury are
likely to understand will be yours – and if you make sure they do you will
win”. William Blake said it first: “The truth was never stated so as to be
understood, and not believed.”

Malice is wrong intent. How do you show that a man knew what he was
doing when he called an honest doctor a killer or said a heroic veteran faked
his medals to win Presidential votes? That it’s untrue is irrelevant: he is not
malicious if he is confused, and for the kind of redneck jihadi usually put up
for these missions confusion is practically identical with breathing. So, far
from creating a Palladium, the Sullivan expansion has degraded America’s
public discourse enough that serious commentators such as economist and
writer Paul Krugman wonder whether the political system’s legitimacy is in
danger. British commentators who would fancy importing its principles are
mostly of the liberal left: have they noticed that it’s overwhelmingly the
barking right which systematically exploits the growing sanctity of untruth?

Journalism exists to do harm

Still, the reform they propose should largely eject the trepidation from
investigative journalism. At which point let’s return to the start: why should
journalists be afraid? Why master fear and risk their livelihoods? Because in
the world that exists, journalism exists to do harm. Put another way, to do
good to some people, investigative work must almost always damage others.
The Telegraph team which exposed Westminster expenses-fiddling did the
British public a lot of good, but brought destruction to several political
careers, not all quite worthless. Perhaps Robert Maxwell, whom Tom Bower
and I spent years pursuing, was a wholly worthless businessman – but an
exception rather than the rule. Investigation and defamation are social
hygiene, and must be astringent to have salutary effect.

Machiavelli made the basic principles clear in his Discourses on Livy: I-VII,
On Indictments. To paraphrase: society survives only if it prevents corruption
of its virtù – in Machiavelli, of course, this stuff differs a little from simple
Christian virtue, but it requires leadership to be interwoven closely with
accountability. And thus society must provide citizens with ample facilities
for bringing accusations against one another. Furthermore, accusers who get
it right must be rewarded. But he demands harsh punishment for those
whose claims don’t stand up (I-VIII: On Calumnies). Probably the best thing,
he suggests, is heaving them off Tarpeian Rock. Defamation is only salutary
when it’s dangerous business for all concerned.

Some moderation applies in considering the fear proper to modern
investigative journalism. Since 1500, human nature has mildly improved: few
states of the democratic world haven’t followed Michigan’s (1847) abolition
of execution, and penalties now are rarely cruel and unusual. So the fears
facing the investigative reporter need not exceed career-damage and perhaps
financial loss. Mixed in with them, even if slightly contrived, may be some
show of exhilaration. (A famous old English cricketer, George Gunn, was
noted for the brio with which he played very fast bowling. When told that he
appeared to like it, Gunn said: “We none of us likes it. We don’t all of us let
on.”) If fears for yourself preclude even some aspect of elation, you should
move out to less demanding work. Nor should you stick around hoping that
the FT/Macdonald formula will be installed and make the error-count less
onerous. Because fear, especially if well controlled and well concealed, should
be welcome as an aid to precision. But if journalists become altogether
unfrightened, the situation is an extremely nasty one.

Again, investigative journalism – ignore for now the question of whether
other kinds really exist – is intended to be harmful. And only being afraid
gives you any moral justification for the practice. You at least incur some risk
roughly related to that you seek to impose on your quarry. It is not a very
sturdy justification, because a reporter’s work, if it’s genuine, consists of
pushing into the unknown, with consequences obviously impossible to
foresee. You may hope to do harm in order to do good, but the outcome can
quite readily be only harm.

If you are the kind of person who likes – who can even bear – doing work
which carries danger for others but little or none to you, because you enjoy a
presumption of innocence, then you may not care to leave investigative
journalism. But you should be forced to. You have the makings – present in
every society – of the scold, the inquisitor, the shock-jock and, in really bad
times, the secret policeman. The law should not be changed to encourage
you, but calculated to marginalise you as far as possible.

Clearly, I think that the proposed libel reforms would encourage growth
of some nasty problems. The Financial Times says that journalism has not been
very good lately at exposing disasters before they overwhelm us. True, but
it’s little to do with libel. Journalism’s chief recent debacles are: failing to
discredit the Bush/Blair WMD concoction; failing to reveal that the financial
system had been hijacked by greedy intellectual derelicts; failing to offer the
concerned public any navigable path through the (admittedly) daunting
complexities of climate science. These resulted from moral and intellectual
failures quite independent of Britain’s laws of defamation.

Lack of moral fibre caused the WMD debacle, following the old, sinister
pattern when ministers claim to act on secret intelligence. Journalists quite
smart enough to see when spooks are telling government what it’s
determined to hear can’t quell irrational fears of the government (somehow)
knowing something. Or, deadlier still, having the facility to cobble-up some
post-hoc “evidence”. The CIA and MI6 scrabbled the desert bare, while
journalists with some, but too few, brave exceptions, chose to wait and see.

Nobody ready to bet editorial credibility on calling the bluff would have
been sued for libel. It’s impractical for governments and minions-in-office to
go to court as it involves disclosures they cannot face. (Watergate turned out
as it did because Kay Graham was ready to bet her ownership of The
Washington Post, but the risk she ran concerned investment law, not
defamation.)

The notion of modern finance being run by brains not far inferior to
Newton and Einstein was equally a concoction. It wasn’t defamation law
which stopped journalists reporting the real character of the sector’s actual
commitment to mathematical science – viz, negligible. They simply hadn’t
discovered it, for lack of the necessary intellectual preparation. (Nor does
libel law have much to do with unwillingness in the business press to be
party-poopers in bubble-time.)

Climate-change is slightly different, as it’s a field rich in litigious
charlatans. It would be good to see some of the ranker hides tanned and hung
on walls. But it’s unnecessary to defame denialists: as The Guardian’s Bad
Science doctor Ben Goldacre suggests, their antics are self-defamatory if
anyone has some serious understanding of the way modern science works.
The problem is that journalism as a whole spends insufficient time
developing that knowledge and too much on insubstantial doomsday
scenarios. Making it easier for nervous people to publish accusations isn’t
going to change any of that. Lawsuit economics still give
excessive advantage to wealth and power. Introducing no-win-no-fee
litigation has reduced that old abuse – and brought some fresh ones into play.
Let’s reform them. But the law itself isn’t broke. Don’t fix it.

Bruce Page was a founder of the Insight team at the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. He is writing a long and troublesome book about risk and complexity.

Even in these out-of-joint times when calm debate is rarely possible,
there are good reasons for questioning the legitimacy of both
institutions – especially Ofcom – in a mature liberal democracy.
Historically, the central principle which has been seen as essential to
the right of free expression is that it be impervious to State intervention.
This means, in the words of Edward Clarke, John Locke’s friend, that
specific legislation controlling the media – in his day, of course, just the
press – was “very needless”. That was in 1695 but it is still true, as is
the jurist William Blackstone’s insistence, the following century,
that there be no “prior constraint” on public communications.

One way or another Ofcom and the BBC both play fast and loose
with these principles. They do so on the 20th century grounds that
broadcasting was so pervasive and limited a resource it required
regulation and this justified the involvement of the State. Whether
or not, fundamentally, it was right to regulate broadcasting was never
considered. Nevertheless, the principle of free expression, as a
basic human right, ought not to be media-specific, for all that it has
been – more or less – limited to the press. (The theatre, for example,
had to wait until 1968 before escaping from the dead censoring of
the Lord Chamberlain.)

Broadcasting regulation was inevitable not least because there
was an initial technical justification for controlling the allocation of
bandwidths; without control, broadcasters – or any other
through-air signal provider – could encroach upon each other.

In the age of channel abundance the scarcity argument fails. Even
without this, it was a clear case of mission creep to move from
necessary technological regulation of the infrastructure to the control
of content; but, again, this was done and persists without much
argument as to its appropriateness in a democracy ostensibly
committed to the principles of free expression. That such control is
“very needless”, given that we have general laws aplenty for the policing
of media content, is ignored.

What is left to justify content-control are non-technological
assertions – that broadcasting can be an “uninvited guest” of
exceptional power and influence and that the market cannot be trusted to
provide “quality”. These, though, are really no more than shibboleths,
puny in the face of what is arguably an ever-more pressing need to
defend the right of free expression. The arguments for specific content-control
are nothing more than pleas for the nanny State to protect us
from this image, or encourage us to consume those messages. The time
is long past to let go of nurse.

There is, in short, nothing to be said for Ofcom’s meddling with
content. Leave aside the bourgeois, curtain-twitching requirements of
its production “code”, how it comes to be, for example, messing in the
appointment of chief executives of media outlets is both curious and
offensive to the principle of free expression.

The BBC is, of course, a better case; but its close relationship to the
State via the licence fee ought to be a matter of far greater concern than it
is. The licence fee settlement renders it susceptible to real
pressure from even the most benign of politicians, never mind swiveleyed
maniacs who, in defiance of the Corporation’s impeccable
pro-establishment history from the moment of the 1926 General Strike
on, are now again on a witch-hunt looking for reds under the BBC bed.

Public service broadcasting is in an hour of need all right but, despite
this, would-be siren songs about the wonders of the market sound
clashingly out of tune. The best argument for some form of State
intervention is, pace young Murdoch, the market’s palpable
failure to provide a full range of programming whenever it has been
left free to do so.

Correcting that failure, however, simply has nothing to do
with an overblown, overstaffed (750-plus) NGO such as Ofcom. It
should be cut down to a technological brief immediately.
More problematically, the correction of market failure does
not necessarily require a sledgehammer the size and
complexity of the BBC. A commission charged with providing
funding for “quality” and empowered to command space for
its transmission might do just as well. In New Zealand and in Ireland
broadcasting commissions distribute public funds specifically
to producers to make good lacuna in programming provision. Surely not
the crazy, unthinkable idea that the emotional spin of top-slicing of the
beloved BBC’s licence fee makes it seem? Like republicanism it should
not be dismissed as unthinkable – even if it is going to have to wait its
time while we defend the public service broadcasting principle in
toto from the barbarians at the gate.

Brian Winston

The writer is a member of the BJR editorial board. A follow-up to his
history of free expression, Messages: Free Expression, Media and
the West, 2005, will be published next year.

Our sponsors and the support of our publishers, Sage, have enabled the
current editor and his team not only to sustain what remains a unique
publication but also, in my opinion, to have developed and improved the
quality and influence of the BJR and forge a reputation across the print and
electronic media industries that we could scarcely have dreamed of 20 years
ago.

Look back across those two decades and reflect on the completely
different media scene then prevailing: no web, no blogging, no digitalised
global communication system bringing information within instant and easy
reach. Even the computer itself was still in its infancy, with journalists on a
steep learning curve towards properly harnessing it. Since then the
unparalleled revolution in global communication has brought a
transformation that has changed our planet, the way we live and conduct our
affairs and, indeed, the entire culture of journalism. We were hardly on the
foothills of any of this when BJR was launched.

When this journal started, nobody seriously talked about “the end of
newspapers” or “the death of print journalism”. Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping
Revolution had lifted a curtain on what might be possible in the future
following the death of hot metal, even if my generation of journalists
remained locked within old habits that had been our life experience.

As the founding group – Hugo Young, Hugh Stephenson, Ivor Gaber,
Laurie Flynn, James Curran and I – sat one evening 21 years ago in the bar of
the Charing Cross Hotel planning the birth of this journal, those around the
table were consumed with improving the quality of our trade, challenging its
professional inadequacies and questioning the superficiality of much that
was then being offered in the name of journalism.

Our principal objective was to ask fellow journalists if the deeper values
of our trade were being corrupted by sloppy, superficial journalism that
often reflected the way our industry was managed and owned. And to
question what the real relationship was between journalists and those with
political power. Had some of us become a touch over-mighty in that complex
relationship? No one around that bar 21 years ago believed we soon might
reach a point when there would be a serious doubt about the very future of
newspapers and even the traditional electronic news media. Today we live on
a different planet, yet all those questions remain as relevant and as important
as they seemed to us in the 1980s.

Although The Guardian’s media section predates us by a decade, such
sections in the national press had yet to make the impact that would come
with online expansion. Some political weeklies published columns of press
criticism, mostly undistinguished. This was the period that brought the
curtain down on old Fleet Street and its famed watering holes as companies
relocated away from their traditional “village” homes, while television news
coverage and comment continued to be dominated by talents largely drawn
still from newspaper journalism.

In the wings, bright minds were sparking with ideas that would produce
the worldwide web, Microsoft, Google, the blogosphere, sophisticated
mobile telephone technology and, yes, YouTube and Twitter. Everything
was changing: rapidly, fundamentally. That was the mood music
accompanying the birth of a media forum with lots of aspiration but slim
resources. Now we inhabit a very different media world, but one no less in
need of the qualities offered by this journal. In fact, we believe the need is
greater than ever.

In numerous editorials in its early days, the BJR argued that there could
be only one response to a changing media landscape that threatened to dilute
the trade and shred traditional values and ideals: courage combined with the
excellence of journalism and journalists. Easy to say, far more difficult to
effect. And – no sanctimony here – it remains a central truth. There has never
been, never will be, an easy way ahead, but the conviction at the core of this
journal when it began remains unaltered.

Geoffrey Goodman, founding editor, chairman emeritus