For students of history everywhere

I thought this might be a good moment to think a bit about some of the important landmarks in press freedom here in the UK … or, more accurately, England.
1641: The abolition of the Star Chamber
This had been the monarchy’s most potent tool of repression for centuries. A court that held secret sessions, without juries and produced arbitrary judgments … all to please the King.
The abolition marked the end of the blanket censorship in England.
1694: The lapse of the 1643 Licensing Order
This was the fifty year old order that required pamphlets and proto-newspapers to be licensed before they could be published. John Milton’s tract Areopagitica was a blast against this order.
The lapse was the consequence of legislation following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which among other things, established the sovereignty of parliament.
1727: Edmund Curll convicted for obscenity
Curll’s knee-trembler Venus in the Cloister or The Nun in her Smock was the first book to be banned for its sexually explicit content. He was charged with disturbing the King's peace – though since George I’s grasp of English was less than perfect it’s unlikely his peace was too disturbed by the book’s rampant prose.
Obscenity laws became a permanent fixture until 1960 when the Lady Chatterley trail began to chip them away.
1738: Parliament bans reports of its proceedings
Unseccessfully, it turned out. And the number of reporters recording speeches and debates grew steadily until …
1771: Parliament lifts ban on reporting
Several reporters, publishers and printers were arrested for breaching the reporting ban – but it proved no deterrent. The radical MP and journalist John Wilkes mounted a legal challenge to the ban, which MPs then lifted.
1803: Reporters allocated seats in the House of Commons
Two hundred years ago, newspapers vied with each other over the quality and accuracy of their parliamentary reporting and the gallery was one of the most important assignments a reporter could land.
1811: Hansard begins publication
The record of parliamentary proceedings wasn’t called Hansard until the end of the century, but it was in 1811 that Thomas Curson Hansard, the printer to the House of Commons, took over its production.
1840: Parliamentary Papers Act
This was the act that established qualified privilege for the reporting and publication of parliamentary proceedings. It followed proceedings for defamation against Hansard.
During those proceedings, it became apparent that while MPs were protected by privilege, reporting them was not.
1926: The BBC and the General Strike
During the strike, the BBC’s first DG Sir John Reith instructed news bulletins to report all sides in the dispute and to do so without comment.
This brought him into conflict with Labour leaders and with the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Reith feared that by deviating from his strict ‘no comment’ policy he would give the government the opportunity it sought to take over the national broadcaster, turning it into the state broadcaster ending its independence for good.
1977: The Gay News Trial
The success of Mary Whitehouse’s private prosecution for blasphemous libel over the poem The love that dare not speak its name resulted in the Gay News publisher Denis Lemon being sentenced to nine months in prison – a sentence quashed on appeal.
1988: Spycatcher cleared for publication in England
Peter Wright’s account of life in MI5 – a life that included bugging prime minister Harold Wilson’s phone – was written in 1985 and banned in England. But it was published – and imported from – almost everywhere else, including Scotland.
2000: Human Rights Act comes into force
The act, passed in 1998, established some sixteen human rights – including the rights to free expression and to the respect for private and family life.
Oh dear.
2006: Wall Street Journal v Jameel
The House of Lords judgment that consolidated the defence of ‘responsible journalism’.
2008: Offence of Blasphemy abolished
Though it seemed to many that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 had simply reinvented it by other means.
2009: Trafigura gag revealed
The Labour MP Paul Farrelly asked a parliamentary question revealing an injunction obtained by Trafigura to prevent the publication of a report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in west Africa.
The terms of this ‘super injunction’ meant that the existence of the injunction, let alone its content, could not be reported.
2011: Ryan Giggs named in parliament
All press freedom’s roads lead to this moment. 


The historic conflicts – from the abolition of the Star Chamber, the arrest of political reporters, the struggle to resist government interference and the power of big business.
And in a world where over a hundred journalists and bloggers are in prison in places like Iran and Syria and China and Burma.
Or risking their lives to confront authority in places like Ukraine and Kyrgystan.
Is it anything short of a freedom’s magnificent miracle that here, now, in England we have, apparently for all time, established the unqualified right to know which premiership footballer has slept with which Big Brother contestant?

Memories of the BBC

This is the text of a piece I wrote in the April edition of the BBC News Magazine.

In the end, only memory is left. What Jane Austen called:

“so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient so bewildered and so weak so tyrannic, so beyond control”

Why we remember what we remember and forget what we forget we cannot ever know. Nor whether forgetting is any different from never knowing. 

It is the ‘retentive, serviceable’ memory that creates a collage from a sharp autumn day in 1978. The day I joined the BBC. 

I wanted to be Controller Radio 4 that day and every day since but never was and rightly so. I am too lazy, too unintelligent and hadn’t the temperament ever to sit at the top table. 

I never burned to be a journalist. It was one option. Also policeman, politician and priest.

But I did burn to be BBC. I’ve never been able to imagine any other life not even when, briefly, I worked at ITN.

The BBC co-owns my memory and that is probably quite sad but there you have it.

The memory, in Belfast, of the corpse. A prison officer murdered by the IRA. He could have been asleep at the wheel of his car but for the crimson slashes across his shirt. And the smashed glass and bloodied pockmarks in the seat.

The memory, in Blackburn, of the wet cobbled street where I cried. Deceiving myself that it was frustration that I was lost once again but knowing it was because I had finally understood what it meant to knock on the door of the parents of a murderer’s raped victim.

It is ‘obedient’ memory that tells me I always knew The World at One would be my home and so it became in 1980. Under Julian Holland it was a magical place where, in a tiny office, we would argue the whole morning over the big issues of the day, clothes and skin suffused by the nicotine of Robin Day’s cigars. 

Nature mocked Julian’s journalistic and intellectual vision, giving him darkening physical blindness. He once told me it was a privilege to work at WATO but I already knew it was so.

‘Bewildered’ memory clouds my year at ITN.

I’d left the BBC in a fit of pique - not the first, not the last - at something someone in the boss class had done. But with no real idea about the outside nor much enthusiasm for it.

By chance, I think, it was the year I felt something approaching shame at the inhumanity of our trade. That we - I - could calmly compose careful, precise graphics clerking 193 deaths in the cold North Sea on the Herald of Free Enterprise.

Or of 31 tube travellers who choked out their lives on a burning escalator under Kings Cross station.

People said they made great TV.

When I came back to WATO and the BBC in 1988, one executive wrote ‘welcome home’ in a note to me. 

Yeah. It was still home. For fourteen more years and in spite of the heart infection that tried to kill me, something my consultant said was “worse than cancer”. 

I didn’t die and lived instead to see the most extraordinary experiment in political media management this country has ever seen. New Labour. The age of Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, who told the Guardian in 1997 - apparently without irony - that it was his job to “create the truth”.

Those years, that team, the incomparable Nick Clarke at the microphone, seems now like some paused journalistic summer. With a self-possession nudging arrogance, we chased down truth in an exhilarating, thrilling but ultimately futile mission. 

Futile because there seemed to grow in that decade of new Labour an indifference to truth. Some journalists took dictation from Downing Street while others gave up even trying to hold power to account, preferring instead to sulk on the sidelines,  getting up peoples noses.

We tried to challenge power with fact and argument, eschewing the grandstanding and bare-knuckle brawling that seemed the norm elsewhere. 

And then there was Broadcasting House, its title a genteel scream protesting TV’s 1998 coup d’etat and Radio News’ forced exile to a place called Television Centre, a 1970s industrial estate on the outskirts of Slough. 

James Boyle, then the Controller of Radio 4, became a good friend though I don’t think he ever knew how much I coveted his job. He was vilified for ripping up the old R4 schedule and creating a new one that was so flawed it remains almost entirely intact thirteen years later.

His brief for BH ran to a single phrase.

“Not the Today programme”. I knew exactly what he meant but it took time to get it right.

Listeners hated it. It was over-planned, over-rigid and strained to be different. Half a year on, we chilled. Dropped the rigid formats and gave Eddie Mair the room to become what he always was – the sharpest interviewer and coolest presenter the BBC has.

Time passes and so do people and it’s the pity of time that so many of those we value, so many of our heroes, become no more than ‘tyrannic’ memory making inexplicable choices. 

Why one of Gordon Cloughs interviews and not them all ? Why one of Bob Williams PMs of the hundreds we did together ? And why is the first - though thankfully not the only - memory of Nick the blazing row over an empty chair? 

And Hutton?

Memory here truly is ‘beyond control’. It could be no other.

At it’s centre, an overwhelming sadness and incredulity that flawed journalism and even more flawed politics could lead to a good man’s death. Perhaps through a shame Dr Kelly felt but could never have deserved.

That’s all that matters. The reality skulking behind the game journalists and politicians play. Who knows if it could ever have been different. 

“Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened” 

So that's it, then

After 33 years minus a year and a half at ITN in the 1980s I leave the BBC at the end of the month.

Hard enough to think about, let alone actually do it.

When I first walked into Broadcasting House in October 1978, Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter President of the US. The Shah was still in power in Iran, the Berlin Wall was intact and the IRA had yet to murder Lord Mountbatten.

I've worked with amazing presenters Sir Robin Day, Nick Clarke, Eddie Mair and editors Julian Holland, Jenny Abramsky, Roger Mosey. And hundreds more.

My first assignment on the road was the Iranian embassy siege - a very minor role that included keeping the phone box free on the corner by the Royal Geographical Society.

The first programme I edited was an edition of The World This Weekend the Sunday after a recalled parliament had voted for the task force to go to recover the Falklands. Our interview with Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce ran out of time before we could ask 'will you resign?' Within 24 hours, he had resigned.

All of these things happened, of course, before some of the people I work with were even born. My own children studied as GCSE history events I had covered as a journalist.

Time to go.

I've done all of the jobs I want except one, and I'm pretty clear that I was always temperamentally unsuited for it. And one that I didn't want - ditto.

I'm resigned to a lifelong association the Hutton inquiry, report and fall out. Maybe one of the first things I'll be able to do outside the BBC is something I was unable to do inside it - finally give my own account.

So there'll be books ... more teaching ... columns .... coaching.

And life on the cold outside. Scary.

Libel reform

In case there's anyone out there who's anxious about libel reform - you will be, you will be - here's the video of my contribution to the Media Standards Trust debate at Gray's Inn on 11 January.

Enjoy.

Cold weather, cold reason

'THEY must do something' ... 'THEY can't do their jobs' ... 'THEY should be fired'.

I know for a fact that if I'd been forced to sleep rough at Heathrow or shuffle forward in a seven-hour queue at St Pancras I'd be one of those shouting loudest, calling for 'THEM' to do something and snarling at the 'incompetence' of it all.

I might even have agreed with Labour's Denis McShane that the Prime Minister should be out there with a shovel, or with the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, that:

"It can't be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snowploughs or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going."

I did enough of that kind of thing when the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud threatened to hold me under casino arrest in Las Vegas in April or while repatriating son #1 from the Netherlands this time last year.
That doesn't make it rational.
And it's the lack of rationality in so much "Arctic Britain" coverage that is a genuine weakness in our adversarial media and politics. That makes it very hard to lift our eyes from 'somebody must resign' or 'bungling bosses' and take a hard look at what's really happening - and what we should do about it.

Assumptions

Breaking away from the conventional wisdoms and assumptions might be one place to start.
It's pretty astonishing to still be reading or hearing 'Europe or America can cope, why can't we?' - though the chaos in Switzerland, Germany and France, let alone the US, was pretty lightly reported at first, we all know about it now, surely?
Even the most efficient operations in the most efficient countries don't expect life to go on uninterrupted when two feet of snow falls. They talk instead of resilience, which means reasonable recovery time - 'reasonable' in this context meaning 24 to 36 hours. Not even the Finns have found a way of preventing the snow from falling.
But yes, Helsinki airport does keep going - because it has three runways (third runway for Heathrow anyone?), using only one at a time while clearing the other two when the snow is heavy. Comparisons with Heathrow should, but rarely do, take into account that it also has half the traffic and a fifth of the number of passengers.
It's not just about de-icing fluid and grit and snowploughs - and the wages of the people required to drive them or stand-by when it's not snowing - it's about big, expensive, controversial decisions on infrastructure. Or reducing our passion for cheap flights, always available.
Does our media coverage encourage or discourage that kind of debate?
Then there's the expectation that it's 'THEY' who must do something to ensure that life goes on without missing a step - and they don't because they're stupid or 'bungling' (again) and should resign.
Now, as it happens, there probably is something in Ferrovial's management of the British airports it bought back in 2006 that needs proper journalistic inquiry - the answer to the question of whether it's invested properly in resilience is almost certainly hidden away there in its balance sheets and annual reports.
Anyone looking? Or is that just too complicated? Simpler to call for the minister's head - though, of course, he has no power over BAA whatsoever.

'THEM' and 'US'

Then, of course, there's 'US'. In those European countries which do recover relatively quickly from big snowfalls, people themselves play a large part. The communes, 'THEY', are responsible for some things; you, the motorist or house owner, for the rest. And part of resilience is accepting the inevitable.
In my part of France - where, incidentally, it doesn't snow much more often than the UK - when the snow starts, the main roads up and down the valleys are ploughed, salted and gritted pretty well straight away; farmers pitching in to help. Whether nagged, pressed or as volunteers, I don't know.
Valley-side roads and those over the hills aren't even touched. Signs go up telling you the limit of snow treatment. No-one expects anything different.
Down in the Vosges and Alps, some roads and passes just stay closed 'til the spring. You go a different way. No-one expects anything different.
In some departments, car owners have to own winter tyres and/or snow chains - and use them when they're told to. No-one expects any different.
Want the track to your house cleared? Clear it then. One of the biggest selling items in the hypermarkets and garden centres is 50kg sacks of coarse salt. Everyone seems to buy it; everyone seems to use it. No-one expects any different.

Hibernation

It's some way, of course, from the hibernation that used to grip France in the Middle Ages and which, as Graham Robb explains in his excellent book The Discovery of France, persisted right up to the start of the 20th century.

"Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity."

Robb writes:

"The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn ... Other populations in the Alps and Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April ... According to a geographer writing in 1909, 'the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, disheveled and anaemic'."

Perhaps the most macabre acceptance of hivernal necessity was dealing with the dead. For obvious reasons, it was impossible to bury those who couldn't make it through the long winter night - so granny's corpse would be unceremoniously lobbed up onto the roof, where the snow would keep it preserved until March or April and when the proper obsequies could take place.
That's probably taking acceptance a bit too far - for the 21st century anyway. But it does illustrate the central point.
Our insistence that our world continue uninterrupted whatever the conditions of flood, storm or snow - and that 'THEY' have to ensure it for us - is such a corrosive idea it makes it almost impossible for us to think what we really should do.
How much extra - both privately and publicly - are we prepared to pay to ensure a better resilience, knowing that it will never be 100%?
Which are the private and what are the public responsibilities? What are reasonable expectations?
How much are we prepared to change or modify our lifestyles, either to mitigate the effects of a crisis or to try to avoid it?
How much do we just have to accept?
And so on. Importantly, though, do we have a mature enough, rational enough media to feed a mature and rational public discourse where we can expect our politicians to make mature and rational decisions?
Or should we just carry on shouting a lot?

Wikileaks - the salient point?

Pretty well everything that could be said about the Wikileaks diplodocudump has been said. Everyone's made up their mind about whether it's good or bad for the world/diplomatic communication/good government etc etc.

But here's something else to think about: what does it do to journalism?

It's an important question because, as I wrote earlier, we really do have to take care we don't lose investigative journalism and all it entails because we believe ersatz, hollowed out versions are the real thing.

We have to keep in focus, too, Wikileaks' agenda as set out by its oddly self-regarding founder Julian Assange. It and he are not friendly to journalism as we know it - and it wouldn't take too much conspiratorial insanity to construct a theory that this is all about busting traditional journalism.

Here's what Assange told an audience in London back in the summer, as reported by City University's Journalism Professor, George Brock.

Wikileaks, George Brock reports, started with a focus on places where government was least transparent:

"Then they moved on to places where 'the power structure is so sewn up that the press doesn't matter much' ... 'It's all bankrupt' he said ... 'All current political theory is bankrupt, all political thought, because we don't know what the hell is going on'.

You might have guessed by now that the established media are part of the problem. Journalists, he argues, are creating unreasonable public expectations. Their 'original sin' is to enjoy the imbalance of power. Why does someone want to read what a journalist has written? 'They're ignorant and you're not. You know more ... You can't lie but the opportunity to distort is large and prevalent.'

The reader can't see the whole picture so Wikileaks has to fill the gap. Once 'primary source material' is up on the web, the 'lying opportunities' shrink."

In essence, it's the journalism bypass theory, as popular with new media gurus as it was with Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson in the decade 1994-2004.

The diplodocudump was underwhelming - but that doesn't mean it was a Bad Thing; no journalist should argue that revelation itself doesn't serve the public interest. At the very least, it's about a partial correction of the information asymmetry between power and people.

But it wasn't and couldn't ever be an end in itself. Without the attentions and mediation of the very journalism he's declared broken, Assange may as well have fed the leaked diplomatic telegrams straight into the shredder (and, yes, I know they weren't actually on paper - cut me some figurative slack here) or indeed re-recorded Lady Gaga back onto the CD.

Journalism - especially investigative journalism - has many shortcomings. There's no science about what gets investigated and what doesn't; no guarantee that it's the biggest scandals - for want of a better word - that get nailed, nor that some lesser 'scandals' don't get a place in the public sphere they don't quite deserve.

No guarantee, either, that the evidence stacks up or that the 'truth' revealed is incontestable.

But because of the way most investigative journalism comes about - through a whistleblower who rightly or wrongly senses some kind of moral violation - it has that magic thing we call salience.

And it's salience that leaking on an industrial scale lacks. Leaking for the sake of leaking or in the hope of overwhelming both power and journalism as we know it.

Whistleblowing that lacks salience does nothing to serve the public interest - if we mean capturing the public's attention to nurture its discourse in a way that has the potential to change something material.

And the risk is this: that we persuade ourselves that Wikileaks-style transparency is a substitute for investigative journalism rather than the precursor of journalistic possibilities.

Let's talk investigations

There's a lot of chatter about 'new' ways of doing investigative journalism - those 'new' ways being, inevitably, online, connected, networked, two-way, global and local etc etc.

The problem is, very few of the acts of journalism that the 'new' ways enable are actually investigative. Sure, they're ways of getting below the surface of data and issues and public policy - but 'investigative journalism' they just ain't.

This matters. Because there's any number of external pressures squeezing genuine investigation out of mainstream journalism. And it would be journalism's and the public's loss if we journalists stood by and allowed the name 'investigative journalism' to become hollowed out - but that's what's happening.

Examples. This from Vadim Lavrusik - who teaches social media at the Columbia School of Journalism in the US and for that reason alone is unlikely to be lukewarm about the journalistic possibilities of networking.

His is a beguiling account of "a society more connected than ever" in which "investigative journalists ... are now taking advantage of their online community relationships to help ... uncover potential wrongs".

He goes on to argue that 'tomorrow's reporters' will be able to:

"create contextualized social story streams that reference not only interviewed sources, but embedded tweets, Facebook postings and more."

And already, journalists are:

"leveraging the vast reach of social networks in unprecedented ways ... social media is enabling watchdog journalism to prosper."

Fine. As far as it goes. No-one could possibly argue with the benefits of networks that enable journalists to dig into any story. Or to tap into the experience and expertise that's out there. Or to commission communities and audiences to wear out some of the real or figurative shoe-leather that has to be sacrificed in the interests of reporting.

But this is, rightly, called Distributed Reporting. And it's a long way from investigative journalism, though it might well throw up leads that generate an investigation. But in essence, it's no more than .. well, basic journalism. All journalism has inquiry at its heart - anything else is PR or advertising. But inquiry is not the same as investigation.

Crowd sourcing, or community sourced mapping, is often cited as another 'new' form of investigation - but again, it's anything but and often falls some way short of even being journalism's raw material.

While it's possible to point to examples of mapping that have been robust, timely, accurate and of public use, there are - as I wrote here - those that haven't been and which, in spite of good intentions, ended up lacking rigour, being quickly out of date, misleading and inciting community behaviour that was anything but beneficial.

The third main category of 'new investigative journalism' is more properly a form of watchdog journalism' - the best UK example is Paul Bradshaw's beta site Help Me Investigate. It's a hugely successful site, of immense value which delivers a new form of networked journalism and has seeded a number of successful investigations.

But in itself, it's not investigative journalism - actually, Paul doesn't claim that it is. At its best, it's an exciting, broadly based watchdog journalism - helping keep the community's attention on the things power does in its name. And seeking answers.

All in the name?

Perhaps all we have here is a difference in terminology - but it's one that matters and matters a lot.

Investigative journalism is much more than sifting data or collecting data that would otherwise be uncollected. It's much more than asking the pointed, significant questions that take journalism beneath the surface facts. More than ensuring power is challenged.

In truth, all journalism is about one or more of those.

At some point, all investigative journalism is about uncovering something that's being deliberately hidden. Something that's it's in someone's interest to keep out of the light.

And it's about assessing the veracity, motives and context of sources that help you uncover what's hidden ... often without anything other than strong, circumstantial evidence to rely on.

It's about persistence - getting the key player to speak. Getting sight of the key document. Joining the dots hidden in confusing and often contradictory testimony.

And the relentless, self-critical checking and counter checking, testing hypotheses, testing alternative interpretations of the limited facts you have ... making the call on what you can and can't say. What's true not just in the detail but in the overall account.

The obvious point. It takes time, it takes money and it takes commitment - both of the individual reporter and of the news organisation.

Of course, inviting audiences and communities in, to use those networks to grind through what can be ground through or to add the expertise that's out there. But does anyone really think that we could have networked our way to the truth about Thalidomide or uncovered the 'third man' or identified the Omagh bombers. Or crowdsourced or community watchdogged our way to those hidden truths?

No. Thought not.

And the danger is, if we allow the term 'investigative journalism' to be applied to something that can be made to look and feel a bit like it's 'investigative' but really isn't. And which, into the bargain requires nothing of the same time, money and commitment - is a hollowed out shell - we'll lose the real thing.