Transparency is the new eyewash

This was originally posted to the BBC College of Journalism website in December 2010

Looks like it was my old boss Richard Sambrook who lobbed the old 'transparency is the new objectivity' dud ball back into play.

Not approvingly, you understand; quite the opposite. He's picking a fight with former US newspaper columnist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Alan Mutter, who wrote at the start of December that:

"It's time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective.

Let's replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency that requires journalists to forthrightly declare their personal predilections, financial entanglements and political allegiances so the public can evaluate the quality of the information it is getting."

Sambrook counters - as he also does in his excellent new paper for the Reuters Institute- that what's required of journalism today is that it become truly, genuinely, honestly, purposefully evidence-led:

"When critics call for greater openness of opinion ('let us know your prejudices and judge for ourselves') they invite a further avalanche of views inadequately supported by the shrinking resources allocated to discovery and verification."

He adds:

"There is no market failure in opinion - we are awash with it. There is market failure in high-quality, verified, evidence-led reporting on which debate can reliably be based. We should focus on the virtues of proof. Which in turn is all about bearing witness."

For the historians out there, it's David Weinberger who's generally credited with coining the 'transparency is the new objectivity' line - though doubtless an earlier reference will turn up, if it hasn't already.

Back in 2009, he wrote:

"What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author's writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. 

Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to."

It's a seductive idea. Until you think about it. And when you do, it's difficult to be as polite as Richard Sambrook.

That's not to say journalists shouldn't be prepared to account for how they make their decisions: which 'facts' they use, which they leave out; how they frame their story; who to approach and why; whose testimony they accept and whose they reject. Nor that they should be secretive and evasive about themselves or their sources, unless they have to be.

And it's an article of faith - well, my personal faith anyhow - that a journalist should always go back to primary sources and share them as fully as possible with his/her audience.

The real-world problem with 'transparency is the new objectivity' is that neither is possible - so replacing one impossibility with another is ... well, nuts. That's one of the many reasons why here in the UK - and especially at the BBC - we aspire to 'impartiality' which (sorry Jeff Jarvis et al) really isn't the same thing.

Think about it: let's say I'm a reporter at the recent London student fees demo. I see and speak to some peaceful students; some who are less so. I see and chat with some relaxed police; I see the mounted police ride into action, paint thrown etc.

What do you need to know about me? What level of transparency do you need to judge my account?

Where I stood, where I walked and why? Who I didn't speak to and why not? What I didn't see and why not?

Whether I was a student myself? Whether I have kids currently paying fees or about to? Who I voted for at the last election and whether I'm getting the policies I thought I would? Whether I'd have to pay higher taxes if the fee hike was abandoned? Whether I'd mind? Why I just used the word 'hike'?

Whether I've ever had a brush with police? Whether I'd been mugged last week by someone looking just a bit like that chap over there? Am I cold and want to file my copy quickly?

In just the same way as there's no real stopping place for an objective account - or even an impartial one - there's no real stopping place for a journalist's transparency. No end to what could be relevant. 

And such is the nature of these things that even when you - the journalist - might think you've exhausted every possibility, you remain open to the charge that you 'hid' something you thought couldn't possibly be relevant but which someone else thinks is.

There's little or no hope for journalism to make sense of the world, or for journalists to act as trusted guides through the information fog, unless we persuade our audiences that we can be exactly that - trusted. Not because of what we've declared but because of what we do.

Open, yes. Accountable, yes. But the idea that transparency is any more possible than objectivity, or that it's some alternative to an impartial mindset, is eyewash. Worse, it risks equating the value of evidence-based journalism and of bearing witness with that of inchoate scrawlings on a Facebook wall.

The Arab Spring did not take place

This is an extract from my chapter in 'Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the Arab Spring' (Ed. Mair and Keeble)'

Trojan War taking place?

On 21 November 1935, a former diplomat and soldier Jean Giraudoux opened his new play at the Theatre de l’Athenee in Paris. Called La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (The Trojan War Will Not Take Place), it imagined and created an eve of conflict debate in which the heroes and heroines of the Trojan War argued to avert the coming catastrophe.

It was typical of its era, surreal and absurd at one and the same time. And it worked on a number of levels. 

At its simplest, it was a critique of the politics and diplomacy that had failed to avert the Great War and were failing to contain a resurgent, militant Germany.

At another level, it was a play about fate and inevitability. The ‘Trojan War’ did take place, at least within the minds of the audience and the confines of the mythological universe Giraudoux was drawing on and reflecting on stage. Arguments to avert it were futile. Strong reasoning, compelling alternatives could not turn aside what was inevitable.

It works on yet another level, too. The Trojan War isn’t just any old story about any old war. It might not be as well known today as it was in 1935, but it is one of the defining stories of our culture. The Trojan War, in myth and in reality, one of the defining wars. And as Giraudoux’s audience watched, they were witnessing characters on stage who they ‘knew’ in most cases better than they ‘knew’ the real people around them. Hector and Helen and Priam and Ulysses and the rest. They ‘knew’ them because of the narrative that defined them; a narrative that the characters themselves, paradoxically, created. They weren’t just locked into an inevitable narrative, they were that inevitable narrative. They couldn’t exist without it; it couldn’t exist without them. Irony was folded inside irony. If Hector’s arguments to avoid war had been allowed to prevail, he couldn’t exist as the Hector we ‘know’ because the story he exists within, ‘The Trojan War’, wouldn’t exist.  

Watching Giraudoux’s play, the audience were like time travellers watching our grandparents debate whether or not they should marry.
Existential irony

It was to this existential irony that, nearly sixty years on, the postmodernist writer and academic Jean Baudrillard referred in his 1991 collection of essays, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, essays originally published in Liberation and the Guardian in the winter and spring of 1991. As ‘The Gulf War’ was about to take place, was taking place, and had taken place. Or rather, as Baudrillard argued, as the events that coalition politicians, military and media portrayed as ‘The Gulf War’, was about to take place, was taking place, and had taken place.

Baudrillard turned Giraudoux’s ironies on their head. In his account of a war not taking place, it was the audience that was unwittingly caught in the inevitability authored for them, not the characters on stage.

He didn’t argue that nothing happened or that there was no military action, violence and death in Iraq in the first months of 1991. There self-evidently was. His argument was with what we thought it was. And the violence and deaths were not ‘The Gulf War’, except in the minds of coalition politicians, military and media. And audiences.

Baudrillard’s argument was not as complex as his detractors portray it. For ‘The Gulf War’ to have taken place, there would have to have been real combat between coalition and Iraqi forces. There was no such combat. No war.

Sure, the coalition was bombing and firing missiles from 30,000 feet. And inviting audiences to whoop at the images from the warhead nose-cams. It cycled and re-cycled images of civilians and conscripts consigned to hell. It was all to establish a narrative called ‘The Gulf War’. A narrative we ‘knew’. A narrative nourished by Cent Com and the media in Doha. 

Baudrillard argued this was not ‘The Gulf War’. Coalition and Iraqi forces didn’t actually meet in combat. Each did its belligerent stuff, but each did it as if they were in different universes. Coalition troops were so distant from true combat that fewer died in the ‘war’ than would have died back home in gang-fights, as crime victims or in road accidents. For his part, Saddam didn’t sacrifice troops and civilians to fight ‘The Gulf War’. The 100,000 dead were the price he had to pay to stay in power:

“the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. ”

And conserve his power he did – for a further twelve years. The ‘victors’ didn’t win and the ‘vanquished’ didn’t lose. Spring 1991 in Iraq may have been an “atrocity”. A bloody series of appalling atrocities – but ‘The Gulf War’ did not take place.

Baudrillard’s essays may appear to be a semioticist’s whimsy – worse, a French semioticist’s whimsy – or a vaguely interesting academic diversion. Rather like Giraudoux’s play may seem, in the end, no more than an intellectually challenging night in the theatre.

Except that … what things are and how we portray them matters hugely to us journalists. And to our audiences.
'Supernarrative' - an ugly trick

We journalists – especially editors in newspaper and broadcasting newsrooms – find ourselves working an ugly trick every day on our audiences. On the one hand, we’re about telling them something new, something salient. Something significant that they don’t already know. Something they didn’t know they don’t know and didn’t know they need or want to know. Dealing in truth, something close to education. On the other, we have to engage them – with tantalising headlines, with facts and observations that sit at the extreme edge of truth. And with stories. Stories that, by virtue of being well written or well told alone, engage their attention and turn it to matters they never knew they needed to know something about. Dealing in impact.

The tool we know that has the most impact of all is the ‘super narrative’. The huge, over-arching narrative that binds other, minor narratives together. That gives them meaning above what they are in themselves, offering the audience what Aristotle called ἀναγνώρισις – ‘recognition’. The means to recognise and empathise with people culturally, emotionally and socially distant from ourselves. The means to link disparate events. To recollect them at a later date. We often give these super narratives snappy, instantly recognisable, memorable titles. Titles we can use in a blazing strap or an over-the shoulder identifier in a TV news bulletin.

‘The Moors Murders’; ‘The Fall of Communism’; ‘Showdown in the Desert’; ‘The Credit Crunch’. 

And, paradoxically, the more that those of us living in digitally hyper-charged cultures are able to know – via the web, social media, 24/7 TV channels – the more we need these super narratives. To tell us: ‘hey … this matters – and here’s why’ or ‘hey… it’s that thing again, the one you were interested in last time’ or. Or even to tell us; ‘hey … you might not think you know anything about this, but it’s a lot like this other thing’. At the same time, those technologies that have increased the quantity of what we can know has decreased what we ‘know’ in common. That, in turn, means that journalism’s super narratives have had to become more reductive, more detached from reality, more resembling what Baudrillard called ‘hyper-reality’. They become illusions. Just like ‘The Gulf War’. They become misleading and unpredictable, too. It’s harder and harder for those of us who create these super narratives to know or predict all that the references will excite in our audiences. What references, precisely, the word ‘Arab’ will generate in the minds of those in the audience. Yet we persist in it.    

It’s easy to see how and why we journalists reached for the super narrative that we called ‘The Arab Spring’. We knew that something was happening and sensed that it was out of the ordinary. People were on the move, politically on the move. For the most part, it was the Arabic speaking countries we were most interested in. And by the time we realised we needed to name it, it was early spring. And spring carries overtones of new life. New growth. Re-birth after a long, dark winter. It was ideal.
Stockholm in the sand

We assumed, probably quite rightly, that few in our audiences would be hugely engaged by a tragic row over property rights in a country most thought of only as a holiday destination. Or in yet another Sunni/Shiite religious squabble in a country that was almost never in the news and to which most people couldn’t point on the map. Or in an elite in the Arab world’s only democracy as it debated the merits and demerits of its confessional constitution.

Create a super-narrative, a hyper-reality called ‘The Arab Spring’ and you might have a chance. Any expression of popular discontent in any Arabic speaking monarchy or despotism was a signifier of ‘The Arab Spring’. It felt real. It felt energetic. It was full of movement. And terrific TV pictures.

But ‘The Arab Spring’ did not take place.

Think back to the event that in most of us in the western media identify as the beginning. December 17, 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street trader in Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire, protesting at the arbitrary exercise of power by the police and local government officials. A petty abuse of authority that prevented him exercising his property rights, his right to trade, his right to earn a living. The police had continually harassed him. Confiscated his  goods, even the barrow from which he sold fruit and vegetables. Officials kept revoking his trading permits, seeking ever bigger bribes. Basboosa, as he was known to family and friends, suffered 90% burns. Within hours of his self-immolation, there were local, then regional then national street protests. He died on 4 January, 2011 and by the end of the same month, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had gone. The revolution had begun.

And that might have been that. The Tunisian January.

Except, Egypt seemed to follow where Tunisia had led. Like Tunisia, it was an Arabic-speaking pseudo-democracy. There were self-immolations. Growing  street protests. And no less a figure than Mohammed el-Baradei, international diplomat and the man who the opposition wanted to challenge President Mubarak, warned that change was “inevitable” in his native, estranged Egypt following revolution in Tunisia.

Egypt was big. Egypt mattered in a away that Tunisia didn’t, so it was time for the super narrative. Finally, the story went,  the Arab world was emerging from its despotism to join the only true political faith; western liberalism. Populations will rise spontaneously, thirsting for freedom and justice. Like Giraudoux, we placed characters we ‘knew’ – the masses in Arabic speaking countries – inside a super narrative that we ‘knew’ – all nations’ remorseless progression to democracy.

And that super narrative, the ‘hyper-reality’ if you like, drove what we looked for and reported. What we headlined. And, just as importantly, what we didn’t. ‘The Arab Spring’ was a ‘domino’ story, we decided. 
One Arabic despotism after another would fall to western ideas of liberal democracy. The people would, at last, build Stockholm in the sand, celebrating plurality, embracing the rule of law.

And before long, we became familiar with the modalities. There would be a ‘Day of Rage’, linked often to Friday prayers – so we made sure the cameras were there. Articulate young men and women would find the TV cameras, or the cameras would find them, and they would speak in polished Harvard English about freedom and democracy and law and the burning desire for justice. And we would show how Facebook and Twitter and SMS were their communication tools of choice.

And because we knew these were Muslims – and we ‘knew’ that story too – we looked for the hidden hand of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the machinations of Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere. We speculated on whether ‘The Arab Spring’ would weaken or strengthen al Qaeda.
Overlooked

Just as Baudrillard argued, the pictures and themes and interviews we selected were all images of the hyper reality we called ‘The Arab Spring’. We collected and shared them as if to confirm to ourselves that what must be taking place really was taking place.  

There was much we overlooked, much that was inconsistent with our super  narrative that declared this was ‘The Arab Spring’ . At the mundane level, the millions in every country who did not become involved in the popular uprisings, either out of fear, lack of interest, distance or because they sustained in themselves a weary cynicism that nothing was changing, nothing would change. We overlooked the images of daily trade and schooling and bureaucracy and traffic and and and … anything that was happening just as before, untouched by our super narrative.

At the symbolic level, we overlooked the near total absence of Arab nationalism in ‘The Arab Spring’. We overlooked the presence of non-Arab actors; the Berbers in Morocco – non-Arabs – Kurds in Iraq. Jews in Tunisia and even Coptic Christians in Egypt.

And we overlooked the role of tribalism, personal fear, vengeance, familial loathing. ‘The Arab Spring’ was a political movement. We could not include non-political dynamics. 

That’s not to say we ignored the complexities. We didn’t. But, with few exceptions, we were oblivious to the obvious. That the causes and characteristics of each uprising were different from any other – and that once we’d listed them all, they became meaningless as signifiers. They were not unique features that identified ‘The Arab Spring’ and only ‘The Arab Spring’.

That list of causes and characteristics – in one constellation or another – would have defined and explained any and every political movement and popular rising throughout history. Here it was poverty and cronyism, there the frustrations of an educated, ambitious middle class. Here there was benevolent monarchy, there cruel dynastic autocracy, there a personal fiefdom of a tribal strong man. Here there was sectarian division, there generational animosities. In some places it was all or most of the causes, in others one or two.

One of the few journalists who ‘got’ this essential truth was the BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason. When he tried to account for “what’s going on”, he eschewed the super narrative ‘The Arab Spring’. He found, instead, twenty deep factors that applied as much to the banlieues of Paris and the suburbs of Dublin as it did to any Arabic speaking autocracy. Mason spoke instead about a:

“protest meme … sweeping the world … [that doesn’t] - seek a total overturn [but seeks] a moderation of excesses”.

But those of use who preferred to stick with our super narrative had much to draw on from the lines our narrative’s characters wrote for themselves. Take the ubiquitous slogan, chanted and scrawled on the walls of public buildings: 

الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام‎ (ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām). ‘The people want to end the regime’. 

We heard it first in Tunis. And then in Tahrir Square in Egypt. And in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Beirut and Jordan. It validated our narrative, provided the motivation for our super narrative. Gave us an explanation for thinking the way we did. ‘Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām’ had the virtue of sounding like the historical inevitability we ‘knew’ was being played out on the Arab street. We ‘knew’ it had only ever been a matter of time before the Arabs succumbed to the inevitable history of liberal democracy and threw off the despots. This was how history progressed. We turned ‘historical’ inevitability into narrative inevitability and ‘ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām’ proved we were right.

Phew. It was ‘The Arab Spring’. 

Yet this slogan, though ubiquitous, meant different things to different people in  different places. In imperfectly democratic Lebanon, it was little to do with despotism or poverty. It was a call for the end of its confessional constitution – a constitution that placed religious and sectarian differences at the heart of the state. Differences that kept the country weak, permanently in thrall to its despotic neighbour, Syria, and a permanent threat to its powerful, polyphiloeisbiazetic southern neighbour, Israel.

In Tunisia, it demanded an end to cronyism, corruption and economic suffocation. In Egypt, it was the susurration of a discontented middle-class – professionals, small businessmen, a bourgeoisie frustrated at the limitations an ageing military ruler placed on their political aspirations.  

While in the Palestinian territories, where the alienation of Hamas and Fatah continued to guarantee the impossibility of a two-state settlement in the region – the slogan was tweaked to الشعب يريد انهاء الانقسام – ‘the people want to end the division’.

Endorsing the super narrative
Arab academics and western students of the Arab world seemed to endorse our choice of super narrative, too. Much as Mohammed el-Baradei had done. We were seeing “a people [moving] as a whole, into spontaneous protests” wrote one. Young Arabs “will no longer tolerate … the contempt and disrespect their governments have shown them” said another, adding that they do not just mean their own “corrupt governments; they also mean the old regime that has prevailed for decades in the entire Arab world, from the Atlantic to the Gulf”. It was a “youthquake”. There was “social cohesion and unity in the project” most agreed. It was ‘The Arab Spring’.

Except it did not take place.

The Tunisian revolution that followed the demonstrations surprised us – none more so than President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who scuttled away from power in the dead of night. The demonstrations in Tahrir Square were a surprise too and it’s just about possible to forgive our read across from Tunisia to Egypt when President Mubarak was forced to step aside. Except, there will be autumn elections in one, Tunisia, while the army still clings on to power in the other, Egypt.

Much as we wanted, expected and predicted that “The Arab Spring” would follow our super narrative, we now find it did no such thing. Arabic speaking populations have not emerged into the broad, sunlit uplands of western, liberal democracy. The old regimes have made the least possible concessions to respond to political demands. Or have thrown handfuls of petrodollars at those demanding social reform – better healthcare, education, reduced poverty. The political and economic dispensation in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman and Saudi Arabia has shifted not one millimetre.

The civil war in Libya followed a different course, as did the cycle of demonstration and repression in Syria – and in both cases, events slid over into new super narrative – ‘The Libyan Civil War” and “The Syrian Repression”. They were no longer ‘The Arab Spring” and most in our audiences no longer make that association.

For the rest, though, if you were to go out into the streets of Britain a year on from Basboosa’s suicidal protest and ask our readers, listeners and viewers,  ‘what happened in The Arab Spring?’ you’d almost certainly have reflected back to you the super narrative we created for them.

The people speak, spontaneous protests – hurrah. Democracy, justice, freedom – hurrah. An end to repression and corruption – hurrah. Arab dictators forced to listen to their people. The Arab world finally following in the west’s historical footsteps. Hurrah.

Except, ‘The Arab Spring’ did not take place.

There was irony here, too. Just as much as in The Trojan War Will Not Take Place … except that this time it was us, the creators of our hyper-reality who couldn’t see outside our super narrative and were defined by it. Unlike Giraudoux’s characters, the real people of those Arabic speaking states – those on the streets and those in power alike – were able to shape events and were not delimited and defined by our account of those events.

‘The Arab Spring’ did not take place.
Definable shapes

None of this would matter if it weren’t for the simple truth that this model, this creation of super narratives wasn’t increasingly the one we follow, especially in the way we report World News. Believing that we can’t explain and our audiences can’t understand the world without us rendering it subject to a hyper-reality.

It has always been the case, of course, that journalism has had an existential need to create narrative entities outside events themselves. To place on top of reality a story or stories, narrative entities without which it could not exist. There is too much information in the world, too much of the world.

As long ago as 1922, the magazine publisher and author Walter Lippman wrote in Public Opinion that journalism is a limited, reductive activity. It cannot report all of reality and to exist it has to be the product of a “standardized routine” that selects and presents. A routine that makes use of “watchers stationed at certain places” – journalists, reporters – to spot a “manifestation”. Not reality. Not a complex truth. But a “manifestation”, an event that “signalises” that there is a reality, that that there is a truth. And to be news:

“The course of events must assume a certain definable shape, and until it is in a phase where some aspect is an accomplished fact, news does not separate itself from the ocean of possible truth.”

Ninety years on, that “ocean of possible truth” is many times squared greater than anything Lippmann had in mind. The journey from “manifestation: to “definable shape” has to be very much quicker, too, in a world of 24/7 live and continuous news and the instantaneous web. And it is cross cultural and trans global.

Where it was once about merely recognising those “definable” shapes – a news sense, a nose for news – now it is about creating them. Creating those super narratives. Like ‘The Arab Spring’.

And every so often, as Baudrillard argues we did with ‘The Gulf War’ and as we clearly have with ‘The Arab Spring’, we get it so wrong we create an illusion. 

We have to think harder, much harder than we do about how and why we create these super narratives. Something we now do almost instantaneously with events themselves and as a matter of routine. We need to think harder about the kind of super narratives we create, too.

‘The Arab Spring’ bulged with western liberal political assumptions and associations. It was  a narrative certainty. But those certainties were built on ideas which, to those who don’t share the western view of mankind’s inevitable ‘progress’, look like, feel like and are intellectual imperialism.

‘The Arab Spring’ did not take place. Our inevitabilities were not realised and may never be realised. And, in an inversion of Giraudoux’s irony, it is we – the western authors and western audience – who are locked into an inevitable narrative.   

Since 1914, we’ve stroked ourselves with the idea that journalism is the first draft of history. Since 1943, we have conceded it is merely a “rough” draft. But for all its roughness, journalism’s super narratives tend to survive the revisions of time, in part at least and most usually in their titles. Expect to read the winter and spring of 2011 described as ‘The Arab Spring’ in decades to come.

But ‘The Arab Spring’ did not take place. Proof, if any were needed, of Hemingway’s maxim: “The first draft of anything is shit”. 

But what comes after?

This is an article originally published in "The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial" Ed Richard Keble and John Mair


‘We were just ordinary people.’
At the end of November 2011, a steady stream of ‘ordinary people’ whose lives and reputations the tabloid press had trashed gave their accounts to the Leveson inquiry. Bob and Sally Dowler – who were just ‘ordinary people’ until someone murdered their daughter. Gerry and Kate McCann – who were just ‘ordinary people’ until their daughter Madeleine disappeared in Portugal. Or Jim and Margaret Watson – who were just ‘ordinary people’ until their daughter was murdered and their son, Alan, committed suicide.
Or even the father of footballer Garry Flitcroft – ‘collateral damage’ in the tabloids’ revenge on his son who dared to try to protect his privacy. Flitcroft’s father could not be at the inquiry. He killed himself, unable through depression to watch his son on the football field.
It was impossible to listen to these accounts without a sense of profound sadness mingled with downright rage. Impossible, too, not to wonder what it takes for someone calling himself a journalist or an investigator assisting a journalist to find himself so distant from common human decency. Leveson has become subtitled ‘the phone hacking inquiry’. It’s very much more than that. Phone-hacking is just one small part of something that’s become very, very sick in our culture and our society.
A tabloid press whose business model had become so dependent on trashing the reputations of ‘ordinary people’ – as well as celebrities, politicians, people in public life – that it is now nothing other than a machine to convert harassment, intrusion, misery, sneering and mockery into cash.
Anger and vindictiveness are its default settings. Papers sell on the depths of their inhumanity. Columnists are judged by the frequency and inventiveness of the offence they cause.
No Defence
By the end of just one week of these accounts to the Leveson Inquiry, it was clear the game was up. Almost no-one was prepared to defend the way the tabloids use their immense power. And while it may still be far from clear how the world will change for them, change it will.
Few tabloid editors, even, are prepared to take the stand to defend what they do. And listening to one that did, the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre, you can understand why. True, Dacre was prepared to break cover and deserves some credit for that. But there the credit ends. And though he was speaking to the Leveson Inquiry before that long queue of ‘just ordinary people’ gave their accounts, he misjudged the public mood catastrophically.
Claiming what he and fellow editors did – and, presumably, how they did it – was in the public interest. Asserting his and his fellow editors’ absolute and unqualified freedom of expression. Standing on their right to expose corruption and hold power to account. This is hypocrisy of the most snivelling sort. Worse, it pollutes the arguments we need to protect the best in journalism by trying to justify the worst.
Yes, it’s vital that we protect our freedom of expression. Yes, it’s vital that no-one can be silenced when they call power to account or root out corruption or ruthlessly examine and embarrass powerful institutions. Yes, it’s vital that we insist power is exercised transparently and that we can hold it to account. And it’s vital that we protect the right of the press to do all of these. But the truth is, that’s not what the tabloids do.
For every MPs’ expenses exclusive – not a tabloid exclusive incidentally – there are thousands of “ordinary people” harassed, vilified, libelled. For every court battle that lifts injunctions to expose evil corporations – not something the tabloids have ever indulged in – there are dozens to assert the tabloids’ right to report that yet another dog has bitten yet another man. Or rather, another premiership footballer has been caught with his shorts off. Defending the tabloids’ right to do what they want to who they want how they want is nothing to do with protecting free speech. Or protecting the press.
Powerful Institutions
The fact is that tabloid newspapers are mightily powerful institutions themselves. And amongst the least accountable and transparent, defending that lack of accountability and transparency in the name of ‘protecting sources’. Actually, it’s about hiding the yobbish behaviour and lazy omissions that go into their vindictive journalism. Or to cover up the fact that a story was planted by a PR agency. Or bought from someone who, at the sight of hard cash, would say whatever a journalist asked them to.
These powerful opaque institutions care nothing about your or my freedom of expression. In fact, they suppress it if your freedom of expression in telling the truth lessens their potential to make money with a lie. As a society, we have the right and the duty to expect of this powerful institution exactly what we demand of others. To determine how they should exercise that power. To impose on it responsibilities. To insist they’re accountable to us for the way they use their power.
We demand it of our police, our hospitals, our politicians. We cry foul when institutions far less powerful than the press seem out of reach of our insistence that they behave in our interests rather than theirs – the bonus grabbers in the City or bond dealers, for example. So it is with the press. The phone-hacking scandal has done no more than bring to a head the boil we know had been festering for years.
People Not Like Us
After hearing account after account of harassment and distortion at the Leveson Inquiry, it began to seem that the tabloid press is peopled by beings who are not like us. Or perhaps and more likely, people who started off like us but have been transformed by the mean minded, mean spirited, macho culture in every tabloid newsroom. 
The lack of the most basic, human, decent regard for the family of a murdered girl is simply the worst excess in an ethic that has no regard for anyone. Celebrity or ‘ordinary person’. Victim or villain. Powerful or powerless. A total refusal even to consider the effects and consequences of what they are doing. The rest of us know it’s not just about phone hacking. The rest of us know that the game is up. The rest of us know we can’t go on with this powerful interest group – the press – behaving like the Stasi, restrained by nothing. We can’t even assume any more that common human decency will restrain them.
The American journalist Janet Malcolm began a book she wrote in 1990 called The Journalist and the Murderer like this: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’ People were prepared to argue with her then. Only tabloid editors would argue with her today. As the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre did in a performance before Leveson that was defiant, disingenuous and in denial.
‘No-one Died’
He could only just bring himself to condemn phone hacking and bribing police officers – even though both are illegal. Neither are such a big deal, he insisted – showing contempt for Mrs Dowler’s tears and her husband’s gnawing fear. Britain’s cities weren’t looted because of phone hacking, nor did the banks collapse because of it. ‘No-one died,’ he sneers. Actually, that’s only just true. Charlotte Church’s mother attempted suicide after the News of the World hacked into the singer’s phone. And I wonder how much any tabloid editor would have cared if someone had died. It was a chilling insight into a warped mindset.
In his speech to Leveson, Dacre claims that the public’s revulsion over phone-hacking derives only from ‘hypocrisy and revenge’ in the political class – i.e. MPs – because the papers ‘dared to expose their greed and corruption’. Nothing to do with the years of harassment, thieving, blagging, distortion, lies, deception, monstering. Nothing to do with the tabloids’ default assumption that reputations – big and small – are there only for his power and business to trash.
Nothing to do with every tabloid editor’s usurpation of the right to decide who is evil. To decide who must be pursued and vilified – based only on which victim will yield the best financial return on the outlay. The issue isn’t that newspapers must be free to tell it how it is. It’s that we’re fed up with them using that freedom to tell it how it isn’t. To harass, distort and lie in the name of profit.
Tabloid editors defend what their papers and their journalists do in their name because, as Dacre has argued at both the Society of Editors and before Leveson, they have to ‘leaven their papers with sensation, exclusive pictures, scandal, celebrity gossip and dramatic human stories’ in order to cover serious news, politics and campaigns. On the face of it, that’s not just reasonable. It’s self-evidently true. For the tabloids to stay in business, they have to appeal to their readers’ less lofty instincts. And so long as they’re in business, they can bolt onto that titillation and sensation and gossip some serious news, scrutiny, reporting, opinion, campaigning. In other words, serve some useful purpose.
Beyond Useful Purpose
That used to be true – but as everyone now knows, we’ve gone way, way beyond that. What used to be the ‘leavening’ is now the purpose of most tabloids. The sole content of some. And instead of serving any useful purpose, it poisons our view of ourselves and corrodes our culture and our society.
Dacre is fond of quoting two former senior judges – judges, incidentally, he would in most other circumstances revile as the people who really run the country. Lord Woolf, who a decade ago when he was Lord Chief Justice, put it like this:
 "If newspapers do not publish information which the public are interested in, then there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest."
 While Baroness Hale, now a Supreme Court Judge said:
"Newspapers should be allowed considerable latitude in the intrusions into private grief so that they can maintain circulation and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the variety of newspapers and other mass media which are available in this country."
Both judges were talking, there, about a balance that no longer exists – a balance that everyone in the country, apart from tabloid editors, knows no longer exists. We have, instead, what one hacking victim called ‘sociopathic’ fixation with intrusion and scandal. The sociopathic fixation of a powerful institution that has the unbridled power to ruin the lives of those it and it alone decides deserve it. But let’s assume just for a moment that tabloid editors such as Paul Dacre are right. And that we need the papers to stay in business, however that can be achieved, because if they were to disappear that would ‘diminish our democracy’.
True, of course. And we have seen some of this in the carnage in the local press. As local papers fold, Dacre tells us: ‘Courts go uncovered. Councils aren't held to account. And the corrupt go unchallenged. That is a democratic deficit that in itself is worthy of an inquiry.’ It would be impossible to disagree with that. So let’s take a closer look at the Daily Mail’s attitude to the courts and the processes of justice.
Remember the case of what the Mail called ‘The Strange Mr Jeffries’? The retired schoolteacher who had the misfortune to be Joanna Yeates’ landlord. Who, though entirely innocent, was briefly arrested and questioned. How did the Mail and the other tabloids report the inquiry? With respect for the courts and for the innocence of any suspect until proven guilty?
We all know the answer. The Daily Mail and other tabloids spared no effort in portraying Mr Jeffries as a weirdo. After all, he was a bachelor and had funny hair that he once dyed purple. Subtext? We all know the message the tabloids were screaming at us. He had campaigned for a ‘gun range and prayer books’. Subtext? How weird is that? Shades of gun-toting Christian fundamentalism. And had a fixation for Christina Rossetti, a poet obsessed with death.
It’s true, the Mail wasn’t the worst – but it was in the pack, securing its place in that pack, making money from trashing Christopher Jeffries. Turning contempt for him and for the proper process of justice into profit. Respect for the courts? Or for Mr Jeffries right to have the truth told about him? Free speech? Protecting the press’s right to report the facts fearlessly? It was none of these. It was a naked, calculated commercial risk – that any financial cost would be outweighed by the income it brought in. And when it came to acknowledging its part in trashing Mr Jeffries, the Mail was as surly and grudging as an adolescent caught shoplifting:
Eight newspapers apologised to Mr Christopher Jefferies in the High Court yesterday. Reports of the investigation into the death of Joanna Yeates had wrongly suggested that Mr Jefferies, who was arrested but released without charge, was suspected of killing Ms Yeates, may have had links to a convicted paedophile and an unresolved murder. It was also wrongly alleged that the former school master had acted inappropriately to pupils. The newspapers, including the Daily Mail, agreed to pay Mr Jefferies substantial damages and legal costs.
The Mail could not even bring itself to say – ‘We’re sorry.’ When it was totally, completely, 100 per cent banged to rights in its race to the bottom as tabloid outdid tabloid in contempt and defamation all in pursuit of market position and profit?
Balancing the Financial Cost of Lies
We saw something similar in the way that Richard Desmond’s papers – the Daily Express and Daily Star – libelled the McCanns and Robert Murat week in, week out – over 100 times. As Leveson heard in that week of tabloid shame at the end of November, these libels weren’t slight things. Ambiguities dressed up as sensationally as possible. ‘Maddy “sold” by hard-up McCanns’ . was one. Allegations that they had stored her body in a freezer, another. Did they run these stories because their newshounds were fearlessly tracking down the facts? Holding the Portuguese police’s feet to the fire, keeping them up to the mark with their insistent scrutiny?
No. These ‘journalists’ were sitting in a bar in Portugal, filing the latest odious rumour so that back in London, editors could make a simple calculation. What’s the financial risk if we run this lie? If we’re sued, will we have made more through lying than we stand to lose in court?
There’s even a myth that the tabloids are better behaved and disciplined than they were in the seventies. Then, as Paul Dacre told the Leveson inquiry, reporters would steal photographs from homes; blatant subterfuge was common; invasion of privacy was unrestrained; harassment was the rule. And he sketched a typical scene in a typical tabloid newsroom. A scene where editors and executives stroked their chins in careful contemplation of the editors’ code. A scene that is as touching as it is fantasy:
"When a photograph is presented, the question is immediately asked: Did the subject of the picture have a reasonable expectation of privacy? In stories, executives question whether the privacy of the person’s family or health is being invaded and whether their children are being protected. Were we harassing people?"
Now I find this very difficult to reconcile with Hugh Grant’s account of Mail and other tabloid journalists’ behaviour towards Tinglan, the mother of his child. A woman and baby, the tabloids decided, who needed a bit of harassment and a sound trashing.
How Tabloid Photographers Really Behave
Take this. Grant’s description of arriving home one evening to find reporters and photographers besieging Tinglan and her baby:
"I asked them if there was anything I could do or say to make them leave a new and frightened young mother in peace. They said show us the baby. I refused. I asked them if they thought it was acceptable for grown men to be harassing and frightening a mother and baby for commercial profit. They just shrugged and took more pictures."
Does a mother in her own home with her baby have a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’? Clearly not, as far as journalists acting in Paul Dacre’s name are concerned. It makes you wonder what that ‘reasonable expectation’ might ever amount to in the tabloid mind.
Perhaps, though, we should cut the tabloid greybeards some slack as, back in the newsroom, they carefully weigh whether or not to run these pictures and these stories. Perhaps they won’t make the cut once the editor knows how the photographers and journalists behaved? Think again. In his evidence to Leveson, Grant named the Mail journalist leading the charge:
"He is also the person behind most of the texting and phoning of Tinglan since the birth…Some of the pictures that are printed of Tinglan when pregnant, taken either covertly…or openly and expressly against her will, are the ones used in the News of the World article back in April. The Mail appears therefore to be picking up where the disgraced News of the World left off." 
And it’s not just young mothers and their babies in their own homes that the tabloids now consider appropriate victims of their thuggish harassment. Here’s more of Hugh Grant’s statement:
"Tinglan's mother, a lady of 61, started to take photos of one photographer parked outside. He immediately turned his camera on her, took some pictures and then accelerated hard towards her so fast that Tinglan's mother had to jump out of the way. Then he did a U- turn at the end of the street and drove fast towards her again in a deliberately menacing way. She was, and remains, extremely frightened."
I’m wondering what the Daily Mail headline would have been if, instead of a tabloid photographer trying to run down a 61 year old granny in the street, it had been a failed asylum seeker. Or a traveller from Dale Farm. Or some other Mail hate figure.
But it wasn’t. It was a tabloid photographer from the world that tabloid editors like Paul Dacre have created. A world where there is no regard for anyone and where there is a mocking, sneering culture. A world and culture that John Lanchester described so precisely when he reviewed Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News in the London Review of Books: Too many journalists, he wrote, are:
"...indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts...and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality."
By the end of 2011, Leveson – and the rest of us – had heard account after account of the most unacceptable behaviour and attitudes. Behaviour and attitudes that, if they existed in any other sector of society, the tabloids would condemn day in, day out in page after page of spume flecked outrage. They would ask what kind of person wouldn’t just hack a dead girl’s phone but stalk her parents when they walked their daughter's last journey. Or print the private diary of a mother whose child has been stolen away. Or wear disguise to gatecrash a private funeral to photograph a father’s grief.
‘What kind of ethics can you teach this kind of journalist,’ one of the lawyers asked at the Leveson inquiry. Rhetorically, one has to assume. Expecting the answer – none. It’s just not possible.
What To Do?
The question is, though, what to do? A question Lord Leveson plans to answer, perhaps in full perhaps in part, towards the end of 2012. And he may well try to answer the question that before, during and after the phone hacking scandal has been repeatedly asked. Can the press regulate itself? Or do we need statutory regulation?
The trouble is, that’s the wrong question. This is no longer about replacing the failed Press Complaints Commission nor re-casting the utterly discredited editors’ code..There is, instead, a much more important, prior question that now demands an answer. What do we require a free press to do on our behalf? And what do we want it not to do in order to be a civilised player in a civilised society?
How do we make sure we have a free press that really can expose MPs’ greed; corporate corruption and crime; police, doctors social workers and the rest who really are incompetent. A press that can bear witness on our behalf; campaign for justice; argue the hell out of everything that matters to us. But do it without divesting itself of every shred of decency. Without the harassment, the lying, the blagging, distortion, vindictiveness that’s become the norm in this powerful institution.
There’s no easy answer and it would be foolish to pretend there is. But one thing I do know. The last people you want to make or monitor any set of rules are the crooks themselves. Imagine if you will the Mail’s spitting outrage if paedophiles were invited to draft new child protection laws and enforce them. Or if illegal immigrants and people traffickers were to be given control of Britain’s border. Quite.
The tabloid press has proved beyond any doubt that it can’t be trusted to regulate itself. But if the answer doesn’t lie in regulation, where might it lie? The fact is that the British media, including the press, is already surrounded by a forest of legislation. Legislation that, if it were enforced it as the legislators intended and as most decent, reasonable people thought proper, would constrain most if not all of the tabloid’s bestial behaviours.
The libel laws. The Human Rights Act that, effectively, balances rights to privacy and to freedom of expression. The Data Protection Act; the Freedom of Information Act; the Official Secrets Act; the Bribery Act; the Contempt of Court Act and so on. But this forest of laws is a mess. Some is statute, some common law. Most is effectively unenforceable or a real brake on responsible journalism because of the costs and time involved. Some have a public interest defence; some don’t. Some is closely defined, some a question of balance between conflicting statutes or precedents. 
It is a massive thing to suggest and I do so aware of the monumental, probably insurmountable difficulties in the way. But we can still consider ideals and in that an ideal word, we would have a new legal settlement for the media. A clear body of law that applied to people and businesses committing deliberate acts of journalism, whether paid for or not.
And one of the key characteristics of that body of law would be that all parts of it had a clear, public interest defence. And while it’s easy to get hung up on defining ‘public interest’, there is a model for this kind of defence in the so-called Reynolds defence – or common law privilege – in a libel action. It’s otherwise known as the defence of diligent and careful journalism done in the public interest. Tied to this new body of media law, however, we need rapid, low-cost resolution. Both victims and newspapers argue – rightly – that the cost of pursuing or defending a libel action is prohibitive. That, and the time involved, turns the righting of that particular wrong into a thermonuclear option. Yet most victims don’t want massive damages. An apology, explanation and putting the record straight is all most require. Quickly and prominently.
The one thing the PCC did, in fact, do well was to organise speedy mediation and resolution, particularly in the local press. And we also have the models of the small claims court and professional arbitration panels to draw on – models that limit costs and damages and aim to resolve disputes quickly and simply.
Streamlining and simplification like this would strengthen both free expression and the public’s ability to keep the press honest and accountable. But there should be more. Even with more rational media law, we’d still need an editors’ code – though one not written by the tabloid editors themselves – underpinning an independent, statutorily established regulator whose main job would be to investigate, rather than simply resolve, breaches of the code.
A burden? Perhaps. But here’s the thing. Newspapers could choose whether to be inside a system like this or not. Inside, you’d sign up to the whole package – complete with pubic interest defence and limited costs and damages. Outside, you could do what you liked – much as the tabloids do now.
Except for this. Outside would be very, very cold and hostile indeed. You’d have no public interest defence. Unlimited costs and damages. Juries and judges would, inevitably, take into account your decision to stay outside the system when they were apportioning those costs and damages. And, as is already the case with libel, the balance of proof would be against you – you’d have to prove you hadn’t harassed, distorted, misrepresented. It wouldn’t be up to the complainant to prove that you had.
When Leveson finally writes his report, it’s very unlikely he’ll take a many steps in this direction. It would be a step – may be more than one step – too far. But it’s not a bad ‘high water mark’ against which we can judge whatever recommendations he does finally produce. But he’s already made it clear he’s not going to walk away and do nothing about this massively powerful, profit led institution that’s gone so far off the rails, it no longer knows where the rails once were.
Getting the Thugs off the Street
How else might we judge whether Leveson has got it right? In the long queue of ‘just ordinary people’ and celebrities who gave Leveson their accounts of tabloid harassment there was one that struck me especially forcefully. It was Sienna Miller’s. She told how up to fifteen men would stalk her every day. How they would spit on her to get a reaction. How they would chase her, alone, down dark streets at midnight.
The men weren’t just your ordinary, common-or-garden stalkers, perverts and muggers. They had been given licence by their editors – men like Paul Dacre – to leave decency behind and ‘legitimised’ by Miller’s celebrity and the cameras they carried. Miller was just 21 years old. The same age my daughter is now. That gave her account, for me, a painful resonance and piquancy.
Leveson will have got it right if his solution makes the press truly accountable to us, the public. If he brings some responsibility to the last unaccountable power in the land. If the tabloid press has to take more care than it does now that that it’s honest and fair and has more than a passing relationship with the truth. If it can tell the difference between challenging power and trashing the lives of the victims of crime. If we, the public, can put wrongs right quickly and fairly.
And if young women, whether a celebrity like Miller or ‘just ordinary people’ like the rest of us are no longer be terrorised by thuggish yobs, turning that terror into cash for the power that is the tabloid press.

What's the question?

"This time, it's palpably nasty." That's Quentin Letts, the Mail's theatre critic. West End and Westminster.

It captures what everyone now feels about the long-running so-called 'phone hacking' scandal. For half a decade it has interested and outraged people like me - the sort of people Nick Robinson dismissed on Today as "professors of journalism ethics".

But now it's on everyone's mind. And lips: 'how could they sink so low?'

But reaching the tipping point is one thing. Where it falls is another.

On 6 July at the House of Lords, a campaign was launched to press for a public inquiry. (I should declare an interest: I was asked to lend my name to the campaign, partly because of earlier blogs I'd written on this website.)

Now is the chance for the public to tell journalists about the kind of press they want - a press they would trust.

It goes way beyond News International's serial offending - though that's the priority for now: discovering the number and nature of News of the World journalists' crimes, and those of the 'investigators' they hired.

But it's important that the investigation of this scandal doesn't end there.

We, the public, need to know how the culture of contempt - a culture of which phone-hacking is just the nastiest tip of a nasty iceberg - came to be the norm in all tabloid newsrooms. We need to know more about the routine of bribing bank and DVLA clerks, doctors' receptionists, nurses... anyone standing guard over private information. And bribing policemen - something News International's Chief Executive, Rebekah Brooks, boasted to MPs about.

We need to know, too, where the police were when this story broke five years ago. Why were those bin bags full of incriminating evidence stuffed away in a cupboard for half a decade? Did they think it was enough to catch the two crooks who'd hacked royal phones? Did they think phone-hacking as a matter of routine wasn't really very criminal at all? Or was there something more sinister at work? The symbiosis of the Met and News International?

We need to know more about the links, formal and informal, between political leaders and the Murdoch empire.

We need full disclosure about and proper, informed scrutiny of the kind of people who aspire to be at the helm of News International and BSkyB. Are they the kind of people the public want in charge of so much of the media?

And we need the Press Complaints Commission to tell us why it has spent the greater part of its two decades of life failing miserably to hold the press to account - even for the most disgusting breaches; not just of the risible Editors' Code but of any understanding of human decency.

We, the public, need to decide whether to call time on the running joke that has been press self-regulation. And whether we need something else in its place.

This matters. It matters because news isn't just a business like any other. And because the one thing that distinguishes journalism from rumour and gossip - trust - is in such short supply.

Tabloid publishers and editors may be content that eight out of ten readers don't believe a thing their newspaper tells them - but still buy them.

They may once have been persuaded that more intrusion, more bribery, more phone-hacking was the way to secure their future.

They can't any more. And the public doesn't have to accept it.

Standing up for journalism, standing out from the mob

This is the text of the keynote lecture given at Westminster University, June 8 2011 at the conference entitled: 'What makes good journalism'

This conference is part sponsored by the British Journalism Review. The Review is, of course, a very British paradox. A very necessary British paradox.

And very different from the journalism journals in, say, the United States.
Journalism is still a trade here in the UK. Unlike America, journalists have no special status, no special protection. Though even there, as John Carroll, the former LA Times editor once put it: 

“It is the constitutional right of every person, no matter how depraved, to call themselves a journalist.”

Here in the UK, we’re quite rightly ambivalent about the study of journalism and the academic style of journalism that’s prevalent in the States. We tend to shuffle nervously or change the subject when people try to talk about journalism in academic terms. We see journalism as a doing thing. Something you do by instinct. 

Talking to people. Having a persuasive and personable manner when you’re trying to get your hands on that key fact. Listening to, following hunches. Knowing something doesn’t smell right. Weaving compelling narratives. 
The American journalism reviews are wonderful things in their way. 
But they have little ink on their fingers. Never feel to me like they know much about staring at a camera with the clock running down and the story breaking round you.
And that’s the great achievement of this thing called the British Journalism Review. The paradox. That it’s a thoughtful place. A place working journalists think over what they’ve done; think over the big questions they’ve had to answer. But a place that absolutely does not lose contact with our trade.
And that’s a tribute to Bill Hagerty and his team.
If I had one observation I’d like to make about this excellent conference. One question I’d like to ask, it’s this. Where is the audience? Where are those our trade touches? Our victims, if you like.
I ask that question partly because they are almost always the missing element when we come together to talk about ourselves. And partly because the people formerly known as the audience – as Jay Rosen calls them – are now, it’s often argued, our partners in our trade.

How many of you know this man?
He’s Sohaib Athar. The IT consultant who moved to Abbottabad in Pakistan for a quiet life.
And found himself live-tweeting the kill or capture operation that killed rather than captured Osama bin Laden.
He tweeted what he heard and what he saw. 
But hadn’t the faintest idea what it was that he was hearing and seeing.
Journalist? Or the kind of faithful, eyewitness we journalists have always sought out at great events.? 
How many of you know this photograph? 

Probably one of the most famous photographs in the world.
The Twitpic image of US Airways flight 1549. 
Captured not by a journalist. But by an eyewitness. 
And already around the world before “journalism” had got its boots on.
Journalism?
Or again, the kind of faithful eyewitness journalists need to do their job?
And even if you aggregate thousands, millions of examples of accidental witness, does that make it journalism?
How does this stack as journalism against the work of, say, Brian Hanrahan, Kate Adie, Jeremy Bowen, Martin Bell and John Simpsone. Or of course the great Martha Gelhorn. All celebrated at the Imperial War Museum North’s exhibition on war reporting. 
Now, I’m pretty clear – and I suspect many in this room are pretty clear – about the difference between them and accidental witnesses like Janis Krums the guy who shot the Hudson plane picture. Or Sohaib Ahtar?
But you know, I’m starting to lose count of the number of conferences and think-ins and seminars and panels where there’s one question on the agenda. How is new media changing journalism? Not, how do new media and journalism overlap. But how the fundamentals of our trade are changed and changing. 
You know the questions as well as I do.
Do we still need reporters and correspondents in the age of You Tube and Twitter?
Do we still need investigative reporters in the age of Wikileaks and crowd-sourcing?
Do we still need columnists and leader writers in the age of the blogger?
There’s an underlying assumption at all levels in our business that paid-for, deliberate, mainstream journalism has to make itself more like amateur, happenstance, random social media. That we have to embrace new media and social media and change our assumptions about journalism. There’s even a strong thread in the current privacy debate that goes: if Twitter can spread rumour around the globe at the speed of light, we must be allowed to do that too. 
I usually find myself in a minority when I argue that journalism is different from, distinct from the new forms of communication that the web and social media enable.          
That it’s a very narrowly, closely defined region of the information universe. That it isn’t, can’t be, mustn’t ever be the same as or part of the white noise of the global mob.
I find myself in a minority for a very good reason.
Journalism is very hard to stand up for.

I suggest you try it. Not here, among friends. Outside. In the real world. But be prepared for hollow laughter. Derision.
When was the last time you saw a journalist as hero in a film or TV drama? It was probably Bill Nighy in State of Play back in 2003. Though the fellow played by Ben Miles in Peter Kosminsky’s The Government Inspector was a pretty good chap, too.  
One of the recent TV cults was The Killing. Remember the role of the press in that? Correct – the mercurial, anonymous mob who magnified every rumour. Took every misunderstood half-truth and made it a scandal. Decided who was guilty and made the story fit. Oh – apart from the guy who wanted to suck the Birk Laarsen’s story dry for his own career.
How very different from the home life of the great British journalist.
Well, we know that’s not true.
In early June 2011, BBC Radio produced one of the most riveting programmes about journalism I’ve heard for some time. It was the story of Kim Cotton – Britain’s first surrogate mother. You’ll remember, she was paid £6,500 to have a childless couple’s baby. And more than twice that to tell her story to the Daily Star.
You could say she was foolish. You could say she was greedy. But she was also trashed by the press. Routinely. Cruelly. Almost casually. 
“Kim Loses Her Money Box” – was how the News of the World headlined her hysterectomy.
Asides by her brother were turned into major family rows – rows that never actually happened. Inaccuracies. Distortions. Manufactured stories. Black and white judgments. Cruelty. Verbal abuse.
But as Kim confronted each of the journalists who’d written about her, one thing stood out. They really didn’t get it. Really didn’t get how they looked to the public. People who weren’t journalists. 
And it wasn't just the tabloids. Polly Toynbee expressed mild regret for what she called her ‘waspish’ comments. But they were comments that misrepresented her subject and her motives. A tad more than 'waspish', I think.
While the other, tabloid, editors and journalists said, more or less. What did you expect? Not me, guv. It’s the system.
Perhaps Kim Cotton was a victim. Perhaps she just lost control of her own publicity. Either way, it makes uncomfortable listening - especially if you put yourself in the position of an ‘ordinary member of the public’. Wondering – ‘how on earth could these people think what they were doing was right?’


We have to accept that most of the public we claim to serve don't like us. Our brand is toxic.
The IPSOS/Mori monthly poll asking ‘who do you trust’ should be on every journalist’s desktop. Our low standing is consistent.    
It doesn't matter that most of us have never hacked a phone. That most of us have never set-up a victim; egging them on to commit the very offence we're purporting to expose. That most of us have never bribed a policeman, a DVLA clerk, a doctor's receptionist to break the law. That most of us don't make up interviews and quotes. That most of us check our facts. Most of us go into a story looking for the facts that will overturn our prejudices as well as those that might confirm them. 
But our brand is poisoned by those who do. And sneer at those who don't. And by editors and executives who deny or forget that they happen on their watch.
We know that there's a culture of contempt in too many newsrooms. Not just the necessary contempt for wealth, power and celebrity. But for the public that we journalists claim to serve. 
Nick Davies described his book Flat Earth News:

"a snapshot of a cancer … I fear the illness is terminal."

John Lanchester went further in the London Review of Books. 
Journalists are, he wrote: 

"... indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts ... and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality."

These are tough words. But if we’re going to stand up for journalism. And make it stand out from the digital mob, we have to accept they might be true. 
The public isn’t stupid, you know. They know that what is true of MPs, the police, the bankers, financial services is true of us journalists. That without some kind of independent scrutiny, inward looking groups and professions do things not because they’re right. But because they can. 
MPs expenses scandal. The bungling at Soham. The banking collapse. Payment protection mis-selling. It’s because the public should know what’s happening in the dark that we  legitimise journalists’ nosiness. That’s what we mean when we insist that institutions are accountable. That’s what we mean when we say sunlight that is the best disinfectant.
While boarding up our own windows so tightly Miss Havisham would be reaching for the torch.
We try to argue that what makes us different is freedom of speech. We are the institutionalisation of free speech. Its bastion.
And we argue that freedom of speech is indivisible. That freedom for Panorama to expose Winterbourne View can’t be differentiated from the New of the World’s freedom to expose Ryan Giggs or Max Moseley.
We use arguments we need to protect the best in journalism to excuse the worst.
But the public knows that free speech isn’t the same as a free-for-all.
Freedom, protection, to report on the repressive organs of power and privilege is not the same as the licence to ogle the reproductive organs of premiership footballers and their Z list flings.
They hear us when we assert journalists’ right to report in and from Syria and Zimbabwe and China. That without journalists, without men and women to bear witness, challenge authority, tell it how it is. Where there are no journalists, all we have is rumour. Gossip.    
Now, some of you may not be able to see the irony in that. But readers, viewers and listeners do. The public aren’t stupid.
At some point, we will have to face up to the fact that if we’re to stand up for journalism. If we’re going to persuade our various publics that journalism has a real and distinct value. Better than. Additional to social media, the mob on the web.
Then we have to be able to say. Look. This is important. And you can trust us to do it. And we will only convince our publics of that if we prove it by what we do and what we say. And we have the opportunity to do that in some of the current, big debates about our trade. 


The continuing debate about contempt, for example. The Sun and the Mirror face contempt proceedings – and we shouldn’t pre-judge the outcome. But at last, the public will say, an Attorney General has finally had the courage to stop spluttering on the sidelines.
No-one wants to see newspapers prosecuted. But if that’s what it takes to get the message across that press lynchings are an offence to justice and to good journalism, then it’s overdue. And if you think this is overstating things. Ask the McCanns. Ask Robert Murat. Ask Tom Stephens. Ask Chris Jeffries. 


Something similar is true of libel reform.
We all know that British libel laws are broken and need reform. We all know that they can present a real constraint on serious investigative journalism. And we’ve seen how proper, responsible scientific debate can be stifled. But you’re living in a fantasy world if we think that that’s what worries most of the public about our libel laws.
I’ve taken part in any number of debates about libel reform over the past few months. And the story from the public – from non-journalists – has been consistent. 
Yeah ok … we get the bit about free speech and investigative journalism. But why did that newspaper print lies about me? Why did they make up quotes and put them in my mouth? Or take what I did say and make it mean something totally different? 
Why did they portray me as a tart? Why couldn’t I get them to print the truth? A retraction? An apology? Even just tell me why they did it? 
So far, the debate in the media about the media has focused almost entirely on reform to suit the media. Well, that’s standing up for journalism in a sense. But doesn’t it also mean showing our publics that we understand their anxieties too? 


And then there’s privacy. 
There’s little doubt, the public would be with us if we were going to court to defend our right to expose – and their right to know about – crime, wrongdoing, hypocrisy. The abuse of power.
They’d be with us if we were defending the right to intrude where intrusion is the only way to hold power to account. They’d be with us if judges – Mr Justice Eady in particular – really were making up the law on to protect wealth and power. 
But we know that’s not how it’s been. And the public know it too. News Group’s lawyers didn’t even bother to argue in the Giggs case that it was in the public interest to reveal the details of an affair no-one except Mr and Mrs Giggs cared two-hoots about.
We congratulate ourselves that Max Moseley lost his ‘prior notification’ action. We nod sagely that THIS time it’s about orgies and Nazis – but we need to protect the principle so that serious journalism isn’t chilled. But the public aren’t fools. They know it’s not really about that.
So how we defend these principles is at least as important as that we defend them.
Get that wrong and the hollow laughter will still meet you when you try to stand up for journalism.

Now, to some of you, all of this will sound like heresy. Restraining a free press? Am I mad?
You’d be entitled to remind me that I’ve spent my entire career in the regulated sector. Broadcasting. And most of that in the cosseted  protected, publicly funded sector. And that’s true.
For me, independent scrutiny from the Trust and OfCom were standard. Strict Editorial Guidelines that, constrained all of the practices I’ve talked about in a way that the PCC’s Editors Code simply does not.
Yet … Panorama remains one of the few truly investigative units in British journalism. And at Today, we uncovered Shirley Porter’s secret bank accounts. Exposed African exorcists here in London who were guilty of child abuse. And the local authorities who bungled keeping watch on them.
But if that disqualifies me, here are some other people to listen to. Evgeny Lebedev. One of the new breed of owners and publishers. If you didn’t catch his speech at Oxford University last month, I suggest you do so.
Evgeny excites conflicting opinions. But what is unarguable is that he is in the front line of making the news business work. 
He also knows at first hand what a truly shackled press is like. What it means to have “armed raids at night by rogue elements of the state” to make the press behave. But here’s what he says about the British press:

“There is too much trivialisation … what passes as an urgent story is nothing more than tittle-tattle. And when that meaningless trivia is procured via illegal means, we are on a slippery slope as this becomes the accepted standard or norm. We must be wary of abusing our freedom, which could result in losing that very same freedom.”

And, he says:

“What has never been more under the spotlight are the role and responsibilities of the press. We must take them seriously. We must uphold them, cherish them, and nurture them. Because if we don't, we threaten press freedom and therefore we damage our society.”

Responsibilities. Evgeny is warning that if we carry on as we are, we will force statutory press regulation.
Perhaps. But the bigger danger is that we do nothing to regain our public’s trust. Do nothing to stand up for journalism and make it stand out from the mob.
Some editors get this too. Back in January, the FT Lionel Barber gave the annual Cudlipp lecture. And he talked about the importance of public trust if we were to stand up for journalism. If we were to argue that it was still valuable in the age of the web. Trust that the facts are accurate. Trust that appropriate weight has been given to context. 

“Journalism is not perfect, nor was it ever meant to be. But we have allowed our standards to lapse. Let us hope we have not left it too late.”

It’s time for journalism to enter into a bit of self-examination, Barber argues.
So perhaps some owners and publishers. Perhaps some editors understand the kind of self-examination, self-criticism we need now to be able to stand up for journalism. But there’s a third player in this who is very important. And that’s the Press Complaints Commission.
Now, I’ve never had much time for the PCC. It was, you’ll remember, the wheeze that the drinkers in the last chance saloon came up with to avoid having their collective collars felt back in the early 1990s.
Though the then Culture Secretary, David Mellor, didn’t help things much by cavorting around with a lady that wasn’t Mrs Mellor. And by taking his summer break with PLO holidays 
But for the first 20 years of its life, the PCC proved itself to be exactly what its critics predicted. A trade association. A toothless watchdog that slept through every raid on journalism’s reputational locker.
You’ll remember what the DCMS select committee said about its abject failure to face its responsibilities when the McCanns were being libelled over and over again. 

"In any other industry suffering such a collective breakdown ... any regulator worth its salt would have instigated an enquiry. The press, indeed, would have been clamouring for it to do so. It is an indictment on the PCC's record, that it signally failed to do so."

And the PCC’s weakness was further underlined when the newspaper group responsible for those libels – Richard Desmond’s Daily and Sunday Express and Star – simply walked away from the PCC in January this year. Their message: we don’t need anyone else to tell us what we can and can’t do.
The PCC had also failed to show any leadership when it took a cursory look at the phone-hacking scandal, preferring to censure those who were insisting this criminal activity wasn’t just the work of a rogue reporter and private investigator. 
But maybe – just maybe – the PCC is starting to stir. And maybe it has to if we’re to stand up for journalism as a unique, valued, skilled trade.
We probably all smiled wryly when the PCC chair Peta Buscombe told BBC 2’s Newsnight that Ryan Giggs should have come to her, rather than the courts, to maintain his privacy. And it would have been interesting to see whether News Group would have paid any attention to a body without any real sanction.
But the important thing here isn’t whether we believe the PCC could have guaranteed Giggs the privacy he wanted. It’s the fact that the PCC said it at all. The fact that it wants to be a player in what will probably be the most important debate for journalism over the coming years. What might well be the defining debate.
The balance between privacy and the freedom to report.
When I read the PCC Director Stephen Abell’s interview with Roy Greenslade last month, I was struck by the way in which he recognises he need to get onto the front foot. Not just standing up for the press. Standing up for a responsible press. He talks about reinforcing:  

"… a sense of responsibility and self-restraint.”

But, more importantly, of the way in which responsibility and restraint is a defining feature of a press that stands out from social media and the free-for-all on the web.  

"We've been in the position of seeing stories on Twitter that we know about and that haven't been run in the press following guidance from us … In the end, what newspapers find most marketable is credibility. You may ignore a story on Twitter. It only really matters when it is published on a trusted site."

Well, if this is an indication that we can’t let social media set the standards for journalism, amen to that.
Especially if the PCC goes one step further and devises a tougher Editors Code which places at its heart a notion of ‘public interest’ that really means in the interest of the public. Not just in the interest of publication.


Now, there are some in journalism who’ll think this is pie in the sky. Who’ll insist – you can’t place any restraint on free speech. And if you try, you’re out of touch with what’s happening on the web. In social media. 
At the same time, at our most neurotic, we look across at Twitter and You Tube and Facebook and Google. And we look at yesterday’s depressing readership figures. And wonder what it is now that distinguishes paid-for, deliberate acts of journalism from the eternal murmur out there. Why anyone should bother. Let’s just get our slice of the mob’s free-for-all. If they can say it on Twitter, we can say it in our paper. We need to be part of the world where gossip and rumour rule.
That’s precisely the wrong conclusion.
We need to take a long, hard look at what it is that gives journalism its value. Not what we, inward-looking journalists value in what we do. But at what it is that our publics value.
If we act in a way that shows our contempt for our publics – and we have to accept that too many of us have too often. If we sound when we’re arguing over the contempt laws, libel reform or privacy that our only interest is in preserving our revenue streams.
And if we think that free speech means having not restraint on what we say, what we do. Then we can’t be surprised to find our publics value us not at all.
And that we will have failed to stand up for journalism. And made it stand out from the mob.