Hacked Off

For some years now in Britain, if you suggested that journalism was about truth you were likely to meet with one of two responses. Either you were dismissed, with a pitying sneer, as naive and pious, or you were gruffly challenged to justify your view in the light of some recent outrage by the national press. The consensus has been that most journalism was about exaggeration, distortion, manipulation, and dishonesty, and so to associate it with truth became in itself a dishonest act. This low expectation of journalism was self-fulfilling. Bad journalists were able to use it as a kind of licence: we can do bad things, they said, because that is the way journalism is. Ethically responsible journalists were isolated, tainted, or corrupted. Society as a whole suffered.

Signs of this cynical culture are everywhere. Newspaper readers will be familiar with the onlooker quote. In the brief report accompanying some snatched celebrity picture, there will be a quote from an unnamed onlooker offering an opinion. “She has put on a lot of weight. No wonder her boyfriend has dumped her.” Certainly in most cases and probably in almost every case, that well-turned remark has been made up on the newsdesk. Just occasionally, it may be the work of the photographer. Very, very rarely is there a bona fide onlooker whose remark has been noted down. Readers are being misled. Extend that spirit of deception and you have the Madeleine McCann coverage, in which newspapers admitted wholesale lying (as was documented in the 2010 House of Commons select committee report Press Standards, Privacy and Libel, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmcumeds/362/36208.htm#a33). And the Christopher Jefferies coverage, when they were forced to admit to wholesale lying again (the court apologies are given in http://www.smab.co.uk/news/news.aspx).

That jump from making up quotes in lightweight stories to the libels in the McCann case may seem a large one, but it isn’t. The logic and practice are the same. Both are banned by all respectable journalistic codes of practice, both are done to make a story better without the effort of reporting it properly and both are untrue and therefore deceptions upon the readers. Yet in some newsrooms in recent years, deception of this kind has been normal practice. No questions are asked and no one is accountable. It is little wonder that people bridle at the suggestion that journalism is about truth.

The voicemail hacking scandal has provided an opportunity to change this. Journalists were caught doing something so outrageous and so shocking that public opinion was stirred. For two weeks in July 2011, after the revelation that the News of the World illegally accessed and even deleted the voicemails of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, questions of journalism ethics were at the top of the national agenda. A new consensus came into being: something had to be done. To most supporters of good journalism, this was as astonishing as it was welcome. But it brought challenges, among them to grasp the opportunity for substantive reform of the news industry and to ensure that the demand for better journalism did not fade to the point where the old cynical acceptance was allowed to return. The Hacked Off campaign has worked for those objectives.

Hacked Off, to explain, was born in the spring of 2011, a time when it appeared that the facts about the hacking scandal might never be placed before the public and that News International management and the newspaper industry might escape from it almost unscathed. On the one hand, the company was vigorously settling civil cases by throwing money at them, and on the other it seemed possible that any criminal cases would end in guilty pleas, meaning that there would be no trials and only limited disclosure. A public inquiry, it seemed, might be the only chance of ensuring that the facts were put before the public and the appropriate lessons were learned. So planning began for a campaign. Those involved were people who had been following the scandal closely, including, besides myself, Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust, victims of hacking, lawyers such as Mark Lewis who represent victims, and soon the former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris. We had good relations with the Guardian, which had its own job to do, and we received encouragement from a cross-party array of MPs and peers—and no fewer than ten professors of journalism.

We launched, by coincidence, in the same week the Guardian broke its Milly Dowler story and as a result found ourselves in the peculiar position that our central demand, for a public inquiry, was conceded almost before we began work. There was still a great deal to be done, however, to ensure that the inquiry would be a genuine one, with sufficient powers and a broad enough remit. Having observed the scandal over time we had a very good idea of its potential scale and of the questions that should be asked. Over three days, in company with the Dowler family, we met all three of the main party leaders and the chairs of the three relevant Commons select committees, pressing the case for a prompt inquiry that would address what we called the three Ps—press, police, and politicians. In fact, two more Ps were also on our list: the phone companies and the prosecutors. We feared that politicians might seek to avoid scrutiny, delay the process, or curtail the remit, but in the meetings there was no sign of that. They seemed open minded and receptive. By our count, the final terms of reference of the Leveson inquiry incorporated sixteen elements—either ideas or phrases—that we had suggested. A number of these were designed to give the inquiry additional latitude in its investigations of relationships between press, police, and politicians. Others ensured that mobile phone companies, the Crown Prosecution Service and police forces other than the Metropolitan police could be scrutinized where appropriate, and one passage in particular directed the inquiry to establish what had gone wrong at corporate level in News International, and perhaps in other newspaper organizations. Announcing the final terms in July, the prime minister acknowledged the help of Hacked Off.

We were, by then, convinced that the campaign should continue, and this brings us back to those broader concerns expressed above about the state and reputation of journalism in Britain. What follows is written in a personal capacity, rather than as an expression of Hacked Off policy.

The first phase of the Leveson inquiry gives priority to the matter of regulation (though under the terms of reference, there are also other jobs to be done). This is appropriate and vitally important but no one can or should be under the illusion that creating a new organization with new powers and responsibilities would of itself effect a cultural change. Even if institutions such as newspaper groups publicly accept that there must be such a change, that will not be enough. There must be a change of attitude in newsrooms and among individual journalists. We need to recognize, first, that cynicism about ethics and standards has caused terrible damage and, second, that getting things right will require relentless effort and may make the job less fun.

Here is an example. On the simple matter of quotation, reporters, subeditors, and editors surely owe it to their readers and to those who are the subjects of their stories to take all reasonable steps to ensure that the words they publish are indeed the words that were spoken. Few people, surely, would take issue with that, so what steps are reasonable? In the twenty-first century, we have ample cheap technology to record the spoken word and journalists ought to use it. We ought never to quote people unless we have such a recording, and that record should be electronically labeled and preserved in attachment to the relevant article so that it is available for checking to settle any possible arguments. In some cases, a shorthand or longhand note may be a substitute, but there would need to be a good explanation. And unless there are strong grounds for anonymity, which are shared with and endorsed by editors and are placed on the written record, quotes should always be attributed to a named and traceable person. Beyond that, there should be structures inside news organizations to ensure that decisions about stories are traceable and accountable. Every evolving story should have a clear paper trail so that there can be no doubt about who wrote what, who changed what, and who made the relevant judgements. Again, the technology exists to permit this.

This sort of accountability is no more than the press has demanded of other professions and institutions in the past generation, but the press has not addressed its own problems of accountability. The philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill described the consequences in her Reith lectures on trust in 2002 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2002/lecture5.shtml):

Outstanding reporting and accurate writing mingle with editing and reporting that smears, sneers and jeers, names, shames and blames. Some reporting “covers” (or should I say “uncovers”?) dementing amounts of trivia, some misrepresents, some denigrates, some teeters on the brink of defamation. In this curious world, commitments to trustworthy reporting are erratic: there is no shame in writing on matters beyond a reporter’s competence, in coining misleading headlines, in omitting matters of public interest or importance, or in recirculating others’ speculations as supposed “news.” Above all there is no requirement to make evidence accessible to readers. For all of us who have to place trust with care in a complex world, reporting that we cannot assess is a disaster. If we can’t trust what the press report, how can we tell whether to trust those on whom they report?

No doubt in part because of changes in society, but also as a result of media pressure, our doctors, police officers, teachers, lawyers, social workers, railway operators, hospital managers, and many others are required today to operate within transparent, monitored systems, according to codes and with clear lines of command and effective paper trails so that responsibilities can be correctly attributed. These systems exist to support trust, and in some cases they were created or reinforced after disastrous failures of trust such as those that followed the Stephen Lawrence murder, the death of Baby P, the Alder Hey hospital scandal, and the Potters Bar rail crash. The turn of journalists has come. We have had our disaster and we need to show that we are capable of confronting mistakes, learning lessons, and ensuring so far as possible that they do not happen again. We need to make the sort of effort that will earn us trust.

But it will tie us up in red tape. But it will make our copy boring. But it will slow us down. But it will take the fun out of the job. But it will make it harder to get some stories into print. But some reporters will be inhibited by potential exposure if something goes wrong. But it will push up our costs. But, but, but. Vested interests, particularly in the mass-circulation press, oppose change on grounds that they would not accept from errant social workers or doctors. Individual journalists too will resist such change. Cutting corners, sleight of hand, and the conspiratorial wink and nudge are so established in some newsrooms that they will be hard to root out. Many journalists see nothing wrong with the invented onlooker quote, for example, but they know that if asked to defend it at, say, a public inquiry they would struggle.

In the new world that follows the hacking scandal, proprietors and editors will have to accept new responsibilities and new kinds of accountability. Regulation and the law affect them most directly. But individual journalists will also have to change the way they work. Many of us have long enjoyed a style of working that is fluid and informal, low on bureaucracy and record-keeping, and—inside the newsroom at least—often trusting. That model is no longer fit for purpose.