Editor's blog

Apocalypse now (although you might not have noticed because it happened in the North)

28/12/2015

A couple of Christmases ago, Buzzfeed's Tom Phillips had fun predicting how the media might report the end of the world.
The Mail fumed "We TOLD you so"; the Guardian was relieved that Islington appeared to be safe, but fretted about quinoa supplies; the Telegraph had a moan about Twitter; the Times's survival guide was hidden behind a paywall; the Express had the SAS confirming that Lady Di was murdered.
You can't beat a good parody. And Phillips is good. (To remind you just how good, here's the link to his 29 stages of a Twitterstorm).
But his job is made easier when papers live down to their stereotypes - as they have done this weekend in reporting the floods that have threatened or engulfed most - yes, most - of England and all of Wales.

For the Mail, the squandering of 0.7% of the national budget on overseas aid is to blame (not the failure to use more of the remaining 99.3% on UK flood defences) - and oh, the delicious irony that some of that money sent abroad is used to protect Serbs from flooding.
For the Express there is, as there is every week in winter, another storm on the way. But never mind, here's a picture of Darcey Bussell and another of Barbara Windsor for good measure.
For the Telegraph, the floods bring an opportunity for a jolly picture of a couple of lads with brooms helping the clean-up, but are not as important an event as the number of foreign doctors working in the NHS.

The map above is the one published by the Government's flood warning information service last night. At the time there were 140 red alerts, including 24 severe warnings where there was a danger to life.
Four Sunday papers splashed on the flooding, almost all had a picture on the front and most did a couple of pages inside. Coverage was hardly incisive, but remember the papers were put together by skeleton Boxing Day crews and contacting people in authority - or with authority - to add gravitas would have been tricky.
This morning there is a flood picture on every front page. Again, the people putting the papers together will have been working under the constraints imposed by the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend. But by this stage, they should have recognised that there was a big story to cover and called in reinforcements if necessary.
The trouble is, they didn't truly recognise that this was a big story.

For the Sun, "York submerged" was worth a picture, but not sufficiently important to dislodge the prepared cocaine-in-churches story with its punny splash head. Meanwhile the Mirror thought prisoner release blunders going back a decade made a more timely main story.
Turning to the inside, the Sun continued punning on its spread, while the Mirror couldn't find enough of interest in the floods to fill even two pages.
Like the Telegraph and Independent, it chose not to give the story a clear spread - and then plonked Ed Balls's chairmanship of Norwich City and a story headlined "Whip bosses of bra show" on top of the ad. The truncated flood coverage included the paper's rugby correspondent bemoaning the fact that his first Christmas with his son was ruined and fears for future episodes of Emerdale if the film studio were inundated.

You might think that the Express, which specialises in dire weather predictions, might go to town when the devastation actually arrived. But, no. It is more concerned with looking to the next storm, both on the front page and the inside spread - both of which look just like any one of a dozen front-inside combinations from the past year.
So what's the beef? What more is there to say? After all, nobody died.
Well, just imagine what the coverage would have been like had that map looked like this (excuse the clumsy photoshopping):

The papers would have found plenty to say then. We'd still have had the "ruined Christmas" stories, the human interest, the rescue of the pensioner from a sinking Land Rover (see it on this video).
But there would also be a more forensic examination of possible causes and possible courses of action to prevent future calamity.
There would be proper consideration of issues such as climate change and land management - including tree felling and dredging - as well as flood defence policies and planning decisions that allow the building of homes on flood plains.
Thought would be given to where people who have been flooded out will live for the next nine months while their homes are made habitable - after all, there is supposed to be a housing crisis. There might be descriptions and case studies from those who have lived through this before of what the evacuees can expect.
There would be panels on where people can go to for help, financial and otherwise (in a Facebook post this morning, Christopher Everard reports on a £50m government scheme that is supposed to make funds immediately available to flood victims through local councils, yet this does not appear to have been widely publicised - most notably by the councils concerned).
There would be a full appraisal of the insurance industry with a breakdown of cover available or denied, premiums and how much each bit of a clean-up operation costs rather than the random millions and billions that are thrown out as "the cost of the floods".
There would be analysis of government policy on flood defences over the past 30 years; how much is being spent on what and where; which schemes are in the pipeline and whether they will still seem adequate in the light of recent experience; which schemes have fallen victim to austerity cuts.
And most of all, the papers would examine what the Environment Agency was up to; who are the people in command, both ministerially and in executive positions?
It would have taken more than a couple of pages to do that - and the space would have been found.
But not this time. Because this time the victims were in the North. In the regions. In the provinces. If it wasn't a holiday weekend, would the floods have been accorded even the attention they received this morning?

Only three of today's papers have the floods as the sole editorial element on their front pages: the Mail, the Guardian and the i - and the latter two keep their puffs.
The Guardian also has three pages inside, including some good river height graphics and a bit of climate analysis.

The Times, above, gives the story two inside spreads, including decent statistics and a useful Q&A that is entertainingly written. But the "Christmas flooding" label is a bit naff and was that jolly picture of daffodils in Maidenhead a good call? Yes, it showed the dramatic contrast in the weather, but also a lack of sensitivity to the seriousness of the subject. Imagine putting a "happier times" touristy shot on a Syria spread.
But only one paper really removed its metropolitan blinkers to grapple with the scale of this story. The Mail not only devotes its entire front - plus a substantial turn on page 2 to the floods, it completes the package with four inside spreads.

The angle of the splash is predictable (indeed, I predicted it on Twitter last night) in that it repeats its demand for overseas aid money to be diverted to UK flood relief.
But whatever you think of that notion, the Mail can hold its head up for consistency. Its coverage of successive floods has been extensive and its Christmas appeal has been to raise money for the victims. The appeal was launched on December 9 and by Boxing Day, more than £1m had been raised. There is a coupon in today's paper and links from its website for those who wish to contribute.
It's a rare day that SubScribe takes its hat off to the Mail. And, largely thanks to the failings elsewhere, that day has dawned.

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Phone hacking and a nagging sense of injustice

12/12/2015

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DPP Alison Saunders said there was insufficient prospect of conviction to continue the hacking inquiry

And so it ends. After four and a half years, countless police hours and the expenditure of more than £40m, the curtain has been pulled down on the phone hacking saga.
This morning's leader columns were sanctimonious. To paraphrase: of course listening to people's private conversations was reprehensible, but the response was a waste of public money and an excuse for the Establishment to stamp on the free Press. Oh, and by the way, they're at it again with attempts to curb freedom of information.
Hacked Off was disappointed - leading light Evan Harris described Alison Saunders's announcement as outrageous. Victims' lawyers are ducking under the curtain to try to regain the stage by seeking a review of her decision-making process.
So far, so predictable.

And what of those of us who love our trade? We who have been watching in bewilderment and dismay as the drama has played out? Should we feel relief that it's all over, glad that no more journalists will be put on trial at the Old Bailey?
Probably. So why don't I? Why do I feel uncomfortable?
Because justice has been the loser in this whole sorry story.

As people have been parroting from the moment Nick Davies lit the blue touch paper in July 2011, phone hacking is wrong. It is, and was, criminal. But the fact is, the public didn't (and still don't) care. They didn't care when Prince William's voicemail was intercepted and Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman went to jail as a result. They didn't care when celebrities complained that their phone messages were being listened to. They only started to care when the Milly Dowler story broke - heartless bastard hacks targeting a murdered girl.

Except, except. Of all the instances of phone hacking, wasn't that the most understandable, the least reprehensible? For wasn't the purpose to try to find her? It wasn't to get the dirt on whose nanny some celeb was sleeping with that week; it was to try to find a missing, not - as far as anyone knew - murdered, child.
OK, the desire was to get a scoop and the delays in sharing information (albeit inaccurate information) with the police were unforgivable. But if those journalists had found that girl alive, they would have been heroes.
So yes, hacking was wrong. But the one case that aroused so much outrage and set this charabanc on the road actually caused far less damage than the Mirror's sustained invasion of the lives of Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne. But the public didn't give two figs about them - and now it seems the DPP doesn't either.

Stephen Glover wrote a Saturday essay for the Mail a while back in which he described Davies as the man who did for the British Press. It was a mean-spirited piece that suggested Davies's intention was to destroy tabloid journalism. Davies and the Guardian have never been great fans of Rupert Murdoch and they would probably shed few tears if they put him out of business, but I doubt they thought they had the clout to do so - let alone enough to bring down the whole popular Press.
The Milly Dowler story would have touched a nerve and then subsided from the public consciousness, as previous hacking stories and assorted Commons select committee inquiries had done before, but for one thing: David Cameron's appointment of Andy Coulson as his director of communications.
Everything that has happened over the past four years stems from that mixture. The Dowler story was simply the catalyst that sparked the reaction.
Cameron panicked and set up Leveson; the Met panicked and set up all those investigations with the quirky names; Murdoch panicked and gave the police millions of documents, betraying sources and staff along the way - with the notable exception of one redhead at the top of the tree.

Once they had started uncovering evidence of wrongdoing, where were the police supposed to stop? Especially as they had all those News International emails.
The phone hacking investigations that had been at the root of all this became small beer against the monster that was Elveden. But as successive juries declined to convict journalists for paying sources - while other courts convicted and jailed those same sources for selling information - it finally dawned on the DPP that the whole enterprise was money down the drain.
Saunders retreated on Elveden in October. Andy Coulson was cleared of perjury in Scotland and the final News of the World hacking trial ended with one guilty plea and an acquittal (the Brooks-Coulson show trial having produced three acquittals, one conviction and five guilty pleas).
With police budgets stretched, no wonder Saunders lost her appetite for the fight.

And yet, and yet.
Much of the prosecution case in the Brooks-Coulson trial depended on evidence from Dan Evans (pictured), a News of the World journalist who admitted hacking and was given a suspended prison sentence. He joined the paper from the Sunday Mirror and told the court that he believed that he had been recruited for his hacking talents.
Evans was also the central figure in the civil case brought against the Mirror by Sadie Frost, Gascoigne, Alan Yentob and others. In a judgment awarding record privacy damages totalling £1.2m , Mr Justice Mann called him the bedrock of the case and a clear witness whose evidence he accepted. Indeed, his evidence was mostly accepted without demur by Trinity Mirror before he went into the witness box.
Evans told the court that he had worked at the Sunday Mirror as a freelance for a couple of years before joining the staff in 2003. Soon after that he was called into a meeting with an executive who told him that a departing journalist had taken with him a valuable source of information - a database of telephone numbers that could be hacked.
Evans was shown how to access a voicemail message, with Yentob's number used as an example. He was also shown how to listen to calls and taught the "double tap" method under which two calls were made to a target number in quick succession - the first to make sure the victim wasn't picking up.
The executive at that meeting and others who were aware and even instrumental in the hacking culture were named in court, but redacted from Mr Justice Mann's judgment, which noted:

xxxx made it clear that Mr Evans' job for the forseeable future was to rebuild the departing journalist's database. For this purpose Mr Evans was given hundreds of mobile phone numbers and other details, such as dates of birth....

He was expected to check the phones most mornings (from his home) and then in the evenings as well. If he heard a call of interest he could get the incoming number from the voicemail system and he could then try to hack that phone as well....if the hack was successful he might, and often could, get information from messages left on that second number by his intended target. He called this process of acquiring groups of targets "farming"....
It is plain that his activities grew over time as he managed to crack more and more PINs. He himself managed to crack at least 100 PINs. At least one other journalist had a bigger database than he did.
If he got useful or interesting information from listening to a message he would pass it up the chain of command, which meant to xxx and xxx and xxxxx and xxxx for consideration. Sometimes his exploitation of his phone hacking database took several hours a day.

Mr Evans collated his information on a Palm Pilot...synchronised to a desktop application. His Pilot was used to store names and numbers and some addresses but not PINS. Not every number on the Pilot was a successfully hacked number, but some were.

In addition to that record, Mr Evans kept a “back pocket” list...of regular targets whose PIN numbers he had cracked and whose voicemail messages he could listen to easily. At the height of his activities he said that he probably had 100 targets on his list, and he checked them daily. Of the present claimants, all except Mr Gascoigne were on this list. The effect of his evidence was that those targets would be checked twice a day (morning and evening), every day, as a minimum. Doubtless if something interesting was thought to be happening they would be checked more frequently. The list was updated from time to time and he prepared copies for xxx and xxx.

It is clear from Mr Justice Mann's judgment that sophisticated systems for the hacking of phones were in place at Mirror papers and that Evans was acting on the bidding of more senior journalists. One who is named in the judgment was James Weatherup who, like Evans, moved on to the News of the World and was also given a suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty at the Brooks-Coulson trial.
Alison Saunders has concluded that it would be impossible to decide who made what phone call from the Mirror's offices, and also - apparently - that evidence from Evans and other former Mirror journalists would not be sufficient to secure the conviction of executives who say they knew nothing.

And so we have a repeat of the Elveden situation where foot soldiers were left to carry the can while the generals who called the shots went free.
Under Elveden, the only conviction for paying officials that still stands is that of Anthony France, who was described by his trial judge as the most junior Sun reporter and a basically decent man.
In the parallel investigations, one Mirror journalist - Graham Johnson - took himself off to the police, and was charged with hacking and given a two-month suspended prison sentence for his pains. Apart from Evans and Weatherup - who were charged in relation to their activities at the News of the World - he is the only Mirror journalist to have been punished by the courts.

Ten Mirror group journalists, including half a dozen former editors, deputy editors and a current high-ranking executive, were "cleared" by the DPP yesterday.
Several of them swore under oath at Leveson that hacking never happened at their papers. Some may have done nothing wrong. Others may have orchestrated wholescale criminal activity. We may never know. And that isn't right. The innocent will forever be tainted, while the guilty go unpunished.

Their ultimate bosses at Trinity Mirror also insisted at the Leveson inquiry and beyond that they were unaware of hacking at their papers. Finally, as Gascoigne and co prepared to go to court, they issued a grudging admission of culpability and a mealy-mouthed apology. They set aside £4m, then £12m, then £28m for compensation to victims they had for four years pretended hadn't existed. The company, which has since taken over Local World to control almost two-thirds of our local newspapers, is now awaiting the result of its appeal against Mr Justice Mann's awards.

Meanwhile the CPS has also halted the process that might have led News UK to face corporate charges over phone hacking at the News of the World. Rebekah Brooks, having been cleared of everything for which she was put on trial, is back in her old job of chief executive, and the Murdoch empire - revamped in the wake of the scandal - is worth twice as much as it was in 2011.
The end of the criminal investigations should clear the path for for the second half of the Leveson inquiry - looking into relations between the police and the Press - to go ahead. But with Cameron safely in No 10 for another five years with a proper majority, I wouldn't bet on that happening.

So yes, I'm glad that no more public money is to be spent on this. But the abandonment of the Golding investigation gives ammunition to those who have argued all along that this was an anti-Murdoch witch-hunt. I can see no evidence anywhere - right down to the fact that Coulson served his entire sentence in the ultra-high security Belmarsh prison - that justice has been done.
And I have an uneasy feeling that this unsatisfactory approach and outcome is being replicated in other areas of society and public life.
Perhaps the free Press could investigate.

Postscript: The cost of the Metropolitan Police investigations into alleged criminal activity by journalists has been put at about £40m.
The force has spent £10.2m and is budgeted to spend a further £2m next year on the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2007 - an event outside the force's jurisdiction.
The Met has an annual budget of about £3.5bn and has been making big cuts over the past four years. It had expected to have to save a further £1bn by 2020, but the Chancellor made a surprise announcement in his Autumn Statement that policing budgets would be protected in line with inflation.

Phone hacking: Some evidence from the Mirror and other cases
SubScribe commentary: Are we too embarrassed to look in the Mirror?
The hacking trial: 19 pages on the Brooks-Coulson case

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Why is arts coverage so lamentable?

19/10/2015

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A Facebook friend posted this letter from an Australian newspaper last week, sparking a lively debate about the relative importance of the arts and sport.
It was, of course, a spurious contest. It would be bonkers to forsake sport for the arts or any other specialist subject. But why should it be either/or? And why are most of our national newspapers so ambivalent about the arts?
I sat down on Saturday to read the Telegraph's 64-page "Review" section. I use inverted commas because reviewing did not seem to be a major part of the supplement's remit.
At the front end were a series of interviews - all interesting in their own way - with various artists, mostly with projects to promote. At the back was the obligatory TV guide. Nothing wrong with that either.

Squidged in the middle were the reviews, heralded by a "front page" wittily entitled "The critical list". This pointed up a handful of presumably important events, numbered from one to five.
Each had a picture, a heading and a paragraph of text. It looks like an index page, hinting at more to come on the following pages. Not a bit of it. That's your lot. An absolute triumph of style over substance (with apologies to design director Jon Hill).
Over the page was a double page spread dominated by a Canaletto and two big ads. This was the critics' "what's on" guide to film, theatre, exhibitions and concerts. These included three films, three plays and three exhibitions, which were allowed 75 words apiece - including the vital where and when details plus plot outlines for those unfamiliar with French Without Tears and Lord of the Flies.
Next up was the music page. One pop and one classical CD review - which were at least given 400 words apiece.
If reading is your thing, you're better served. Past the West End ads, there was a spread on Charlotte Bronte and then reviews of seven books - including Michael Ashcroft's Call Me Dave, in case the Piggate story passed you by. Interestingly, each review was accompanied by a little panel telling you how you could buy the book from the Telegraph. There was also a tie-up with WH Smith for the "pick of the week" title and further ads offering the chance to buy an Andrew Marr poetry anthology and Tom Holland's Dynasty - again from the Telegraph.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that commercial considerations had any bearing on the editorial judgments - any more than Pan's appearance as No 1 in the Critical List and its against-the-grain four-star rating (the Times and Guardian gave it one, the Mail and Indy two) had anything to do with this monstrosity of an ad in Friday's news pages.
What I am suggesting is that the coverage was - and generally is - inadequate.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were proper treatment of the arts during the week, but there isn't. The block of pictures below shows all the Telegraph's weekday arts pages from last week.

It is interesting to note that Booker Prize winner Marlon James features on both Wednesday - the day after the presentation dinner - and Thursday.
In common with the Baftas, the Brits, the Turner Prize and the Mercury Prize, the award for the novel of the year generally manages to leap the fence separating news and features. But this year it warranted only a nib on page 2 of the Telegraph.
Even that was better than the Mercury managed. The 12 nominations for album of the year were announced on Friday morning. Last year, the Telegraph ran a story by critic Neil McCormick and a rundown of the nominees, complete with audio links, on its website. This year? Nothing. Not a word in the paper or online.
Ditto The Times. The Guardian gave the list a full page, the Independent half a page. The Mail didn't manage anything in the paper, but ran a piece about Florence + The Machine online, linked in with "how to buy a shirt like the one she wore at Glastonbury" ad. The Sun was disparaging, saying that the award had become irrelevant and that the judges were on another planet (ho ho), but at least it ran the list.
Neither The Times nor the Telegraph is known for its love of the BBC, which is running the prize this year, but surely you would have to be an arch cynic to believe the lack of coverage is down to spite.
In his Telegraph commentary bemoaning Ed Sheeran's absence from the nominees last year, McCormick pre-empted Dan Wootton of the Sun in declaring the prize irrelevant, so maybe the paper has taken its critic at his word.
And maybe he had a point: Sheeran's album x sold 1.7m copies last year But critics above all others must realise that commercial success is not necessarily a measure of artistic merit - should 50 Shades of Grey have featured on the Booker list of 2012?
Whether you approve of the nominees or not, this cavalier attitude to even the big set-piece events of the arts calendar is extraordinary. Yet it is the inevitable result of not caring about the arts week in, week out. Can you imagine a paper choosing to cover only two football matches in a week - one soccer (sorry), one rugby - as the Telegraph did one classical and one pop CD?
Look again at those ten weekday arts pages, heavily laden with supporting ads. How do they compare with sport? Well, over the same five days, the Telegraph ran 108 sports pages. And as for generating revenue? Last Friday's 24-page supplement had five paid ads.

As I said at the beginning, it's not a case of either/or. Sport is important. But so are the arts. They lift the spirit, they teach us about life, they simply entertain. And for those who believe only in the bottom line, here's a statistical portrait of the UK's cultural landscape last year:

67 million tickets were sold to professional sporting fixtures, of which
42.8 million were to football matches
311 million books were sold
157.5 million cinema tickets were sold
14.7 million tickets were sold for London theatre performances
14.8 billion - yes billion - songs were streamed over the internet
1.3 million vinyl records were sold
55.7 million CDs were sold - which, combined with vinyl, accounted for half of album (or album equivalent) sales
17.4 million tickets were sold for music concerts
3.5 million tickets were sold for music festivals
49 million people visited Britain's 16 national museums and galleries (not necessarily 49 million different people, any more than the 42 million football fans were all different people)
77% of the population either attended or took part in at least one artistic performance.

There are an awful lot of people out there who care about sport. And even more who care about the arts. Editors, please take note.

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Corbyn: all singing from the wrong hymn sheet

16/9/2015

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Just three days into the new job and Jeremy Corbyn has already had his donkey jacket moment. That boy isn't hanging around.
The Labour leader is in trouble for wearing a jacket and trousers that didn't match to the Battle of Britain service at St Paul's yesterday. Not only that, but the top button of his shirt was undone and his red tie was not knotted right to the neck.
Oh yes, and he didn't sing the National Anthem.
These are the things you need to know about Jeremy Corbyn's activities yesterday.
He also made a speech to the Trades Union Congress, but for today's newspapers, that was almost insignificant when set against his monumental sins earlier in the day.

The response to Corbyn's silence during the singing - especially when he had been in good voice for the Red Flag on Saturday - was predictable. Guess who popped up to denounce him as rude and disrespectful? Good old Nicholas Soames, descendant of the sainted Sir Winston; reliable retired military folk including Admiral Lord West, Colonel Richard Kemp and a couple of ninety-something war veterans; Nigel Farage, who must miss being on the front pages; and media tart Simon Danczuk and some mostly unnamed fellow Labour MPs.
Did anybody in the real world care? Will the non-singing of a song cost Labour a single vote? Or gain one?

And what if Corbyn had sung? Well, he'd have been a hypocrite. Look at what the Sun had to say yesterday when it was disclosed that he would kiss the Queen's hand etc etc when inducted into the Privy Council.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn't.
Honouring those who served the country at war is a tricky business for Labour leaders. Consider the flak Michael Foot took over his choice of coat for the Cenotaph in 1983. How dare he pick something warm from his wardrobe instead of trotting off to Aquascutum for a classic number in navy serge?

Clothes do matter. Dressing appropriately is an expression of courtesy to those around you. Gordon Brown was guilty of a repeated insult to his hosts when he refused in 1997 and subsequent years to don formal dress to deliver the Chancellor's Mansion House speech. Foot would have done better to have buttoned up, but the coat itself wasn't scruffy. Corbyn could have gone the extra half-mile and done his tie up properly, but did anyone beyond a hostile Press notice or care that his smart jacket and trousers didn't constitute a suit?
If Corbyn's attire and attitude were disrespectful to Queen and country, how disrespectful to the country were this morning's newspapers? "You don't need to know about his policies, take it from us they're laughable. So rather than report what he had to say, we'll just mock the way he said it and concentrate on his bad manners."
The Times splash did at least give a fair chunk to the TUC speech, even though the intro and heading were anthem-related and the overall emphasis - as with the Independent - was on a "day of chaos". The Express gave the address a page lead a few pages behind the St Paul's scandal, albeit in "look what he's come up with now" style; the Mail reported it straight in a box on its "Labour Earthquake spread" - and then gave Quentin Letts four columns to lampoon the delivery.
This, however, was the entirety of the Telegraph's reporting of what its splash described as "the first major speech of his tenure":

Mr Corbyn yesterday travelled to the TUC conference in Brighton where he delivered a rambling speech that called for people to be given unlimited benefits. Just before he took to the stage, the string quartet played a rendition of Hey Big Spender, an apparent reference to his "people's quantative easing" policy.
Mr Corbyn also said the unions would write his manifesto for the next general election, and compared the Government to the fascist leadership of General Franco in Spain.

The story also said that he had forgotten his lines, but the paper forgot, in its outrage over the anthem snub, to say what he had forgotten. The Times let us into the secret - Corbyn had "forgotten" to say that Thatcher had once described the miners' union as the "enemies within" - but are we sure he forgot? Maybe he just edited it out?
Corbyn's campaign and election bypassed the conventional relationship between politicians and the media and thus enhanced the sense of there being something fresh about him.
There was much Twitter joy over the fact that an aide had put the phone down on The Sun's Harry Cole, but how wise it is to refuse to communicate with the country's biggest selling paper remains to be seen.
Corbyn's win may have been a landslide, but it still came from just a quarter of a million votes from politically engaged people. The Sun is seen by 24 times as many people every day and, much as Corbyn and his deputy Tom Watson may wish to declare war on Murdoch, it would be folly to ignore such a huge constituency if they hope to attain power.
They cannot expect to speak to packed halls week in, week out. Social media are just echo chambers where people follow or interact with like-minded souls and jeer at those with a different outlook. As several commentators, including those on the Left, point out today, Corbyn needs to get to grips with the mainstream media. Shunning Andrew Marr and the Sun is not a strategy that will lead to electoral success.

But the Press, too, must rethink. If people are offended by Corbyn's singalong choices or dress sense, it is fair that they are reported. If his oratory leaves something to be desired, it is fair that that, too, is commented upon. But let's get this into perspective. Those are side issues; the first job of the Press is to report the news, so when a new leader makes his first important setpiece speech, it would be good if newspapers told us what he said rather than what they thought. One paper did that. Yes, that red rag the Morning Star. You can read its dead straight reporting here.
Now let's see what the rest of them make of Prime Minister's Questions.

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Murder on camera: to publish or not to publish?

27/8/2015

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Spot the difference.
Two people are captured on camera at the moment they are shot dead. One picture is a grainy still from an amateur movie taken by a killer with a gun in one hand and a video camera in the other.
The second is one of the most renowned news pictures of the last century, taken by a respected professional war photographer who described still photographs as the most powerful weapons in the world.
Is one more printworthy than the other? If it was all right for the New York Times to publish Eddie Adams's Vietnam photograph in 1968, then it must follow that it was all right for our newspapers to put yesterday's murder of Alison Parker on their front pages?

There is no escaping the fact that the shooting of Parker and her cameraman Adam Ward while they were broadcasting live on breakfast television was a big news story. Bigger, you might say, than the summary execution of the leader of an enemy death squad in a warzone.
Bad things happen in war, but local television crews tend not to lose their lives on routine assignments. And viewers chewing on waffles and breakfast muffins with the one-eyed monster blinking in the corner of the kitchen don't expect to see their favourite presenters murdered in the middle of an interview about tourism.
But was this justification for the saturation coverage in this morning's British newspapers? And, most particularly, for the use of so many stills from the killer's video?

BBC News Channel: Have decided not to show some of the front pages due to their graphic nature. #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/sSLbgT11yi
— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) August 26, 2015

Nick Sutton, who edits the BBC's World at One, World this Weekend and What the Papers Say. tweets the next day's front pages every evening. Last night he did so as usual, but he also posted the tweet above.
As can be seen from the front pages that were shown, it was perfectly possible to illustrate the story without recourse to snuff movie stills. The two victims were, remember, television workers, so there was plenty of archive material available.

In his Guardian blog today, Roy Greenslade writes that the question of whether papers were right to publish the stills all came down to a matter of taste. He says that some who cried Foul! were hypocritical in that they would view images "to inform themselves" and then denounce their publication as ghoulish.
He discounts concerns about invasion of privacy to focus on the danger of offending readers, and concludes that if the Sun was wrong to publish, then its six million readers must also be wrong for continuing to buy the paper (although not every reader buys the paper, of course).
Greenslade is probably the most-read media commentator in the country and, as a professor of journalism at City University, he holds a position of great influence over future practitioners of our trade. So what he says has significance.
But I believe that the coverage of this story was not a matter of taste. It was a matter of judgment. And I fear that we are seeing a worrying lack of basic news judgment in our national newspapers - and not just today.

Take the Shoreham plane crash last Saturday. This was a freak accident the week before the August Bank Holiday - the big air display weekend of the year when millions are expected to turn out to see the Red Arrows and other stunt fliers. By any measure it was real hard news.
Yet the Observer splashed on yet another Corbyn story; the Sunday Telegraph put it mid-page under a hamper follow-up to Friday's Paris train terrorist drama; the Mail on Sunday stuck with its set-piece hero-villain front, also based on the Paris incident. (Surely the absence of Shoreham from the front had nothing to do with its free flights promotion?)
So much is pre-planned these days, with agendas set in stone, that news teams seem reluctant - or frightened - to throw the specials away when a real story breaks. And so the unfortunates left in charge of their daily sisters last Sunday were left to pick up the pieces for the Monday papers. In the case of the Guardian, the result was a where-have-you-been-for-the-last-two-days heading - "11 feared dead in jet crash at Sussex airshow" - and this excruciating intro:

Police warned that more fatalities may be confirmed following the Shoreham airshow crash, after it emerged that at least 11 people are feared to have died in the worst British airshow disaster for a generation.

What worries me is that people putting our papers together aren't thinking things through.
I have a suspicion that this is, in part, down to the erosion of the traditional boundaries between news gathering and news production.
News editors used to commission stories and then offer the dishes of the day to the paper's executives on a menu called the schedule. Once written, the stories would go to the backbench, which would decide whether they passed muster and where they should appear in the paper.
Now, in many cases, everything is decided by a team of executives at morning conference and ushered through into print without any disinterested eyes to look at whether the stories work or independent voices to ask whether a better splash had surfaced during the day.
Another symptom of this approach has been the spread of "agenda" journalism, where newspapers - particularly the Mail and Telegraph, but also the Guardian and the Times to an extent - increasingly use the news pages to grind their axes. Look at the coverage of migration - where the Express is also guilty - and the BBC. This is quite different from campaigning journalism and it isn't healthy.

All of this is a digression from the Virginia shootings, but it all comes down to the standards of judgment being demonstrated day by day.

So let's get back to those pictures and whether they should have been used, starting with a few questions that might have been asked last night:

Are British readers interested in the deaths of two rural American television reporters with an average daily audience of fewer than 100,000?
Probably not. It was the circumstances of their deaths - the live TV broadcast - that made them newsworthy.
Were the shootings connected to some wider matter of public interest - a political or terrorism link perhaps?
No. They were killed by a former colleague with a grudge because he'd been sacked.
Is the killer a threat to wider society?
No. He had a clear target, wanted publicity, and has killed himself.
Will the victims' deaths bring change or affect society generally?
Probably not. They have been used by lobbyists calling for changes to American gun laws, but other more deadly and more dramatic attacks have failed to achieve that, so these are unlikely to have much effect in that quarter.

Why, then, did papers devote so much space to the killings?
Because it was a real human interest story. Murder may be common, but not on live TV. We love stories about revenge. We want to put ourselves in the position of the woman being interviewed, of the anchor back in the studio having to continue with the programme after watching her friends and colleagues killed.
And then, of course, there was the fact that the gunman obligingly filmed the killings and posted them on social media for all to share.

So, what about the pictures? Did we have to see the Parker's terror? Did we have to see the flash of the gun? Why did even the "serious" papers run sequences? The Times, Mail and Telegraph did not think the story was worth a splash, so why did they run so many video stills (seven in the Telegraph and Mail, five in the Times)?
It's hard to offer an explanation. Arguments that might be put forward could include "the public has a right to know" or "we have a duty to inform our readers". To which I'd reply that the public has the right to know a lot of things that don't find their way into newspapers and, no, papers don't have a duty to print graphic images.
It is an editor's job to decide what is important to his or her readers. Half a dozen stills from a video are no more enlightening for the British audience than one - if you must - or even the file photographs used by the Guardian and Express. We don't need to watch a woman die to know that shooting people is wrong.

But it's "out there"; "you can't put the genie back in the bottle"; "everyone else will have it".
Like everyone else in your teenager's class will be going to the party or getting that pair of designer trainers?
Time to grow up and take some responsibility. Newspapers are not obliged to replicate what is on the internet or to match it horror for horror.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and just because material is available doesn't mean you have to use it.
And, anyway, isn't "It's been everywhere all day" the classic argument for downgrading a story rather than promoting it?

Even if there were a legitimate reason for the Sun to run so many pictures, why point readers to the "full chilling video" outside the paywall on its website?
Did it really think that readers would put down the paper and pick up their phones or switch on their computers to watch it on Sun online? Did it not think that anyone who wanted to see the video might already have googled it and found it yesterday? This was not a reader service, it was a device to drive traffic.

In some ways, the treatment of this story was similar to the gung-ho approach to the Isis murders, the glori-vilification of the killer we so charmingly nicknamed "Jihadi John" and the thoughtless reproduction of video stills of his victims defenceless in their orange robes. We gave Isis the propaganda it craved and today we fulfilled Vester Flanagan's ambition to have his grievances dramatically aired.
We slowly learnt our lesson on Isis and started using happy family pictures of the dead - remembering them as they should be remembered - but we are still in thrall to Jihadi John, however much we describe him as vile or evil. Only today The Times used an image of him in his black balaclava in a tweet to promote an eight-par news story that appeared at the foot of page six.

Teenage girl used school computers to look up recipe for explosives http://t.co/7YPUCWzfRi pic.twitter.com/iQhfzv4dfl
— The Times of London (@thetimes) August 26, 2015

With Isis, we can to an extent defend the Press by pointing to the global significance of the rise of the organisation and its impact on many areas of modern life, both at home and internationally.
But it is really difficult to understand, let alone justify, today's coverage beyond the simplest - and most unwelcome - explanations: prurience, callousness, and lack of judgment.

What would have happened had the shootings taken place not in America, but in Norwich? What if the victims had been a local TV crew known to two or three hundred thousand people? Would our London-based newspaper executives have thought "We've never heard of them, so we'll use lots of gory pictures" or "They're British. We'll show some restraint"?
What if the victims had been a Newsnight reporter and cameraman, people we were used to seeing in our living rooms, people known all over the country?
Would the photographic coverage have been muted - in deference to our familiarity and their families - or even more excessive?

Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer prize for his Saigon photograph, but he always regretted having taken it. Thirty years later he wrote:

Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. … What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?’…. This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time. … I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes.”

The New York Times thought long and hard before printing the picture on its front page, and it did so only with a balancing photograph intended to go some way to explaining why the killer acted as he did. Was it right to publish? It's still hard to say.

Despite Adams's regrets, the image eventually led to wider questioning of the prosecution of the war in Vietnam and to intelligent debate about the role of war photographers.
It is most unlikely that the sad shootings of Alison Parker and Adam Ward will have any impact on American society, and it is certain that they will have no effect whatsoever on life in Britain.
That is the difference. And that is why it was wrong for the Virginia murders to have been given the treatment they received from Fleet Street today.
It is time we started thinking more clearly about what we do and why we do it.

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Grandparents' tale of woe is only part of the story

27/7/2015

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Social workers can never win. They are accused of incompetence and complacency if they fail to protect children from abusive or murderous parents and they are described as acting like the Stasi if they remove children from their families.
On Tuesday last week they came under fire again when the Southend Echo reported the case of a couple who had been refused permission to adopt their granddaughter.
The splash treatment was stark, but the text by Christine Sexton was written straight, making clear from the outset that the story was being written based on information from the couple rather than an independent source:

A couple claim their granddaughter has been taken away by social services because they are too old to look after her.
The couple, from Shoebury, started looking after the three-year-old girl when her mother was hospitalised with depression.
The doting grandparents were first told to give the girl up for fostering, but now, just six months after her mother was taken ill, Southend Council's social services department has put the girl up for adoption.
The devastated grandparents claim they were told it was because they are too old to look after her.

Towards the end of the story there was a quote from the council saying that while it could not comment on individual cases, "we should highlight that age is not the deciding factor in our assessments of prospective carers" .

The Mail picked up on the story and splashed with it the next day. In its eyes there was no doubt why the grandparents' application had been refused:

The grandparents of a three-year-old girl have been blocked from adopting her because they are "too old", it emerged last night.

The report went on to say that the couple's daughter had been "persuaded" to sign a form giving up the child while she was in a mental health hospital and without legal advice. It continued that the grandparents had attended a court hearing on June 17, but that they had been "unable to argue their case as they could not afford legal representation". Their case had now been taken up by a solicitor who had waived her fees.
The Mail also quoted the council spokeswoman saying that age was not the deciding factor.

The turn of the Mail splash from last Wednesday and Thursday's follow-up

Both papers followed up the story on Thursday. In the Mail, Steve Baker, a Tory MP who sat on a Commons working group on fostering and adoption in the last Parliament, and John Hemming, a former Liberal Demcrat MP who runs the Justice for Families campaign group, both questioned the mother's capacity to consent to her daughter being put into care. A second Tory MP offered an anodyne comment about the child's welfare being paramount and preconceptions about age.

The Echo produced a spread in which the grandmother said that she had been told that another reason she had not been allowed to adopt the child was that she had suffered post-natal depression 31 years earlier. That story then went over the ground of the original piece, and was bolstered with a case study of another couple aged 62 and 70 who had fostered hundreds of children.
The council clearly felt aggrieved by the media interest because that afternoon it tweeted a link to an edited version of the judgment issued on June 17, which had just been published by the family court in Chelmsford.

In his adjudication, district judge Stephen Hodges, left, describes how the mother had, since adolescence, suffered from depression, self-harming, a personality disorder and a neurological problem that tended to lead to epilepsy. In January this year she had cut herself with a kitchen knife in front of the child and was subsequently sectioned.
The child then spent three days with the grandparents before being moved into foster care because the mother objected to her being with her parents. The little girl had been in foster care ever since. Her mother had been discharged from hospital, but was readmitted in May and had accepted that she could not care for her daughter. They had a "goodbye" meeting on June 5 and the mother had expected a final care order to be made at the June 17 hearing - which she did not attend.
According to the judgment, the grandparents had chosen that hearing to make their application to care for the child - even though they had been in possession of the social services' assessment of their unsuitability since March - and they refused the judge's offer of an adjournment to allow them to prepare formal statements. They had no legal representation, but told him that they wanted the matter dealt with that day and the grandfather gave evidence under oath.
In that evidence, he said that they had previously been asked to care for the child, but they had not done so because his wife was ill and his daughter did not want the little girl to go to them. He spoke of conflicts between his wife and daughter, the difficulty in keeping the peace at home, and how his wife's problems with their daughter brought on her depression. He had been to many meetings in relation to his daughter as she grew up, but that his wife had not attended because of her depression.
The social worker's assessment said that the mother had had an unhappy and dysfunctional childhood and the judge noted that she had on various occasions said that she was abused physically by her parents. He concluded:

The main concern...is the fact that this family would be in my judgment completely unable to cope with the triangular relationship of C, M and the grandparents....I just cannot envisage how the triangular relationship can possibly work.

The judgment includes two quotes from the viability assessment, neither of which refers to the grandparents' age, but the judge says "this is not a short document", so it is perfectly possible - likely even - that it does include concerns that at 82, the grandfather might have difficulty dealing with a teenager.
The impression conveyed by the edited judgment released to the public is of a woman in her early 30s who has had a troubled childhood - the viability assessment refers to "extensive professional involvement" - and who is not now able to look after the daughter she loves. She has said goodbye to the child - a scene the judge said she described in "heartrending" terms - and wants her to live with a stable "forever" family rather than her own parents.

The Echo responded to the release of the ruling by publishing it in full. The Mail responded like a cat that misjudges a manoeuvre: hope no one notices and walk on, nose in the air, as though nothing has happened. There has been nothing in the paper on this case since Thursday.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, pitched in on Saturday with a page lead headlined Full story of grandparents 'too old to adopt'.

Except it isn't.
The judgment in this case was delivered in private and its release to the public two days after the case hit the newspapers cannot be coincidence.
The grandparents' case seems hopeless when you read the ruling, yet there was enough in it for a solicitor to come forward and offer to represent them without payment. And the point the MPs picked up on - that the mother signed away her rights to her daughter while being treated in a mental health unit and without an legal representation - remains unanswered.
The Mail's first story notes that the social workers' assessment of the grandparents is not available to the public - quite rightly so - but the judge says the couple had been in possession of a copy since March 24. Why didn't Christine Sexton of the Echo or Andrew Levy and Rosie Taylor of the Mail ask to see it? And if they did, and were denied access to the document that supposedly corroborated the grandparents' claim about ageism, then shouldn't they have smelt a rat? They should certainly not have taken the couple's story at face value.
There is little doubt from all the material available that both mother and grandparents love the little girl at the centre of this case. What we don't know is whether the decisions made along the way will make it more or less likely that she will live happily ever after.
It is seven years now since Camilla Cavendish started writing in The Times about the need for greater openness from family courts - a campaign that earned her the Paul Foot award and led to some changes in the privacy rules. Yet we still cannot be sure that families are seeing justice.
The only reason this case from Shoeburyness reached the public consciousness was because someone mentioned age. That turns out to have been a side issue, and we shall probably never know the full story. That may be right and proper, a family's private traumas should not be aired for public entertainment.
But if women are being coerced into signing away the right to look after their children when they are not mentally fit, in order that councils can meet adoption targets - as the grandparents' lawyer and MPs suggest,- then we need to know.
The journalists covering this story have fallen for the clickbait angle and missed the real issue.

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Why Murdoch won't cough up for Anthony France

26/7/2015

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I will do everything in my power to give you total support, even if you're convicted and get six months or whatever.

We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can, and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

These were the promises made to Sun staff arrested for paying public officials for stories. The first came from Rupert Murdoch himself, secretly taped during a meeting with his journalists in March 2013. The second in an email from News UK chief executive Mike Darcey last year when crime reporter Anthony France was told he must face trial.

So what happened?
Most of the journalists were cleared - or at least not convicted - and the Crown Prosecution Service retreated from most of the outstanding cases, leaving former head of news Chris Pharo and reporter Jamie Pyatt alone in facing a retrial on a single count after a jury could not reach a verdict.
But one conviction stands - that of Anthony France, who was given a suspended prison sentence by a judge who described him as a decent man of solid integrity.
Judge Pontius made an order that France should pay £34,618 towards the prosecution costs - on the understanding that News UK would foot the bill.
Six weeks later France was back in court to hear his lawyer tell the judge that the company would not pay - and not only that, it was also considering disciplinary proceedings against him.
The judge was not pleased. Sun journalists routinely paid for stories, France had "inherited" his police contact, and the company had funded his defence "at considerable expense":

In these circumstances I’m concerned to learn that News International still refuses to put its hands into its capacious pockets and accept the consequences.
There can be no doubt that News International bears some measure of moral responsibility, if not legal culpability for the acts of the defendant.

The judge reduced the order to £3,461 and a crowd-funding appeal raised the money within six hours.
But why did News UK refuse to cough up?
In that, it was being consistent. It did not pay Nick Parker's costs after his conviction for handling a mobile phone and it has said that it will not contribute to the hacking trial prosecution costs - Mr Justice Saunders made orders of £150,000 against Andy Coulson and £75,000 against Ian Edmondson last week.
There is a difference, though, between phone hacking - which everyone accepts was wrong - and paying contacts for stories, which has proved more of a grey area.
In that covert tape from 2013, later released by Exaro, Murdoch tells the staff:arrested under Elveden that he didn't know of anyone who had done anything "that wasn't being done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture...Payments for news tips from cops, that's been going on for a hundred years".
Rebekah Brooks had previously told a Commons select committee that her papers had paid police for information, and several respected journalists piped up with anecdotes confirming that such payments had been common practice. Rival news organisations joined the condemnation of the Operation Elveden prosecutions and the celebration of acquittals.

There is obviously more to this than money: the hacking scandal and its fallout have cost News Corp hundreds of millions of dollars, a few thousand more here or there wouldn't make a lot of difference to the business or to shareholders. So why hang out junior staff to dry?
The clue probably lies in the pauses in that Murdoch tape from two years ago; the hesitation when confronted with the question: what if we're convicted?

I'm not allowed to promise you...I will promise you continued health support...but your jobs...I've got to be careful what comes out...but frankly [big pause]...I won't say it...but...just trust me

He has already told the gathering that anyone who was released or acquitted "would just continue", but in the event of a conviction "I've been told that I must not give guarantees, but I can give you something.".
Graham Dudman, the former managing editor who went on to be cleared of some charges and to have others against him dropped, pushes the point:
"Will News International be allowed to make a decision on whether somebody is retained in employment with the company or will that be taken by people in New York?"
Darcey, who has been asked this question in previous meetings, interjects: "We don't know what you mean by 'people in New York'. Were you specifically referring to the MSC?"
[The MSC was the Managements and Standards Committee set up in the panic after the Milly Dowler story broke, which went on to hand over millions of documents to the police, and which in turn prompted the broadening of the initial hacking investigation into payments to public officials.]
Dudman comes back: "The MSC or a News Corp lawyer who says 'No, Rupert, you can't do that. You've got to do this."
Murdoch assures him: "We all take legal advice. I'll take that decision. I'll take responsibility. Absolutely."
Pressed further by Dudman: "So you, as chairman, would be prepared to go against legal advice if you felt that was appropriate?", Murdoch replies: "Sure."

The question now is what advice Murdoch is getting in New York and whether he feels it is appropriate.
For, as he admitted himself, the whole MSC and its messy aftermath was the product of panic, a frantic attempt to protect the business - a business run from New York. And whatever Murdoch's protestations, there remains a
near-universal belief that fear of corporate governance and malpractice litigation in the US has driven every News Corp move over the past four years. To appear to condone law-breaking, whether by paying prosecution costs or by keeping a convicted journalist on the staff, is fraught.
One insider told SubScribe:

There is a lot of dismay about Anthony France. The problem is that, although I believe London would like to support Anthony, everything is run these days by the New York lawyers who are obsessed with how everything is interpreted by the US Justice Department and the American regulatory authorities. Darcey and Dave Dinsmore, and the HR director Derrick Crowley are actually decent chaps who have done their best, but their hands are tied by News Corp honchos.
This is a legacy of the way so much corporate control was handed over to the MSC. Even hacks' London entertaining expenses have to be signed off in New York these days, Once you bring in the lawyers, you can never get rid of the buggers, as Rupert has been discovering.

Then there is Murdoch's anti-establishment cussedness: he will not have taken kindly to the suggestion that his organisation should reimburse the Exchequer for the prosecution of his staff - especially when he believes, as he says, that they have been "picked on" in retribution for Sun activities over the past forty years.
We may yet see further examples of that obduracy.

The flurry of acquittals and the capitulation of the CPS may have been a cause for celebration, but they have brought a new set of problems: what to do with the journalists who are now free to resume their careers? You can't run a news organisation for two or three years without deputy editors, managing editors, news editors, picture editors, reporters. Others have stepped up to cover for the Elveden crew who have been catching up on their reading while suspended from work and on bail. And while Murdoch may have said that anyone acquitted would "naturally just continue", he probably wasn't expecting the process to drag on for a further two years.
So negotiations are underway at London Bridge. Older hands are looking for what are delightfully known as exit packages, younger journos with young families and big mortgages are looking to return, and those in the middle are trying to decide which way to jump.
Overlooking all of this is one Rebekah Brooks. Although she holds no official position, she remains close to Murdoch and is seen constantly at his side when he's in town. And while the lawyers are calling the shots in the negotiations, those who have met her have come away with the feeling that she has had some influence over the terms being offered.

What goes around comes around.
Four years ago Murdoch had to abandon his bid to take over the bit of BSkyB that he didn't own because of the hacking fallout. The company has since expanded into Europe and is now called simply Sky, the name Murdoch first gave it in 1984, long before the merger with British Satellite Broadcasting. In the past month, 21st Century Fox (which took control of the network when News Corp was split) has rebuffed approaches from Vodafone and Vivendi for its 39% share of the business, saying it wanted £18 per share - it is currently trading at around £11.31.
With a majority Tory government now in place, some analysts are predicting that Fox may be planning a fresh bid to take outright control.
The man who would ostensibly be in charge of any such bid would be the Fox chief executive: James Murdoch, former chief executive of BSkyB and - during its darkest days - of News International.
James took the helm at Wapping in 2011 when Rebekah Brooks resigned. Her£16m payoff is reported to have included a clause promising her a job of equal status should she be cleared of any criminal charges - which indeed she was.
So there she is now, in her upper floor office in the Baby Shard with no formal title. Mike Darcey is understood to be leaving the company in the autumn and, despite initial disbelief, there is a widespread expectation that Brooks will get her old job back.
As one observer noted: "It would be such a Rupert thing to do - rubbing his enemies' noses in it."
Which doesn't help Anthony France as he knuckles down to his next 100 hours of community service.

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Death and dishonour: journalism's hidden victims

14/7/2015

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We remember James Foley, but what about Faisal al-Habib?
We know who Peter Greste is, but does the name Mahmoud Abou Zeid ring a bell?
Al-Habib was, like Foley, a journalist. And, like Foley, he was murdered by Isis. Like Foley, he met his end dressed in a symbolic orange prisoner's jumpsuit, the "star" of a snuff propaganda video. Although in his case he was shot rather than beheaded.
Al-Habib, 21, had been abducted in Raqqa in Syria and accused, alongside fellow media activist Bahsar Abdul Atheem, 20, of photographing oil wells and distributing anti-Sharia leaflets. After confessing on video, the two were tied to a tree and shot in the head.
The murders last week received little attention in the Isis-obsessed British media.
Even the "trial" and "execution" of a woman journalist in Iraq did not cause a stir. Suha Ahmed Radi had been a reporter on a Mosul newspaper until Isis overran the city last year. She then switched to offering stories to news agencies. The move cost her her life. Isis broke into her home, then held her captive for several days before sentencing her to death for espionage and spreading false propaganda.
The Iraqi Journalists Syndicate believes that at least 14 journalists have been murdered by Isis in Mosul since it took control there last June. Known victims this year include the photographer Adnan Abdul Razzaq, the newspaper editor Thaer al-Ali, and television producer Feras Yasin.
Our newspapers and broadcasters cannot, of course, be expected to record every journalistic death, so it comes as a shock even to those of us within the industry when the figures are collated, as they have been by the International News Safety Institute in conjunction with the Cardiff School of Journalism. INSI's twice-yearly survey Killing the Messenger has just been released, and very sobering it is, too. It reports that 60 journalists and support workers were killed in the first six months of this year.
Some of these deaths received huge attention - the Charlie Hebdo massacre that resulted in France becoming statistically the most dangerous environment for journalists - and the Isis murder of the Japanese freelance Kenji Goto. But when you look at the INSI website - and, indeed, that of the Committee to Protect Journalists - it is doubly shocking to note how little is known about so many of the non-Western victims and how little is done to chase down their killers.
Richard Sambrook, professor of journalism at Cardiff and chairman of INSI, said: “So far this year seven journalists have been decapitated by jihadist groups - a figure unthinkable a few years ago. The consequence of all this is that the public know less about the world than they should, and the killing of journalists is increasingly seen as a political act or means of censorship.”
Sambrook also noted that almost all of those killed had been working locally, and many had been trying to expose crime and corruption.
Across three continents, the modus operandi is remarkably similar: one or two men on a motorbike zoom in and fire a few shots as their target is leaving home, arriving at the office or just waiting at a bus stop. This is international summary "justice" for challenging a politician or crossing a criminal, proof that journalists are not endangered only when working in warzones.
The very high percentage (90%) of deaths in supposedly peaceful areas is - as with the suggestion that France is a riskier environment than Yemen - a slightly skewed statistic. For it is in part a reflection of the fact that many mainstream organisations have pulled out of Syria and Libya because the risk to their staffs has become unacceptable
With the rise of Isis, the West contemplating (and, indeed, taking) military action in the area, and concerns about the masses of people trying to escape from the region to Europe, this is a real problem. We need a much clearer picture from trusted correspondents to inform public opinion about the wisdom or otherwise of decisions being taken in Westminster, Washington and Brussels.

Kenji Goto was murdered on the same weekend that Peter Greste suddenly found himself being taken out of a prison in Cairo and on to a plane home to Brisbane.
Greste had been in custody for 400 days, most of them before his conviction last summer for helping a terrorist organisation - as the Muslim Brotherhood has now been branded.
His arrest, along with his Al Jazeera English bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and colleague Baher Mohamed, led to an international campaign under the hashtag "Journalism is not a crime", which saw journalists and media presenters all over the world posing with their mouths taped shut. The focus was on the "AJ three", but other colleagues and students were also in prison. One, in jail without charge, was eventually released after a prolonged hunger strike.
Hopes for justice were not high, especially with judges dispensing death sentences to hundreds of people at a time after ten-minute mass trials. Greste, Fahmy and Mohamed were each jailed for seven years, and Mohamed was given a further three for possessing a bullet. The convictions were quashed in January, Greste was deported and the other two have spent the past two months being retried, with the verdict due on July 30.
In all this, SubScribe is probably telling you what you already know. What you may not know, however, is how many other journalists have been imprisoned in Egypt since the overthrow of President Morsi and the outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The incoming President al-Sisi promised greater Press freedom, but a survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists last month found that 18 journalists were in jail in Egypt for allegedly "anti-state" activities. Mahmoud Abou Zeid, whom I mentioned at the start of this post, has been in prison without charge for two years.
The CPJ has protested to Egypt about the situation and is also spearheading a campaign called Press Uncuffed to try to secure the release of eight other journalists imprisoned around the world.
Then there are the journalists being held hostage - no one knows exactly how many, but they certainly number in dozens. Among them is Britain's John Cantlie, still in the clutches of Isis and being used as a propaganda pawn, who has told his family to forget him and move on. The whereabouts of the American Austin Tice are still unknown. it's all pretty grim.
Most of us don't face these sorts of dangers doing our jobs, and public sympathy for all journalists has been in short supply since the hacking scandal. Few tears have been shed beyond Fleet Street for those News UK journalists who spent years in limbo in our justice system before being cleared of criminally paying for stories.
It's perhaps wise, therefore, to avoid over-empathising for fear that that could amount to self-aggrandisement. But ours is an honourable and important trade and we should be proud to stand up for it

Yet in all this, there is a glimmer of hope. The graphics and collation for INSI were done at the Cardiff journalism school. The Press Uncuffed campaign was started by students at the University of Maryland's college of journalism. It's good to know that the next generation is being driven by something other than celebrity gossip.
The Maryland students have also produced bracelets to support the imprisoned journalists, which you can buy here. And the family of Austin Tice has a campaign page that you can support here.
You see, we're not all bad.

You can see brief reports about those killed while doing their jobs this year, death notices for some distinguished journalists and links to commentaries about the reporting of other deaths on the revamped Obituary page here

For reports of the court hearings, click here and here.
Peter Greste background
Abdullah Elshamy released
Commentary: Why we should care about jailed journalists

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Coulson perjury case was doomed from the start

5/6/2015

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There isn't a lot of love for Andy Coulson in Fleet Street, which may account for the muted response when he was cleared of perjury charges in Scotland this week.
The Sun, which thrilled to the acquittal of its journalists charged with paying public sector workers for stories under headlines mocking the "Clown Prosecution Service" and "Crown Persecution Service", gave the Coulson verdict four pars in a corner of page 8.
The Mail, equally strident in its criticisms of the prosecution of journalists in England, speculated on whether Coulson might tell all in a book not that the last of his court cases is behind him.
Yet this was the one case that justified the question "Why did this ever go to trial?"
An estimated £2m of taxpayers' money was spent on bringing a case where a central element required to secure a conviction was missing from the word go.
Everybody got so excited by the idea that Coulson must have been lying when he told a court that he knew nothing about phone hacking that they lost sight of the fact that, to count as perjury, a lie has to have some bearing on the verdict.
So all that apparently damning evidence from Neville Thurlbeck, James Weatherup and Clive Goodman meant nothing.
It's one thing for barrack-room lawyers (and even journalists) to stroke their beards and pronounce on the basis of surmise and assumption, but the prosecutors in Scotland are supposed to be the real thing. They are paid to know the law.
Yet it was almost as though they couldn't bear to be left out of the feeding frenzy that followed the hacking scandal. This really was a shameful waste of public money and manpower.

The saga began in October 2004, when the News of the World ran a story by columnist Anvar Khan in which she said she had had a "kinky fling" with an unnamed Scottish politician and that they had been to a Manchester swingers' club called Cupids. The MSP was Tommy Sheridan and the report led to his being asked to step down as Scottish Socialist Party leader.
Sheridan sued for libel over the original article and a series of follow-ups. The News of the World mounted a defence of justification and produced a string of witnesses to support its claims. Their evidence provided a string of splashes for the Scottish tabloids (above), but Sheridan denounced them all. Having sacked his legal team, he delivered an impassioned closing speech:

From four in a bed to five in a bed. From five in a bed to sex clubs. From sex clubs to champagne. From champagne to cocaine. From cocaine to orgies in a hotel slap bang in the middle of Glasgow.
The allegations have been as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara Desert but evidence, but real tangible, substantial evidence, has been conspicuous by its absence.
I am a socialist politician who believes he has a reputation for honesty, integrity and hard work...I am not about to allow that reputation to be destroyed by a newspaper and the multibillion-pound empire it is attached to.
I stand accused of being a hypocrite, an adulterer, a liar and an abuser of power. In reality, this marathon case has proved nothing of the sort.

The jury believed him and awarded him £200,000 damages.
The News of the World didn't just go away and lick its wounds. It appealed against the verdict and also continued to work on the original story. In 2006 its Scottish Editor, Bob Bird, was approached by Sheridan's best man, George McNeilage. McNeilage had made a video in which Sheridan admitted visiting the club and also that he had confessed to members of the SSP executive at the meeting at which he was asked to step down. The newspaper paid £200,000 for the tape.

Gail and Tommy Sheridan after charges against her were dropped. Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

The Procurator Fiscal asked the police to investigate and Sheridan was charged with perjury at the end of 2007. His wife Gail (with Sheridan above) and a number of supporters were also charged but later cleared. Sheridan's case went to trial in 2010.
Conducting his own defence, he maintained that he had not lied in the libel case and claimed that he had been the victim of a conspiracy involving members of the SSP, the News of the World and the police. The court heard that Sheridan's name had appeared on the hacking private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's notes - although there was no evidence that his voicemails had been intercepted.
Bird and the paper's Scottish news editor Douglas Wright were called as witnesses and challenged by Sheridan about rampant phone-hacking at Wapping. [This case was being heard before the scandal blew open with the Milly Dowler story in July 2011, but after former News of the World reporter Sean Hoare had spoken at length about the practice to the New York Times and two years after Mulcaire and Clive Goodman had served prison sentences for intercepting Prince William's voicemail.]
Both journalists denied believing that their newspaper was above the law or that it had paid people for illegal activities.
Andy Coulson, called as a defence witness, also denied having been aware of phone-hacking at the paper before the Mulcaire-Goodman convictions.

Bird "stripped to his boxer shorts" to prove he wasn't wired when collecting the tape from McNeilage, right

In their closing speeches, both the prosecution counsel Alex Prentice QC and Sheridan dismissed the phone-hacking evidence as irrelevant to the central charge that Sheridan had lied about his sexual antics.
There was no evidence, Prentice said, that Sheridan's voicemail had been accessed illegally or that the McNeilage tape had been produced using illegal means.
In his summing up, Sheridan said that he had called Coulson to the witness box not because he would help his case, but out of a sense of responsibility for standards in public life; so that he could hold him to account.
Since both sides in the 2010 case declared the Coulson evidence irrelevant, regardless of whether it was true or false, it is hard see how there was any prospect of success for a subsequent prosecution that would have to prove both that Coulson lied and that his lying might have had an impact on the Sheridan verdict.

With the acquittal of Coulson and the dropping of charges against Bird and Wright, Operation Rubicon - the Scottish wing of the hacking fall-out investigations - has now been closed.
SubScribe agrees with Coulson that the case was a waste of public money and disagrees strongly with Sheridan's demands for a public inquiry (more expense?)
As to which of the two is less convincing is a tougher call, but you can only look in wonder at the former spin-doctor and convicted criminal with the chutzpah to stand outside the court on Wednesday and say outright: "I did not lie."

For someone who loves newspapers, writing this website is often dispiriting. This, however, is an occasion where journalists tried hard to do their job. The reaction to the Coulson verdict was bound to be split between those who saw it as another example of a Murdoch employee getting away with it and those who saw the case as proof of a witch-hunt against journalists. In fact, journalists made a good fist of explaining why the outcome was as it was - led by James Doleman and Severin Carrell and Lisa O'Carroll of the Guardian, who had posts up online very quickly. (They had time to prepare - the judge had ruled there was no case to answer on Monday and given the prosecution time to challenge that verdict before announcing it on Wednesday. But no matter, the key thing is they got the message out quickly when it was needed.)
In print, the Times's Scottish team did an excellent job with a spread (above) that ran all editions. Reporter Mike Wade was on the button when he homed in on Judge Burns's ruling "not every lie amounts to perjury" - though one feels that the sub may turn out to have been premature with the headline saying that those six words put an end to the Sheridan affair.
The Times and Telegraph both took the opportunity to run leaders about Establishment threats to a free Press. Yes, it's self-pleading. But it does matter.

Sheridan on Wednesday after the verdict, which he described as a shambles

Postscript: During the Sheridan perjury trial, Anvar Khan admitted that she had lied and embellished her News of the World stories to promote a book about her sex life.
Sheridan was found guilty of perjury, sentenced to three years and served a year in prison. He was refused permission to appeal, but last year succeeded in getting his case reviewed by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. The commission said last month that it was not prepared to refer the case back to the High Court on the evidence provided, but Sheridan still has time to submit more material before a final decision was made.
James Doleman blogged the trial and you can read his reports here.
He also live-tweeted the Coulson perjury trial, thanks to crowd-funding, and you can follow him on Twitter here.

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Time for Darcey to put his money where his mouth is

29/5/2015

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View image | gettyimages.com

When Anthony France was told last year that he would face trial for paying a policeman for stories, News UK's chief executive sent an email to Sun staff promising to support the reporter "in every way we can".
The memo from Mike Darcey (above) was a testament to France's popularity and professionalism:

Anthony is a hugely popular and highly respected member of The Sun team and has been an integral part of the newsroom since 2004....
He joined us after stints on the Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard and Sunday Mirror and almost immediately scored one of the biggest scoops of the year. At the height of concerns over security in The Houses of Parliament, Anthony revealed how lax security still was with the classic front page 'Sun 'Bomber' In Commons'....
Since then he has concentrated on covering crime issues and security, often asking difficult questions of Britain's police chiefs. He broke a string of big stories including the Sally Anne Bowman murder and the John Worboys serial rapist case. Despite being at the centre of a police inquiry, Anthony covered the Oscar Pistorius murder trial and Nelson Mandela's state funeral in South Africa...
We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

France was convicted last Friday and today given a suspended 18-month prison sentence and ordered to do 200 hours community service.
Judge Pontius was clearly equally impressed by the reporter, describing him as essentially a decent man of solid integrity, who had written stories of undoubted public interest.
In hissentencing remarks the judge acknowledged that paying people for stories was a well-known aspect of the way the Sun worked, that there was nothing wrong with this if it did not involve encouraging people to abuse a trusted public position, and that there was a recognised procedure for payments:

The defendant was required...to present a request for payment to his editor. It follows, first, that payment of a fee, and determination of the appropriate sum, were matters for editorial discretion and not for the defendant and, secondly, there was no handing over of a grubby envelope produced from the defendant's pocket in a dark corner of a pub.
The defendant, holding a fairly junior post at the Sun, was therefore following an accepted procedure that doubtless had existed for some time, and doing so in relation to a source...he had inherited from a colleague and to whom payments had previously been made.

Rebekah Brooksfamously told MPs that journalists had paid police officers; Rupert Murdoch was caught on tape saying that they had been doing so forever; the Sun still carries a panel on page two offering money for stories - as the judge noted.
The Sun has also protested loud and long about Operation Elveden - most of whose evidence, remember, was handed over by News International's management and standards committee - and the persecution of journalists doing their job.
So how could it be that in mitigation before sentencing today Anthony Keeling QC told the judge that there was an overwhelming likelihood that France would lose his job and that News UK had indicated that it would not bear the costs of the prosecution?
In ordering France to bear those costs, the judge said he assumed that News UK would pick up the bill and that if it declined to do so, France should return to court to seek a review.
As Keeling said:

There is a sense it is Mr France, who held the most junior full-time position it was possible to hold at the Sun, who stands to be punished for the whole system.

News UK does not enjoy the best reputation in journalism. If it is not to be tarnished even further, it should announce tonight that France's job is still there - if he wants it - and that there is no question of the company leaving him to pick up the prosecution tab.

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Apocalypse now (although you might not have noticed because it happened in the North)

Phone hacking and a nagging sense of injustice

Why is arts coverage so lamentable?

Corbyn: all singing from the wrong hymn sheet

Murder on camera: to publish or not to publish?

Grandparents' tale of woe is only part of the story

Why Murdoch won't cough up for Anthony France

Death and dishonour: journalism's hidden victims

Coulson perjury case was doomed from the start

Time for Darcey to put his money where his mouth is

Liz Gerard

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