Law
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16
Jan 12
There are many things the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre no doubt wants to say to the Leveson Inquiry when he appears before it on February 6th and plenty of questions lined up by the Inquiry’s lawyers. I have a small suggestion.
The elusive and much-disputed idea of the “public interest” will play an important part in Leveson’s deliberations. Public interest defences – such as exceptional justifications for intrusion, for example – are written into the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct and into several laws. Back in the middle of last year, public interest was an important issue in one of the cases which triggered several public rows and court cases over privacy injunctions.
One of these cases involved Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland. While in charge of the bank, Goodwin had had an affair with a female colleague. Injunctions were granted to prevent the disclosure of the names of either party. Despite the injunction, Goodwin’s name was freely bandied about on Twitter and he was named in the House of Commons by an MP. A judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, eventually cancelled the order concealing Goodwin’s identity but kept in place the one preventing the naming of his lover.
The Daily Mail did not approve of the judge’s decision, running as many details (“the mistress on a six-figure salary”) about the woman as it thought it could get away with. Or so it appeared. A number of different court hearings were held on this case and this is the judgement covering what the Mail had said. It repays careful reading.
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Law / UK Press —
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Tags: Daily Mail, Fred Goodwin, Leveson Inquiry, Mr Justice Tugendhat, Paul Dacre, Royal Bank of Scotland
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13
Jan 12
I was going to write about the use of jokes in politics and how political reporters never cover the subject for fear of sounding trivial. But then jokes suddenly starting happening everywhere.
The leader of Britain’s parliamentary opposition, Ed Milliband, made one of those doomed “relaunch” speeches last week which no one outside the political industry much noticed. An interview that morning intended to set the stage for the speech went awry when Milliband found himself being asked if he was too ugly ever to be elected Prime Minister.
Milliband’s looks may or may not be a liability but he has bigger problems. He never seems to find anything funny and never makes any jokes anyone can remember and retell. Plenty of leading politicians are born without a sense of humour, but the smart ones have that corrected. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t naturally hilarious and had to have jokes explained to her. But she had a speechwriter (the theatre director Ronnie Millar) who was funny and who, as someone reminded me the other night, carried a small notebook everywhere in which he recorded lines that he could use.
Milliband shares this humour-deficit with the strange collection of people currently slugging it out (“mud-wrestling for dwarfs” one commentator called it) for the Republican presidential nomination in the US. John Dickerson of Slate reflects here the Great Republican Humour Crisis and on what the presence or absence of gags tells you about politicos. And his piece has jokes. My favourite is the self-deprecating story told by a now-forgotten man called Mo Udall. Canvassing, Udall walks into a barber’s shop and introduces himself as the local candidate who’s asking for their votes. “Yeah,” replies the barber, “We were just laughing about that.”
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Leveson / Political Journalism / UK Press / Wit —
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Tags: Daily Express, Ed Milliband, Jeff Jarvis, Jon Stewart, Leveson Inquiry, Margaret Thatcher, Press Complaints Commission, Richard Desmond, Ronnie Millar, The Daily Show
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5
Jan 12
The first phase of the Leveson inquiry in the British press isn’t quite finished yet, but the inquiry is entering new territory. Or at least there’s a change of mood.
The opening weeks were dominated by complaints and horror stories about red-top reporters. Straws passing on the wind tell me that this indignation is now being replaced by more sober reflection about the issues which face big-circulation papers.
Daily Mail February 1997
Here are the straws I’ve counted recently. Lord Leveson himself has from the start been keen to underline that he is not embarking on any project to “beat down” popular papers. He has also been asking each of his celebrity witnesses what they would do about the faults of which they complain and has more than once sounded a little irritated by the vagueness of the prescriptions he is offered. When editors take the stand at Leveson this month, we will be reminded that popular journalism can reveal important truths and explain complex events in ways that papers with bigger reputations and much smaller circulations can’t manage. Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, at one time a columnist for the Daily Mirror, wrote a defence of the tabloids the other day.
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Law / Leveson / Media Freedom / UK Press —
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Tags: Ben Fenton, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, Jonathan Freedland, Leveson Inquiry, Paul Dacre, The Guardian
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29
Dec 11
This blog’s author is of a buoyant, optimistic cast of mind. I mention this only in case it isn’t already obvious. My general view of the “crisis” in journalism in Europe and the US (not, please note, the rest of the world) is that while the business model for printed daily papers may be in deep doo-doo, journalism and news will find ways not merely to survive but to flourish and improve.
But there are journalists and writers in places for whom 2011 was a year of threats, jail terms, violence and misery. They should not be forgotten This is just a quick selection of those people who deserve to be remembered at the passing of the year – and the governments who deserve to be shamed for what they have done.
- The Ethiopian government jailed two Swedish television journalists the other day for eleven years apiece on “terrorism” charges.
- Wondering why you haven’t heard much from Bahrain recently? This despatch from Reporters Without Borders, written in restrained and careful language, will tell you why. They lock up bloggers and journalists, intimidate others and exclude foreign reporters they don’t approve of. Do not forget that in April the founder of the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat, Karim Fakhrawi, was taken into custody when his paper had been shut and he died in custody a week later. His death remains unexplained and no one has been held to account.
- There are many things to worry the Chinese government nowadays, but they remain terrified of the stubborn handful of men and women who simply refuse to stop speaking their mind. The moment that the strength of the Arab Spring became clear, many of these people began being questioned and detained. Two of those who vanished into jail in the spring, Chen Xi and Chen Wei were given sentences of 10 and 9 years respectively just before Christmas. They thought and wrote the wrong things.
- On a quite different level – because no actual curtailment of freedom of expression seems yet to have taken place – is the developing disaster for the news media in Hungary (background here, latest developments here). I’m not enough of an expert on central Europe to know why Hungarian confidence in the the ordinary, boring-but-valuable institutions of democracy is so much more fragile than in neighbouring countries which also endured long decades of suffocation under communism and the Soviet Union. But it is.
- And let’s never forget Russia, where the manipulation and threats have been normal for a long time. As ever, it’s always worst outside the big cities where the tourists go and the foreign correspondents live. One small, grim example here.
But I did read one cheerful scrap from Russia this holiday. In Dagestan, east of Chechnya there is a newspaper called Chernovik. This name translates into English as “rough draft” and is, I think, the best and most honest name for a newspaper I have heard for some time. I came across it in David Remnick’s superb New Yorker essay on Vladimir Putin and what has happened to news, information and journalism in Russia during his rule.
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Media Freedom —
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Tags: Al-Wasat, Bahrain, Chechnya, Chen Wei, Chen Xi, China, Dagstan, David Remnick, Hungary, Karim Fakhwari, New Yorker, News of the World, Reporters Without Borders, Russia, Vladimir Putin
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12
Dec 11
Amid the drama of the phone-hacking inquiries, anyone could forget that the British government is undertaking a review of plurality and media ownership. I had forgotten myself. And I’d actually sent the review a contribution.
My memo to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was based on a post on this blog. But for the record it’s here (scroll down to Brock and click). By far the hardest issue is not “how much should anyone own?” but how to measure media influence in the hands of one company.
Transparent government is a splendid thing. But that hardly makes it exciting.
Broadcasting / Law / Media Economics / UK Press —
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Tags: Department of Culture, Media and Sport
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9
Dec 11
Unless you look very hard you will not have seen the Leveson Inquiry session of yesterday mentioned in the news. The inquiry wasn’t taking a day off: it was hearing from seven media academics.
Our views, to put it mildly, did not make headlines. But for the record, here is the link to the video and transcripts. The best summary I’ve seen is here (others here and here).
A few quick impressions. The questioning is thorough, rigorous and well-directed, much of it conducted by Lord Leveson himself. Given that so much of the focus is coming down to the less attractive activities of red-top papers, the absence from the inquiry’s panel of “assessors” of anyone with experience of a red-top newsroom seems odder and odder. Partly because such a person could have helped diagnose the problem; partly because the inclusion of red-top experience would bolster the political defences of inquiry conclusions which turn out to be unpopular with the popular papers. Those papers editors’ will give evidence in January and at least some of them are meeting shortly to see if they can organise a common front and shared proposals for the inquiry.
Lord Leveson referred yesterday to what had gone wrong in newspapers in the past “twenty years”. That choice of timeframe reminds us that the unspoken premise of this inquiry is to discover why the suggestions made (twice) by the last judge to consider these questions, Sir David Calcutt, two decades ago did not succeed as planned. There is a clear hint of this (part 1 c and d) in the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference.
Journalism Schools / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press —
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Tags: David Calcutt, Leveson Inquiry
5 Comments
1
Dec 11
Below is the text of a piece which I’ve written for the British Journalism Review and it argues a different approach to newspaper regulation than the one taken by most witnesses to the inquiry so far. The BJR’s new edition carries other advice to Lord Leveson from a clutch of other commentators including Tessa Jowell, Steve Hewlett, Geoffrey Bindman and Donald Trelford.
Balanced privacy law might be the least bad outcome
George Brock
I blame the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference. These ask the inquiry to recommend “a new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press”. No sooner were these words published than editors, pundits, publishers and media lawyers plunged with joyful relish into the business of elaborating “options” for toughening the powers and operation of the existing regulator, the Press Complaints Commission. The idea that the phrasing of the terms of reference is open ended, and doesn’t necessarily imply even the continuation of any self-regulatory or independent regulation, seemed not to occur to anyone at the seminars which Leveson organised as the overture to the formal hearings.
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Law / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press —
5 comments
Tags: British Journalism Review, Donald Trelford, Geoffrey Bindman, Leveson Inquiry, Steve Hewlett, Tessa Jowell
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22
Nov 11
There are very few spectacle sadder than watching a political movement which has worked for freedom become corrupted to the point where that same movement starts closing freedom down.
Today the South African parliament, dominated by the ANC, passed by a large majority a media law which will restrict and constrain independent journalism in that country. Indeed, the law seems designed to squeeze, chill or eliminate independent reporting. The state is going to be accountable to the state.
A few years ago, I sat at a table at a conference in Cape Town with Jacob Zuma, the lunchtime speaker. At the time he was widely tipped to become president and duly did. Zuma’s speech was platitudinous and he avoided almost all the questions on the media. At the time he was taking the truly unusual step of suing a cartoonist. But despite the discretion of his words, Zuma’s loathing of the media was plain to see: his body language and flinty stare conveyed eloquent disgust for the privileges and airs of journalists. I assume that he is savouring his revenge.
There are no doubt problems in the conduct of South Africa’s media. Given what we’re hearing at the Leveson inquiry into phone-hacking, it’s hardly the moment to be throwing stones from London. But – briefly to state the obvious – the answer to misconduct or excess by reporters and editors is not licensing and control by the state. This is not an exotic, “colonial” or particularly new idea and it is well expressed by many prominent South Africans of all stripes.
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Law / Media Freedom —
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Tags: ANC, Desmond Tutu, Jacob Zuma, Nadine Gordimer, Nelson Mandela, South Africa
