22 Nov 11 | Leveson Inquiry
The Leveson Inquiry continued with its blend of the harrowing and the invasive today as more victims of alleged press intrusion gave evidence at the high court.
Margaret and Jim Watson, whose daughter Diane was stabbed to death by a fellow pupil at her school in 1991, slammed “misleading” articles written in the Glasgow Herald and Marie Claire that portrayed their daughter’s killer as a victim. Without legal recourse, they were told there was nothing they could do to clear their daughter’s name. The following year, their teenage son killed himself. He was found holding copies of the articles, which the Watsons say contributed to his suicide.
The Glasgow Herald released a statement this afternoon, saying it “deeply regrets any action which added to the Watson family’s grief over the tragic loss of their daughter and later their son.”
In a powerful account today, Margaret Watson said the articles “tore everything we had of Diane apart.” She added, “the dead shouldnt be besmirched by the will of some sick journalists.”
Watson has campaigned for the law to be changed so it is no longer impossible for the dead to be defamed. While the Scottish government has published consultation paper on defamation of the deceased, the Watsons are waiting for the results.
She also criticised the notion that restrictions on reporters would have a “chilling effect” on the press. “What about the deadly effect it has on the victims?” she asked the Inquiry.
Ex-footballer Garry Flitcroft made a similar argument when he described the taunting his family received once the press revealed details of his extra-marital affair. Flitcroft had sought an injunction preventing the Sunday People revealing details of the affair, but once the injunction was lifted, Flitcroft said his marriage collapsed and his children were teased. He added that fans’ chants at his football matches caused his father to stop attending the games, and contributed to his suicide several years later.
Flitcroft maintained his affair was a matter between himself and his wife, and was not of public interest. “If I’d been done for match-fixing or taking cocaine, it’s in the public interest,” he said.
Though he did not have evidence, Flitcroft said he “strongly suspected” the Sunday People had hacked his phone to get details of his affair. He said his 2001 injunction spurred the paper to launch a “dirt-digging exercise”, which to led to the discovery of a second extra-marital affair.
Also giving evidence today was Mary-Ellen Field, a former business adviser to supermodel Elle Macpherson. Field told the Inquiry of how Macpherson had accused her of leaking stories to the press, and was told she could either go to rehab for “alcoholism” (an accusation Field denies) or be fired.
She heeded Macpherson’s request out of fear for losing her job, but was then sacked in 2006 by her company, accountancy firm Chiltern. Field said this had a “very serious effect” financially, adding that her health suffered as a result.
Field learned in 2007 of phone hacking carried out at News of the World by Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, and that Macpherson had been targeted. Her subsequent emails and texts to Macpherson went unanswered. Attempts to find out from the police if she had been a hacking victim were also fruitless, until earlier this year, when Field was contacted by the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police investigating the practice.
Lord Justice Leveson described her experience as “collateral damage”.
Last to give evidence was actor Steve Coogan, who said an extra-marital affair was revealed in a “sociopathic sting” led by former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and the paper’s then showbiz reporter.
Coogan said reporter Rav Singh had warned him in 2002 of a suspected “sting”, telling Coogan he would receive a phone call from Coulson’s office: “There was a girl in Andy Coulson’s office who was going to speak to me on the phone, the phone call would be recorded and she would try to entice me into talking about intimate details of her and my life,” he said.
While no story was published, Coogan claimed he was the victim of a successful sting by Singh and Coulson in 2004. Singh agreed not to publish explicit details about Coogan’s extra-marital affair in April of the same year, provided he would confirm certain details. However, Coogan said his manager later received a phone call from Coulson saying his phone interview with Coogan had been recorded, the story would be published, and that Singh’s word was “just a ruse”.
He also detailed how a profile of him in the Sunday Times featured photos of his children, which Coogan had not authorised. Although the Times later apologised, Coogan said “all these apologies are closing door after horse has bolted. You can’t give back the pound of flesh you’ve taken.”
Defending why he had not challenged the press, Coogan quoted his agent as saying, “they will come after you. Do you really want to make enemies of these people?”
Coogan said choosing silence was the “lesser of two evils”, adding that mechanisms of redress were not straightforward. “I wish the press were able to regulate itself. But has been given many opportunities and failed.” He said of the PCC, “the hacking scandal completely passed them by.”
Earlier in the day, Associated Newspapers were accused by victims’ lawyer David Sherborne of adopting “intimidatory tactics” after it issued a statement saying Hugh Grant was guilty of of spreading “mendacious smears” in the evidence he gave to the Inquiry yesterday.
Neil Garnham, QC for the Metrpolitan police, warned Leveson that witnesses may fear giving evidence if they were to then face similar accusations of lying by the press. Leveson, who admitted he had not read this morning’s papers, shared concern, saying that he “would be unhappy if it was felt that the best form of defence was always attack.”
Jonathan Caplan, QC for Associated, argued the paper was “under pressure” to respond to Grant’s claim yesterday that the only way the Mail on Sunday could have sourced a 2007 story on his relationship with Jemima Khan was through phone hacking. Caplan added that he had had no opportunity to cross-examine Grant yesterday.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from Mark Lewis, Sheryl Gascoigne, Tom Rowland and Kate and Gerry McCann.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
18 Nov 11 | Leveson Inquiry
A provisional list of witnesses and hacking victims giving evidence next week in the Leveson Inquiry has been announced.
The schedule is as follows:
Monday 21 November
Bob Dowler
Sally Dowler
Hugh Grant
Graham Shear
Joan Smith
Tuesday 22 November
Steve Coogan
Mary-Ellen Field
Garry Flitcroft
Margaret Watson
Wednesday 23 November
Sheryl Gascoigne
Mark Lewis
Gerry McCann
Tom Rowland
Thursday 24 November
“HJK”
Sienna Miller
Max Mosley
JK Rowling
Mark Thomson
Monday 28 November
Charlotte Church
Anne Diamond
Ian Hurst
Chris Jefferies
Jane Winter
After David Sherborne’s scathing illustration of the British tabloids on Wednesday, next week’s sessions are expected to be even more damaging to the reputation of the press.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
10 Nov 11 | Uncategorized
This post was originally published in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian on Wednesday 9 November
James Murdoch knows his future as the heir apparent is hanging by a thread. As he prepares for Thursday’s second, and crucial, appearance before MPs, he will reflect that he remains in his job only thanks to family loyalty, a Saudi prince and some weak questioning last time. For all the hullaballoo surrounding his first appearance before the Commons culture and media select committee in July, the young Murdoch managed to bat away the questions easily as he chaperoned his smarting and near-silent father, Rupert, who was sitting alongside him. The amateurishness of most of his inquisitors – a perennial problem with parliament’s weak committee system – helped his cause.
Since then the questions have mounted. In September the News of the World’s former legal manager, Tom Crone, told MPs he was “certain” James Murdoch had been informed about the now famous email showing that phone hacking went beyond one rogue reporter. Murdoch had told MPs in July that he had not seen the email when he signed off the settlement to Gordon Taylor in 2008. Both cannot be right.
News International’s senior figures are fighting for survival. Many shareholders in its global arm, News Corporation, have signalled their disquiet. Murdoch Jr survived a vote at the company’s AGM in California a month ago only because of the company’s preferential share arrangements, which are skewed towards family and friends.
Is he, as some have described, a dead man walking? Thursday’s session will provide clues but is unlikely to produce the killer punch. For that, attention will turn to the next stage of the Leveson inquiry, which will hear from the victims. The important thing is that Leveson differentiate between specific crimes – and many of the allegations do revolve around criminality – and the broader conclusions about the UK media.
Almost every day brings further damaging revelations about News International. The spying antics of the private detective Derek Webb are just the latest. It seems that anyone who came into News International’s orbit was tailed or bugged. The Metropolitan police inquiry confirmed last week that the number of possible victims of phone hacking has risen to 5,800 – far higher than previously thought.
The company has launched a damage limitation exercise on all fronts. It is desperately seeking to reach out-of-court settlements with as many people as possible. Some estimates put the total bill at £200m – a sizeable chunk even for NI. Some in the organisation are seeking to learn the lessons. One of the few slivers of light in this tawdry affair has been the strong coverage devoted by the Times and Sky television to the actions of their bosses. That takes gumption, even if the bosses’ power is fading fast.
Since the understandably fevered reaction to the Milly Dowler revelations in July, the atmosphere has calmed. Lord Justice Leveson and his team have started proficiently. They are fully aware of the balance they have to strike between recommending measures that will improve journalistic standards while not limiting the ability of reporters to find out the awkward truth that the rich and powerful seek to withhold.
The Press Complaints Commission, under its new chairman, Lord Hunt, is looking afresh at its own practices, which were flawed in both conception and execution. The PCC was a mediator, not a regulator. It needs to start regulating and presiding over standards, in order to stave off the ever strong calls for rules by statute. It is important that the PCC, an organisation long dismissed as toothless, seeks to take the initiative, and presents a strong agenda for reform to Leveson in the new year. Hunt has already begun to ask searching questions and to take some useful advice.
Some media-watchers have been bending the ear of politicians in their attempt to take revenge on Murdoch and to “control” a profession that Tony Blair unwisely described as “feral beasts”. As I made clear in my presentation to Leveson, the real danger facing journalism is that it is too weak. It finds out far too little. It too often swallows the spin and takes no for an answer.
A perfect press does not exist anywhere: it never has and never will. Given the inevitable choice, would we rather have a press that is excessively pliant, cautious and deferential, or one that sometimes gets it wrong? Would we want a media shackled as in France? Not only do privacy laws there prevent much legitimate investigation of financial and other public misdeeds, but more broadly journalists are frightened stiff of offending politicians. How else could one explain the reluctance for five days to publish the embarrassing Sarkozy-Obama taped discussion about Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu? At Index on Censorship we catalogue daily cases of not just egregious harassment of journalists by authoritarian regimes, but the more subtle restrictions imposed by western governments.
Britain’s media remains, mercifully, raucous. Even so it already operates under a vast array of restrictions – from dangerously restrictive libel laws to official secrecy and various self-denying ordinances. The phone hacking affair casts a dispiriting light on the state of journalism. But it is about far more than that. It is most of all about corporate governance. Although other newspapers will be implicated, this was mainly about one media organisation. News International accrued such power that it believed it had impunity to act as it pleased. It dominated public life, dictating to politicians what they should say and do.
That all this happened was an indictment of two generations of politicians, from Tony Blair flying to an Australian island to kneel at the feet of Rupert Murdoch to David Cameron’s intimate Oxfordshire suppers with Rebekah Brooks, and police chiefs taking jollies. One under-reported story in this saga was Blair’s decision to become godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.
NI executives behaved as they did because they were allowed to by politicians who were in turns cowardly and titillated by the invitation to the corporate top table. This was a vivid example of a corrupted public life. The most heartening factor in the affair is that it was investigative journalism that, finally, extracted the information. If Leveson and the politicians draw the wrong conclusions, if they are lulled into thinking that journalists rather than corporate executives accrued too much power, the consequences for democracy will be stark.
09 Sep 11 | Uncategorized
As he took soundings from lawyers earlier this week, Lord Justice Leveson served notice that he would run his inquiry into the hackgate scandal and media ethics very much on his own terms. With the odd put-down to barristers for sloppy briefs, Leveson set out the running order of his investigation and priorities. He will be nobody’s patsy.
The key players have already been dubbed in the corridors of the court either the “perps” (the alleged perpetrators) or the “victims”. Most of the narrative so far in the Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee proceedings and in the broader public domain has clearly been able to delineate between the two.
Yet, as events over the past few days show, the deeper the tentacles of the law intervene, the more confused some are becoming about rights and wrongs. The Metropolitan police’s questioning under caution of Guardian reporter Amelia Hill is the most serious known case so far of an embattled force struggling to understand the terrain. They probably did it in their state of confusion, without thinking through the ramifications. Instances such as this should not be repeated.
It is perfectly within the rights of any company or organisation to discipline an employee if they leak information without authorisation – although it is equally for courts or tribunals to determine whether that action was in the public interest.
There is absolutely no authority, however, to impinge upon a journalist’s legitimate work — the garnering of sources and subsequent protection of them. Hill is not accused of paying anyone for information or doing anything underhand or immoral. She has no case to answer and should never have been questioned. It is good that not only did the NUJ spring to her defence — as would be expected of it — but also the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. While not mentioning the case directly, he told MPs: “We must be careful not to overreact in a way that would undermine the foundations of a free society”.
One of the challenges for Leveson is to ensure that whatever measures are proposed to tighten procedures in the wake of the phone hacking scandal do not impinge on much-needed investigative journalism. A strong media is a bedrock to a healthy democracy and, as I never tire of saying: Look back over the past decades and ask yourself, have journalists found out too much about the activities of those with power or too little?
With that in mind, Leveson will need to help the forces of law and order to separate out the Amelia Hills from the spivs and crooks in league with bent coppers.
