19 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The associate editor (news) of the Sunday Express has said a Guardian story from July 2011 alleging the News of the World had deleted voicemail messages on murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone “chronically and potentially fatally” damaged press-police relations.
James Murray told the Leveson Inquiry that the article, which alleged the tabloid had deleted messages on the abducted teenager’s phone, giving her family false hope that she was alive and listening to her voicemail, had an “enormous impact” throughout the industry.
“We spent an enormous amount of time building up relations with Surrey police, meeting them for briefings, having coffee, gaining their trust,” he said. “All that trust was blown out of the water.”
He added that normal lines of communication have since been damaged, noting later: “Everyone’s cautious, everyone’s frightened.”
Last December the Metropolitan police announced that the tabloid may not have deleted Dowler’s voicemails, though it remains uncontested that the paper hacked her phone.
In response to this morning’s revelation that the News of the World had employed their own surveillance team to identify suspects and the deployed Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) team in the 2006 Ipswich murders inquiry, Murray warned against journalists acting as detectives. “Playing an amateur detective can get you into all sorts of trouble and that’s not what we’re about,” he said.
He added that the now defunct tabloid was a “lone wolf” in the field of surveillance, saying it had been mentioned the paper had resources to employ ex-detectives, and that he could not think of another mainstream newspaper that had “such a well-organised enterprise.”
On recommendations for press-police relations, Murray argued that issuing written guidelines would be “frankly ridiculous”, though he said a “broad-based framework” might be helpful.
Speaking earlier today, John Twomey, chair of the Crime Reporters Association and crime correspondent at the Daily Express, also warned against what he termed a “freezing effect” if all contact between reporters and journalists were to be recorded.
“Officers would be less likely to talk to you,” he said. “Some officers may just cease contact with you completely.”
Daily Star reporter Jerry Lawton also expressed his concern that the Inquiry may have impacted on the relationship between reporters and police forces, noting that lines of communication had “been shut down all over the place.”
“My concern in the fall-out from phone hacking and this series of inquiries is that a wedge will be driven between the police and press that will restrict the level of trust and guidance, therefore making accurate reporting more difficult,” Lawton wrote in his witness statement.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with further evidence from crime reporters, staff from West Midlands Police and Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe of the Metropolitan police.
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19 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The purpose of the Leveson Inquiry is to examine the British press and its ethics. Given how culturally specific the press tends to be it might appear to be a fruitless exercise comparing different regulatory regimes. Ireland is a possible exception, given that many of the same newspapers are freely available in Ireland and many British newspapers, especially the tabloid have Irish editions, with Irish content mixed with British content.
It might be of interest to look at the reaction of some of those newspapers, which did accept and join up to a very different regime than that operating in the UK.
While most of the Irish media accepted the need for a regulatory system, all be it with reluctance in some cases, many of the British newspapers with a presence in Ireland were strongly opposed. A number of Sunday Times’s Irish columnists, for instance, wrote pieces opposing the Press Council. Others warned of the threat to press freedom.
The Irish Press Council and Press Ombudsman system was launched in January 2008 following years of debate and negotiation concerning the libel and defamation regime, considered even more draconian than the UK’s.
There were three groups involved, successive governments and politicians; journalists and finally, proprietors. Each had their own agendas. Politicians were unwilling to concede anything and could see no reason to relax or reform defamation. Some politicians, far from supporting reform wanted to make things more difficult for the press, by insisting on privacy legislation that would sit alongside defamation laws that were last examined in the 1960s.
Journalists, through NUJ (the NUJ operates in Ireland as well as the UK) wanted to be involved in any regime that would emerge and not be sidelined as had happened in the UK.
Proprietors wanted libel reform first and foremost and were willing to concede regulation to get that. Ranging from News International to owners of small family run local newspapers, the proprietors were often less than united.
The council was launched in Jan 2008, following about five years of organisation and planning. The steering committee drew its membership from newspaper and magazine proprietors and the NUJ and was chaired by a former Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, Dr Tom Mitchell. Some groups, particularly News International in Ireland had, to be, more or less, dragged to the table — it had a particular problem with the NUJ’s presence. At one stage the NI representatives did not even want to be in the same room as a trade union member.
The system that emerged was a hybrid, a mix of Britain’s Press Complaints Commission and the Scandinavian ombudsman. One of the more urgent tasks of the Steering Committee was convincing the Government (and a sometimes sceptical public) that the proposed Press Council was independent and would not be a mouthpiece for the newspaper proprietors who were funding it. It was absolutely necessary to ensure there was a system were members of civic society, whose independence was beyond question, would be in the majority.
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14 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Crime reporters have lamented the current atmosphere of more restricted contact between the press and police at the Leveson Inquiry today.
Testifying this morning, the Guardian’s Sandra Laville said that there has been an “over-reaction” by the Metropolitan police in response to the Inquiry into press standards, and that “open lines of communication, which have been there for many years, are being closed down”.
“It affects everything I do at the moment,” she said. She told the Inquiry that when she recently approached a senior ranking officer to ask him about a subject he knew well, he said he had to ask the Met’s press officer who then refused her access to him. Laville said this was “absolutely not” how it was in the past.
The reporter stressed that the country’s police force needed to be held account, which could not be done by journalists relying solely on official sources. She warned that limiting information to official sources might drive information “underground” and turn it into a “black market”.
“I think we already have laws and guidelines in place and I think they should be reiterated,” Laville said. “You can regulate as much as you like, unless you can trust them [police officers], I don’t think it’s going to work.”
The Independent’s Paul Peachey added that there was a concern that the current eagerness to drive information through official channels — namely the police press office — would lead to less contact between the media and the force, and that restricting information further would be a “worrying trend for the way we hold the police in this country to account.”
Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas of the Sunday Times told the Inquiry he disagreed with recording every exchange between journalists and police officers, as suggested in the recent Filkin report into press-police relations. “It would be a mistake to unnecessarily restrict flow of information between journalists and police officers,” he said.
Laville defended using informal contacts as a source for information alongside official channels, noting that they often bring “texture” and “colour” that official sources might not provide.
She disagreed with the view of former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Condon that hospitality can be “the start of a grooming process that can lead to inappropriate or unethical behaviour”, calling the suggestion “faintly ludicrous”.
“These people are grown-ups, they make life and death decisions,” Laville said.
She said that she saw it as “perfectly legitimate” and part of “normal human relationships” for meetings between journalists and police officers to take place in a social setting, noting that taking contacts out for drinks occurs in every journalistic sector.
She noted differences between Condon’s and Lord Stevens’ commissionerships in dealing with the media. “Under Lord Condon you could not talk to an officer without a press officer present,” Laville said, noting that his successor adopted a policy of “more openness”.
She stressed that the press and police have for years had a “mutually beneficial relationship” and that it was in the public interest. “It’s lasted for a long time because it actually works,” she said, but added that she believed that training on both sides could help to “understand each other’s worlds”.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
13 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The Metropolitan police’s senior press officer has told the Leveson Inquiry that she was not aware that the force had hired a former executive editor at the News of the World as part of a PR consultancy arrangement until after his contract had been terminated.
Giving evidence this morning, Sara Cheesley said she only became aware of Neil Wallis’s £24,000-a-year PR consultancy at Scotland Yard in July 2011. Wallis’s company, Chamy Media, provided communications advice to the Met on a part-time basis from October 2009 to September 2010.
Cheesley said she was “a bit surprised” when she learned of the contract. An incredulous Lord Justice Leveson said: “I am just surprised that you didn’t know anything about him at all.”
Also giving evidence today was the Met’s communications chief Dick Fedorcio, currently on extended leave from Scotland Yard since August pending an investigation into Wallis’s contract arrangement.
Leveson questioned him about the possibility of a “reputational risk” for the Met hiring Wallis months after the Guardian reported on phone hacking at the now defunct tabloid. “And here you were contemplating giving a chap who was deputy editor at the time?”
Fedorcio, who has been the Met’s director of public affairs since 1997, responded that he did not see it that way at the time. In his witness statement he wrote that “on a professional basis, Nell Wallis fully met my requirements; we knew nothing about Neil Wallis that would be to his detriment.”
“There was no indication that he was suspected of involvement in criminality — he had never been named, implicated or questioned regarding phone hacking; he had never been required to resign over the issue at the paper; the phone hacking investigation was closed; and Nell Wallis was no longer employed by the News of the World and was now setting up his own media business,” Fedorcio continued.
He added that former assistant commissioner John Yates had asked Wallis in August 2009 if “there was anything that was going to emerge at any point about phone-hacking that could ’embarrass the MPS, me, him or the Commissioner’,” and that Yates received “categorical assurances that this was the case”.
“As John Yates had obtained and recorded this assurance I felt there was no need for me to repeat the question,” Fedorcio wrote.
In his oral testimony he revealed he was “surprised” about the extent of the out-of-hours meetings between Yates and Wallis, but said he was aware that the two “got on well” and that there was “banter” between them over football matters. Fedorcio added that, had he known the pair were close, he might have thought that hiring Wallis was inappropriate.
He also clarified that Wallis himself had put his name forward for the position over a lunch, “rather than it being proposed by anyone else”, as Ferdorcio had suggested to the Home Affairs select committee in July 2011.
He also revealed that on one occasion in 2010 he let former News of the World crime editor Lucy Panton type a story from his email account on his standalone computer, as the reporter was “under pressure” from the tabloid to file copy. He recalled that Panton had arrived at an end-of-the-week meeting, which Fedorcio had set up with the tabloid paper in order to work with them at an earlier opportunity on stories, with her notes for a story on former Metropolitan Police commander Ali Dizaei, who was jailed for corruption in 2010.
“I was present in the office throughout this time, and therefore got advance sight of a story about an MPS officer,” he wrote in his witness statement, admitting to the Inquiry later that it “may have been an error of judgment”.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from crime reporters.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
