22 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A former home secretary has attacked elements of the British press as “spiteful”, telling Lord Justice Leveson today that problems of nastiness were rooted in culture.
“Why are some elements of the media in this country so spiteful?” Alan Johnson MP asked the Leveson Inquiry today.
“It’s the nastiness, real nastiness you have to face. That’s a cultural thing,” he said. He pointed to the singling out of female politicians as subjects of spite, adding that he felt the sections of the press’s attempts to attack politicians’ families was “concerning”.
Johnson, who was home secretary from June 2009 to May 2010, told the Inquiry about a story the News of the World was due to run in January 2008 while he was health secretary alleging he had had an affair with a district nurse in Exeter.
“I’d never been to Exeter,” Johnson said, adding that he rang the paper’s editor to tell him the story was “absolute rubbish”.
“Run the story — it will be a good pension fund when I take you to court,” Johnson told the editor. The story — which was untrue — was never published.
On the topic of future regulation, Johnson toyed with the idea of a Parliament-backed system similar to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which oversees complaints made about police forces in England and Wales, but stressed the need to avoid “doing anything North Korean”.
“It is important that the press is not dragged kicking and screaming to a regime they fiercely disagree with,” Johnson said.
Also appearing this morning was Labour MP Tom Watson, one of the fiercest critics of News International, describing the publisher as the “ultimate floating voter” that behaved “with menace”.
Watson, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, said there was a sense of “mystique about the News International stable” and of it having “unique access to Downing Street.”
“They were the ones that had the connections and everyone was aware of it,” Watson said. “As a minister when I discussed issues or policy, there was always a conversation about how this would play out in the Sun,” he added.
When asked by Leveson if there was a similar concern about other titles, Watson described the Daily Mail as more “constant” in its editorial position. “There were no surprises,” he said.
He named justice secretary Ken Clarke as one of the Murdoch-owned Sun’s “target MPs” and subject of “frequently harsh comment” in the redtop due to his willingness to “swim against the tide”.
Watson admitted he had “no hard evidence that there was a craven understanding” between politicians and executives at NI, but said he believed this was the “general view” among the public. He stressed that reforms were needed to restore public confidence in relations between the two.
Watson also revealed he had been contacted by a dozen MPs who had told him of their intimidation by NI titles and other British tabloids. He said they feared “ridicule and humiliation over their private lives or political mistakes”.
He also briefly described the surveillance the now-defunct News of the World subjected him to. An email trail between investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood and two executives at the tabloid suggests private investigator Derek Webb had been commissioned to survey Watson at a Labour Party conference in the hopes of proving he was having an affair; an allegation Watson said was untrue.
When asked about the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed the Murdoch empire, Watson argued that politicians had “closed their minds to the potential of a major scandal at one of the key outlets for their message.”
“Relations between them [NI and politicians] were too fibrous, so politicians couldn’t divorce their objective thinking,” he added.
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21 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Former Labour cabinet minister Lord Mandelson has accused the British newspapers of feeling they are “above the law”, arguing that it is “politically suicidal” for any prime minister to consider taking them on.
In an afternoon at the Leveson Inquiry in which he lamented a “loss of deference” in society, Mandelson compared the press to Britain’s trades unions in feeling “untouchable” and wanting to “operate above the law”. He wrote in his witness statement:
Like the trades unions, when you try to apply the law, they shout from the rooftops about basic freedoms and fundamental rights. (…) Perhaps, because of all that has now happened and been revealed about the invasions of privacy, law-breaking and deceptions, the time for the press has also finally arrived. But it will take a brave government and I would not bank on their nerve holding.
Mandelson, one of the key architects of New Labour, lamented what he termed the “tabloidisation” of the British press, suggesting News International titles and others had “pioneered” a shift from “conventional news to a pre-occupation with celebrity, scandal, gossip and sexual revelation”.
“There are barely any broadsheets left, figuratively or literally,” he said, adding later that he felt the country would be “better off” if newspapers “spent more time looking into corporate misbehaviour and general wrongdoing rather than celebrity tittle tattle and gossip”.
He also expressed fears over the challenges presented by digital media. “Media business models are being ransacked, governments are losing control of the information flow and the public are being given access to a flood of undigested and unmediated ‘news’, all in the name of free speech,” he wrote.
He stressed a need to maintain standards in the press. “The media has to be challenging,” he said,”but it seems that every journalist wants to turn themselves into a [Bob] Woodward or a [Carl] Bernstein. They have to accept that sometimes people haven’t done wrong.”
Mandelson spoke out in favour of a body enforcing higher standards, but argued that corporate governance and transparency were equally important. “Just in the case of banks, you need regulation, but for banks to uphold proper standards they need better people running them,” he said.
He advocated independent, statute-backed regulation controlled by neither the press nor the government, disagreeing with Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestion that it might be seen as infringing free speech.
Elsewhere in his three hours of evidence, Mandelson described his time in dealing with the press in the run up to the 1992 elections and Labour’s takeover of power in 1997, when the Murdoch-owned Sun famously switched its previous Conservative party allegiance.
He compared dealing with media in the 1980s as “like living in a jungle, engaging in almost daily hand to hand combat with people who never seemed prepared to give you a break”, and described Labour’s relations with press around 1992 elections as “pretty dire” due to their antagonism with the party.
Ahead of the 1992 elections, Mandelson said, “we didn’t want to make permanent enemies of News International”, as the party tried to forge a friendlier relationship with the publisher.
However he was firm in rejecting the view that “some sort of Faustian pact” had been struck between the Murdoch-owned group and Labour at the time of the Sun supporting the party ahead of its 1997 landslide win.
On his dictum of press-politicians relations, which the Inquiry is currently examining, Mandelson said: “You can be friendly with journalists, but journalists are never your friends.”
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
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21 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The former secretary for culture media and sport told the Leveson Inquiry today that her family had “been destroyed” by intense media harassment.
Tessa Jowell, culture secretary from 2001 to 2007, became emotional as she described the “total” invasion of privacy she and her family had suffered.
Detailing what she called “obsessive curiosity” about her family and private life, Jowell said: “In the months to years after I’d find people sitting outside my house with cameras.”
“Only in the last 18 months do I find myself not looking in cars to see if there is somebody waiting,” she added.
In May 2006 she was told by Operation Caryatid, the original phone hacking investigation, that her voicemail had been intercepted 28 times, and subsequently discovered the activity was more extensive. In December 2011 Jowell settled a civil case for breach of privacy with News International.
“There is no evidence yet shown to me that the hacking of my phone was undertaken for commercial motives, but rather in pursuance of an obsessive interest in my troubled family circumstances at that time,” Jowell wrote in her witness statement.
She added that she was “deeply shocked” when she read Metropolitan police’s DCS Keith Surtees’s evidence, in which he said Jowell had declined to sign a statement to be used in the prosecutions of former News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire when she was first informed of phone hacking in August 2006.
“It is untrue,” she told the Inquiry. “Had I been asked at that time to provide a witness statement I would have.”
She said she “sought clarification” from the police over how she could contribute but was assured there was nothing further to do, writing in her witness statement that her “offers of further help were declined”.
She also said she did not approach the News of the World over the matter because she believed the perpetrators had been imprisoned, and did not complain to the Press Complaints Commission about the press intrusion she suffered.
During her evidence, Jowell and Lord Justice Leveson collided over whether or not the Press Complaints Commission was in fact a regulator. “Regulatory may be the wrong term,” Jowell said, noting that the Commission oversaw media conduct and provided redress for those who felt they had been wronged by the press.
Asked if the DCMS should have taken a more hands-on role in media monitoring, Jowell said such manoeuvres would have “been seen as a step to undermine self-regulation”.
“There’s no halfway house in this,” she said. “Either the media is regulated on statutory basis or it’s self-regulated.”
The Inquiry continues this afternoon with evidence from Lord Mandelson.
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18 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
There was an unsettling moment in the normally demure Leveson Inquiry last week.
As the 10 May hearing began Lord Justice Leveson announced he would be calling Independent on Sunday editor John Mullin to appear to discuss an article published the previous Sunday Leveson said disclosed details included in Andy Coulson’s confidential witness statement.
Coulson, the former News of the World editor and David Cameron’s ex-communications chief, was due to appear that afternoon. Under Inquiry protocol, witness statements are confidential, and Leveson has made clear his distaste for leaks, issuing restriction orders under section 19 of the Inquiries Act that prohibit prior publication of the statements outside of the Inquiry’s confidentiality circle.
Summoned under section 21 of the Inquiries Act, Mullin appeared, and was robust in his defence: he told Leveson that the story — which revealed Coulson held shares in News Corp while working at No. 10 — had been confirmed by three sources before the leaked copy of the witness statement came to his attention on the Wednesday evening prior to publication.
He said he was aware of the Inquiry’s restriction order but believed it did not apply to the story, as none of the sources relied on Coulson’s statement.
It quickly became rather unsettling, with junior counsel David Barr questioning why Mullin had read the statement at all and implying it was used as a fourth source for the article. A defiant Mullin did not budge, repeating that the story had been confirmed — “copper-bottomed” in his words — by the time the statement reached him.
“We didn’t use the statement as a source,” he told the Inquiry, adding:
We may not be the world’s greatest newspaper, in fact we may not be the greatest newspaper in our own building, but we’re good honest journalists and we try and do our job as best as we can do it. This is an issue of massive public importance. The fact that your Inquiry is going on shouldn’t stop us from doing good honest journalism as we go ahead. It was our misfortune that through good honest journalism we got this statement after we had already substantiated the story.
Later in the week Leveson said he would not pursue action under Section 36 of the 2005 Inquiries Act against the newspaper.
Even for an interested (and, if I may say so, pretty dedicated) Leveson watcher such as myself, exchanges of the Barr-Mullin kind made me question the Inquiry. Mullin explained clearly how he believed he did not break the restriction order; was it necessary for Barr to press further on the other three sources?
Besides being unnecessary, it was futile: journalists don’t reveal sources. At that moment, the gulf between the lawyers brought into examine the standards of the press and the journalists giving evidence had never seemed so wide, or so problematic.
In printing the Coulson story Mullin had done what good editors do: fill their pages with informed and readable content that serves the person buying the newspaper.
The judge might be a few months away yet from setting in stone his recommendations for what the country’s press regulation system should look like, but watching a lawyer trying to get a newspaper editor to shed light on his sources did little to calm fears of a chilling atmosphere towards the press and freedom of expression.
These fears aren’t just speculation: various crime correspondents across regional and national titles told the Inquiry during their evidence in the second module that previously open channels of communication between them and police forces had been shut down (see here, here and here).
The episode might have been nothing more than a roadblock, and Leveson has said that no inferences should be made from the orders he issues and his approach to press regulation.
But Mullin summarised it perfectly when he said the Inquiry — fascinating and illuminating though it may be — should not stop good, honest journalism.
To do so would go against the freedom and diversity of expression that British newspapers are built on.
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index, where she covers the Leveson Inquiry. She tweets at @martaruco
