09 Jul 09 | Uncategorized
The news could not have come at a worse time for free speech campaigners. Revelations about private detectives have been paid large sums by the tabloid press to hack into the mobile phones and other records of public figures will cause damage to the newspaper at the heart of the practice, the News of the World. It will not enhance the credibility of its former Editor, Andy Coulson, now David Cameron’s trusted Director of Communications at the Conservative Party.
But the consequences are far more important than the future of a tabloid and a spin doctor. The scandal — for it is a scandal –– has unleashed a further bout of yelping from the “something must be done” brigade, the people in public life who argue that the media has long been “out of control”. Their cheerleader is Tony Blair, who famously used one of his last days as prime minister to take revenge on journalists, deriding them as “feral beasts”.
The painful truth is that, in one respect, these people are not wrong. British journalism contains no shortage of sleazy practice. And yet the context is entirely misleading. The biggest problem with the Fourth Estate is not that it finds out too much, but that it finds out too little. Investigative journalism is a declining art. Much of that is due to economics. It costs a considerable amount to deploy a team to eke out information about, say, a dodgy arms deal, unethical corporate practice, or British collusion in torture. Sometimes months of probing leads to nothing, and editors are under pressure to account for every penny they spend. Some of the decline is attributed to simply laziness. It takes a lot of effort to commission and see through difficult stories.
But the main impediment comes from Britain’s horrific libel laws. So skewed is the legislation and the practice that the burden of proof in court falls entirely on the media, rather than the plaintiff. The costs have grown beyond all proportion and are entirely out of sync with the original “offence”. This has led to malicious threats of prosecutions by the rich and famous, forcing newspapers to retract, even where they know the information to be correct, simply because they cannot afford to sustain their defence.
Britain has now become the libel capital of the world, the home of what has come to be known as “libel tourism”, the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and others to prosecute not just journalists, but book authors, even NGOs. The chilling effect is hard to quantify, because beyond the prosecutions and threats lies the self censorship that is affecting so much journalism at the moment. The new mantra, from the BBC to most newspapers, even now to some bloggers, is: “why cause trouble?”
The House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is putting the finishing to an enquiry it has been carrying out on “press standards, privacy and libel”—note the order. At Index on Censorship, in conjunction with English PEN, we have been conducting our own inquiry into the impact of libel. We have spoken to editors, lawyers, journalists, publishers, bloggers and NGOs in a unified campaign for changes in the libel law. We intend to issue our report in coming months as the government ponders its response to the Select Committee. We urge those preparing their conclusions to distinguish between robust investigative journalism that seeks to find out what the powerful would rather conceal from us and grubby and often illegal practice.
If they fail to make this distinction, if they tarnish us with the same brush, democracy and free expression will be the losers.
25 Jun 09 | Uncategorized
The charge sheet is long and yet the dock is empty. One of the most extraordinary aspects of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war has been the ability of those responsible to evade any form of reckoning. For that they have many people to thank, including incurious journalists and pliant judges. But most of all, Tony Blair is in debt to his New Labour friends for their efforts to get him off the hook — recent days, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown.
At each step of the way, Blair and his allies have outmanoeuvred their opponents. The death of Dr David Kelly in 2003 provided ministers, and particularly Alastair Campbell, with some of their worst moments. The emails, the hubris and the deceit would have done for many a world leader. Instead, thanks to some artful bullying by Campbell and the brilliant recommendation by Mandelson (drawing on his experience as Northern Ireland Secretary) to appoint Lord Hutton, it was the BBC and not the government that took the flak.
That was that, declared a smiling Blair. The government had been exonerated. A year later, faced with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the prime minister then called upon Lord Butler of Brockwell. He made sure the terms of reference were as narrow as possible. Unlike the theatrical testimony before Hutton, Butler’s team met in private. As the only journalist called to appear before them, I took a close interest in the way they carried out their investigation. Their manner was Establishment-polite, but their questioning was refreshingly direct. One of the most impressive members of the team was a certain Sir John Chilcot. They asked me to elaborate on a number of revelations in my book, Blair’s Wars. They then asked me straight out if I believed Blair had lied. I replied that I did not suspect he had gone out of his way to tell falsehoods, but that, knowing the intelligence did not stack up to justify war, he willed the facts to fit. I considered my answer to be quite clever at the time. I now wish I had been a little less clever and a lot smarter.
Butler’s conclusions were coruscating but couched in mandarin-speak. Of the so-called dodgy dossier, he said it went to the outer limits of the intelligence available. He recorded surprise that, in spite of the ‘generally negative’ results of the UN inspectors, the quality of British intelligence was not reassessed. We found out only afterwards that Downing Street had prevailed on Butler to water down the most important passages.
What mattered was the press conference that accompanied the launch. Butler had the prime minister’s fate in his fingers. He decided beforehand that he would not give an opinion as to whether Blair should resign. Remarkably, nobody thought of asking him. Instead Butler said he did not hold any single individual responsible for the failures in intelligence. Within seconds, the Downing Street spin operation went into overdrive, thanking the eminent privy councillors for their work, insisting that their recommendations would be given all due weight, but celebrating the fact that they had been let off the hook once again. Butler would later regret his timidity.
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16 Jun 09 | Comment, News and features, United Kingdom
A private investigation into the Iraq war will only backfire on Gordon Brown, writes Chris Ames
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13 Mar 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Chris Ames
The new revelations about Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier are pretty devastating. Emails revealed intelligence experts veering from despondency about exaggerated claims to black humour about Doctor Frankenstein while policy officials asked for unhelpful caveats to be removed. Surely this is why the documents have been hidden for so long.
I first asked for these papers in June 2005, nearly four years ago. The Cabinet Office delayed for as long as it could before turning down the request, at which point I appealed to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Last September, nearly three years on, Thomas ordered that the papers should be released, hinting along the way that they would provide ‘evidence that the dossier was deliberately manipulated in order to present an exaggerated case for military action’.
The Cabinet Office then quietly appealed the case to the Information Tribunal. Given recent tribunal decisions, such as the cabinet minutes case, they can’t have had much hope of achieving anything other than a further delay.
It’s not clear that the Cabinet Office even intended to fight the case. At the beginning of last week, as it was due to submit skeleton arguments, it told the tribunal that it was withdrawing. This looks like a scandalous waste of time and public money.
The Cabinet Office promised the tribunal that it would give me the papers ‘as soon as practicable’. But no-one told me this until I went to the scheduled hearing on Monday this week. The Cabinet Office was still reluctant to tell me what was happening. Eventually it was claimed that they had been put in the post on Monday night (9 March). [UPDATE: I have just received the documents in the post (Friday morning, 13 March). They package is dated Wednesday 11 March]
Whether this really happened remains to be seen. I have still not received the hard copies. Yesterday morning the Cabinet Office emailed me electronic copies and I learnt that they were going to publish them at midday. This is what government departments usually do with freedom of information requests, discouraging journalists from thinking that they will get much of an exclusive.
In spite of these apparent attempts at news management, the media have woken up to what the documents show. The Iraq dossier was deliberately sexed up, against the wishes of the intelligence community. The case for war was heavily spun.
