If the sight of a nation rejoicing at the very public implosion of a great media group was less than edifying, its implications were chilling. The eurozone may have been drifting towards possible disintegration, but so what? Famine may have been ravaging the Horn of Africa, but who cares? Here we had MPs smugly and loudly celebrating “victory” in the phone hacking war and gleeful citizens across the country abusing young newspaper reporters taking their first, tentative steps in journalism.
The words “toxic” and “scum” dominated rants in pubs and on radio phone-in shows. And those targeted were not just the newly-arrested – and yet to be charged, yet alone tried – News International staff members who may, but may not, have been responsible for a culture that led to the News of the World hacking into and tampering with messages on the mobile belonging to murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler. Lord help us: how and when did this nation become one unified, perspective-skewed mob bent on revenge and anxious to dance on graves even before they are occupied?
No one, and certainly not I, will defend the kamikaze journalistic malpractice of phone hacking. But when suspicions were first aroused – through such tittle-tattle as Prince William’s strained knee and the subsequent knowledge that grimy private investigators and hapless hacks had meandered through a private celebrity wasteland – little was heard except some huffing and puffing in Westminster and the sound of cash registers ringing up serious sums of money paid to canny hackees. The bad guys were swiftly banged up, Scotland Yard went back to the pub and mostly everyone except those zealots at The Guardian returned to talking about the weather.
Then Milly Dowler’s mobile propelled the saga from tut-tut illegality to senseless and insensible criminality that has dealt British print journalism the most severe of body blows. The resignations of eminent police officers and the ducking and weaving of lickspittle politicians who previously embraced Rupert Murdoch and his acolytes like lampposts befriend dogs were just collateral damage. It is journalism – a skill in which Britain led the world – that is shot through the heart.
News International’s decision to close the News of the World – the ultimate in damage limitation – and the departure of high-flyer Rebekah Brooks and former executive chairman Les Hinton leave the company disabled, a heavyweight champion that has suddenly lost its right arm. Meanwhile, the cluster of arrests made by the previously dormant Metropolitan Police will perhaps lead to the retribution both public and Parliament demand (and enable a Prime Minister whose habitual lack of judgement has become more than mere embarrassment to embark on further follies).
Arrests and possible convictions are serious antidotes to both law-breaking and stupidity. So is the loss of jobs. But how can a battered newspaper industry re-establish the public trust that various red-top excesses had seriously eroded long before an aide suspected Prince William’s mobile messages had been somehow illegally accessed?
The press does not need respectability – indeed, early press baron Lord Northcliffe’s definition of news as “what somebody somewhere wants to suppress” negates such a notion. But its job of seeking out the truth and uncovering corruption demands that the public, while correctly subscribing to the cliché “You can’t believe everything you read in the papers”, can believe most of it most of the time.
The British Journalism Review has long been calling for an industry-wide, industry-led and very public review of the press. Fat chance: increasingly fierce competition in a diminishing market has over the years bred reluctance to co-operate on much other than funding and control of the Press Complaints Commission. Although a vast improvement on the previous regulator, the Press Council, the PCC’s construction – editors wield inordinate power and its adjudications are hampered by a toothless code – means it has become reviled by the establishment and distrusted by many of those seeking redress through it.
The PCC needs now to be totally overhauled, even if history will show that any reform will have been accompanied by the sound of the stable door being slammed long after the departure of the bolting horse and the arrival of statutory regulation. If self-regulation is to be preserved – look outside these shores to verify that is a pre-requisite of a free press – the Commission must be stripped of working editors (half-a-dozen at present). Tougher penalties, including fines that will provide revenue and greater independence, must be introduced. Third-party complaints, currently outside the PCC’s remit, must be considered in circumstances where public rather than personal sensibilities are offended.
Will this and newsroom reforms that banish illegal eavesdropping and blatant entrapment be enough? Of course not. Only when the anything-goes culture of recent years is totally eliminated – perhaps with the assistance of the National Council for the Training of Journalists and those former senior practitioners now working in academia – can print journalism begin to regain any kind of public respect.
It will take years. But if the industry doesn’t act now, Tom Stoppard’s famous line from Night and Day, “I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand”, will become its obituary.
