Who runs Britain? The politicians or the journalists?

Phillip Knightley

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 85 spring 2011

Janet Malcolm, an American author who took a keen interest in current affairs, wrote in her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”. At the time, her comment caused a wave of outrage as journalists queued to defend their trade. How many would do the same today?

Telephone hacking, blackmail, intimidation, provocation, invention, misrepresentation and sheer nastiness have been exposed as everyday tools of the journalists’ trade. It was not always like this. News used to be a valuable commodity. The public was prepared to pay for it. Every day, thousands of journalists armed with spiral-bound notebooks set off and tramped the streets in search of it.

Everything changed in 1981 when the supply of news items in the western world over a 24-hour period exceeded the demand. It took some time for media proprietors to react to this. In order to be valuable again, in order to persuade readers to pay for it, information not only had to be new but also had to have an ‘angle’, a twist that would make it irresistible. Opinionated or pundit journalism was one way—and it was no coincidence that the rise of the columnist accelerated in the eighties and nineties. But you cannot have a newspaper staffed solely by columnists. Celebrity journalism seemed to provide the ideal answer.

Journalists specialised in singling out victims, often celebrities they themselves had a hand in creating, and while being careful not to defame them ‘worked them over’ with lurid attacks. Some of these attacks were personal, deliberately calculated to be hurtful and demeaning. Here is an example:

The Speaker of the House of Commons, a position of power and influence, is of less than average height. His wife Sally, an attractive blonde, is several inches taller than he is. This, and the fact that Mrs Bercow was determined to be her own woman, attracted the media’s attention.

She had put her head above the parapet and was therefore ‘asking for it’.

The Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts had this to say about her:

The unlovely Mrs. Bercow has gone thigh-striding off to TV’s Celebrity Big Brother, where she has been behaving with all the decorum of an out-of-work Black Sea belly dancer. The 41 year-old Hooray Henrietta, educated partly at Marlborough, partly in the gutters of London, has boasted about how she outwitted her pint-sized husband. She is reported as saying she persuaded him to agree to her TV stunt by giving him a dirty weekend of breathless entertainment.

Some journalists have defended stories like this by claiming that public figures have no right to a private life, and that by taking the decision to make a career that puts them in the public eye they have to accept the ensuing rough and tumble.

Some even argue that media intrusion can be a force for good and that, for example, there was not enough press intrusion into Princess Diana’s private life. If journalists had pried more into her relationship with Dodi Fayed, the case goes, then they would have revealed that the relationship was a totally unsuitable one, the couple would
have broken up, and Diana and Dodi would not have died in that car crash in a Paris underpass.

Others say that while pretending to hate the media intrusion, celebrities actually enjoy it and court it. Some even come to arrangements with photographers about when and where they will be appearing so that the ‘paps’ can get their ‘snatched’ shots.

But how could they possibly defend their behaviour towards Britain’s first surrogate mother, Kim Cotton? She was paid £6,500 to bear a childless couple’s baby and twice that amount to tell her story to the Daily Star. That unleashed a storm of media criticism. Stories about her were invented, others distorted. Some were terribly cruel. When she had to have a hysterectomy, News of The World headlined its story “Kim Loses Her Money Box”.

In a recent BBC radio program, Kim Cotton confronted each of the journalists who had written about her so harshly 25 years ago and asked them why they had done it. She failed to get a proper answer. Writing about the program, a former BBC editor, Kevin Marsh, concluded:

The journalists who had trashed her just didn’t get it, couldn’t see how their remorseless, unfeeling pursuit looked to people who weren’t journalists; those who wondered how on earth these people could think what they were doing was within the bounds of common human decency.

But it has been the intense competition within the media that specialises in celebrity and human-interest stories that has brought intrusion to a new level and has increased demands for some sort of government control. It was the perceived demand for more and more details of the personal lives of people in the news that led to the telephone hacking scandals that have convulsed the British media, especially the Murdoch media, in recent months.

How more intimate can you get than listening to someone’s private telephone calls? And hacking was very efficient and comparatively cheap. No more laborious than tracking down friends of the celebrity and persuading them to talk. All it needed was payment to a professional telephone hacker and you had the basis of the story
that no one could deny.

Members of Parliament suspected it was going on—some were hacked themselves— but were reluctant to act because they lived in fear of reprisals from powerful media proprietors. This has raised the crunch question of the whole affair: who runs Britain? The politicians or the journalists? Prime Minister Cameron admits that politicians in recent years had “got too close” to media bosses and that this was not a good thing. But the criticism works both ways. Journalists were too close to politicians and thus unable to fill their ideal role of holding those in power to account.

A recent symposium, The Press We Deserve, was attended by the editors of all the serious newspapers in Britain, by the BBC, by politicians, and by some 300 members of the public. It tried to decide whether there should be some form of regulation of the press to curb its excess and to provide public redress for press
abuse, and whether this should be voluntary or statutory. In short, whether the media in some way had to be made accountable to the public.

Kevin Marsh writes that unless the press changes in a very fundamental way and transforms itself from the least accountable and least transparent institution in Britain to one of the most, it is probably doomed. I agree. I believe it is an ethical issue. The media should ask its members to sign up to a code of ethics and punish breaches of the code with censure, fines and publicity. It should try to achieve a high standard of professional behaviour. Journalists must show some empathy for the people they write about. Otherwise it’s all over.