John Lloyd

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

My Reuters colleague Jack Shafer wrote a powerful piece, giving two cheers for the tabloids. He took his text, as I did in a quite contrary piece, from the current Leveson Inquiry into British tabloid journalism, which has its roots in the uncovering of the massive interception of phone messages – “phone hacking” – at the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s British stable, now closed.

Columnists working on the same patch usually pass by on the other side of an argument with each other. But this argument is important to the profession of journalism, now in several sorts of trouble, and it is important to the public which journalism claims to inform. So I want to take public issue.

Jack quotes the legal writer Stephen Bates in the Journal of Media Law & Ethics as arguing that the “freedom of the press in Britain has been constricted” by judgments made in the past few years in favor of observing the privacy of those about whom journalists have written. Shafer and Bates agree that such judgments will deprive the British working class of its favored reading material, and will delight the elite, whose sins, of whatever kind, will be safe from the public scrutiny they should have. These assertions need examples, which Jack doesn’t give. Here are two:

In 2008, the then head of the association which controlled Formula 1 racing, Max Mosley, was outed in the News of the World as having enjoyed a sadomasochistic orgy with a number of women paid for their services. So shocked was the newspaper that they used several pages and many photographs (taken by a woman who took part in the orgy and was paid to give the News of the World the story) to display Mosley’s degradation. The story gained extra traction because the women were dressed in what the paper described as Nazi uniforms – and Mosley is the son of the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Much to the disgust of tabloid editors, Mosley took the paper to court – and won, and was paid substantial damages.

More recently, in October, the wheel turned the other way. Rio Ferdinand, a Manchester United star and England’s soccer team’s captain, sued the Sunday Mirror after the paper revealed a string of affairs. The case was dismissed. The judge accepted that he was a public figure, who had recently given interviews with his heavily pregnant wife, saying his wild days were over. His hypocrisy was thus a matter of legitimate public interest.

Privacy cases are now taken under the Human Rights legislation, which balances two clauses — one in favor of freedom of expression, the other in favor of the right to privacy. Judgment must always balance the two rights. Yet it is practically inconceivable that any judge would allow a privacy suit to succeed if there were any element of public interest – defined as something which the public should know – in the published story. In the case of Max Mosley, who did not proclaim the joys of straight sex (nor, for that matter, of sadomasochism), he was no hypocrite, and thus  it was found he had a right to keep his sexual activities private. Rio Ferdinand was judged a hypocrite – and since , at least for some, he is assumed to be a role model, the newspaper exposure was unpunished. Any politician would have been treated similarly.

Indeed, in the most famous exposure of recent years – that of Westminster MPs’ expenses – the Daily Telegraph, which reproduced at length the details of MPs’ use of taxpayers’ money, paid for the disks containing the information, which were stolen. There has been no hint of any action against the Telegraph for trafficking in stolen goods, normally a serious offense — nor could one succeed.

To argue that the tabloids are the preserve of the working class and thus give a sort of implicit pass from questions of ethics is a very bad argument. In fact, it was the revelation that the News of the World journalists had hacked into the cellphone of Milly Dowler, a teenager who had disappeared and was subsequently discovered murdered, which sparked an explosion of distaste which had no class preference.

The phone hacking in this case raised hopes that Milly was still alive — the hacker had deleted messages, which gave the Dowlers and others, who called the phone in desperate efforts to get an answer, false hopes that she was still alive. Even without such an egregious intervention, the case that the working class needs a diet of tawdry revelations in order to satisfy them recalls the dystopias both of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, where those conditioned to be mere automatons had a debased media diet; and of George Orwell’s  “1984″, where the proles were fed a similar doctored brew of mindless rubbish. When people of any position in society realize the way in which tabloids get stories, they tend to be shocked.

Jack writes from a journalistic culture in the United States, where, as in many other countries, a sharp if informal break is made between tabloid journalism and journalism that seeks both to observe certain ethical rules and to give a view of the world which is based on evidence, investigation, and fidelity to the observable truth.

When the former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan, of whom Jack seems to approve, told the Leveson Inquiry that he was proud that the paper’s campaign against pedophiles, in which he had assisted, had resulted in an irate mob beating up a pediatrician, one got a glimpse into the depths to which the tabloids could sink, and the state of mind they engendered in their staff.

The fact that, in the UK, the tabloids like the late News of the World, The Sun, the Daily Star, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror together with the more upmarket Daily Mail and their Sunday sister papers, command a circulation of some 8 million (even with the closure of the News of the World) and a readership of at least double that, meant that their political heft was large. Politicians believed that Rupert Murdoch had great power, both to reveal their private indiscretions and to give or withhold support from their parties (they were not wrong in this, even if they may have exaggerated it.

They courted him, flattered him, did the minimum possible to annoy him. That is bad for any democracy. Many of the politicians, including the Prime Minister, have put ashes on their head, confessed they were too pliable and swore to withstand media pressure in the future. It will be good for democracy if they remain faithful to that pledge.

Tabloid journalism can be excellent – sharper, more vivid, more polemically passionate than the upmarket press. It is fighting for survival, like every other form of newspaper journalism – long may it live. On trial in London is not a journalism of that sort. It is the journalism which can ruin lives. Soon may it die.

Photos, top to bottom: A journalist reads a tabloid newspaper that claims to have details from the leaked Hutton report prior to its publication, in Downing Street in London, January 28, 2004. REUTERS/Russell Boyce RUS/ASA; A young mother reads the British Sunday tabloid newspaper News of the World July 23. The paper has come under criticism on Sunday after it printed the names and photographs of 49 convicted paedophiles following the murder of a young girl three weeks ago. The paper says it will publish the names and addresses of all known paedophiles in Britain over the coming weeks. REUTERS/Kieran Doherty

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

An inquiry under way in the Royal Courts of Justice London, just a few hundred yards from Fleet Street, once the heart of the British newspaper industry, is becoming — in the low key way in which the British like to think they always do things (but often don’t) — a global event. It is the consequence of a crisis, as inquiries frequently are. But it will have consequences of its own: one of these may be to redefine journalism for the 21st century.

In July, the forward march of Rupert Murdoch and his son James through the British media and political establishment was halted — cruelly, abruptly, with every sign of the chaos and clamor which his tabloids usually love, indeed often create. The efforts by his British newspaper subsidiary, News International, to lock in the narrative that phone hacking at the Sunday tabloid News of the World was the preserve of one “rogue” reporter in 2006 — Clive Goodman, the Royal Correspondent, who had paid for his sins with a short sharp prison sentence — fell apart. Like Marley’s ghost from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, the awful truth came through the door, dragging a clanking chain made up of mobile phones, mementos of the hackings into the private lives of this celebrity and that politician and, most horrible, of ordinary people, caught in some media storm, for a few days the biggest story in town, and thus regarded as fair game.

No escaping that. Politicians, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, beat their breasts and said they had been too servile to the man who had four of the most important newspapers in the land and controlled the largest share of the only major satellite broadcaster, now rivaling the BBC. No more kow-towing to the Murdochs. The Press Complaints Commission, which handles complaints against the press and had foolishly said that nothing was amiss at the News of the World, was for the chop. A Commission, with full powers to examine and propose, was set up, under the chairmanship of Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with a reputation for probity and profundity.

That Commission has been under way for more than a month now, and it has made for good copy. For days, big names — actor Hugh Grant, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, comedian Steve Coogan, and the former head of Formula One racing, Max Mosley — sat in a kind of witness box and told of harassment, threats, and gross intrusions. Mosley, whom the News of the World had caught in a sado-masochistic orgy with girls dressed in Wehrmacht “uniforms” and was so shocked that it put photographs of it across six pages. Mosley refused to be shamed into silence and said his tastes, however eccentric, were nobody’s business but his own.

J.K. Rowling spoke of being trapped in her house by squads of paparazzi and reporters seeking anything for a story: one had got into her five-year-old daughter’s school and put a note in her schoolbag for her mother, begging for an interview. One day, she said, when she thought they had gone because there was no story about her anywhere, she came out to find that two more were still lying in wait. When her PR assistant asked them why they were there, they told her that they were bored in the office.

Above all others were the McCanns, Kate and Gerry, whose daughter Madeleine went missing in May 2007 from their rented flat in Portugal – and who were at the center of  a media maelstrom for two years. The News of the World editor Colin Myler had, they said, called and shouted at them for giving an interview to Hello magazine, bullying them into giving an interview to his paper. Four months later, the paper acquired a private diary written by Kate McCann and published excerpts – making her feel, she said, “violated” and “worthless”.

The story of the first weeks has been, in the main, the story of the tabloids. Even with the disappearance of the News of the World — closed in a vain attempt to put an end to the damage the Murdochs, father and son, were suffering — has a varied tabloid culture. Apart from the market-leading Sun, there are the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, with the Daily Star, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail (though its editor, Paul Dacre, is quick to claim that it has as much of the up-market paper about it as the tabloid), now the most distinctive voice of the right in the country. They vary, but less than they used to: for long, the mainstay of their business model has been celebrity, sex scandals and TV in various guises, as well as extensive coverage of sports, especially football (what Americans call soccer).

They assume that if their readers want the news, they can (and do) get it from TV: their job is, largely, to entertain, to distract. Dacre, invited to give a speech to the Inquiry, mocked the elitist liberals for mocking the tabloids, saying that by doing so, they were scorning the choice of the call center worker in Sunderland, who lived for football, and had a right to know who his football heroes were sleeping with since he looked up to them and they tried to sell him things through appearing in advertisements.

Dacre is the leader of the tabloid pack; though he sometimes manifests something of a distaste himself — he said he would not have the News of the World in the house — he is the foremost in arguing that their stories of sex scandals, which interest the public, are also in the public interest. He, and Trevor Kavanagh, a Sun veteran political writer, and Kelvin MacKenzie, a former Sun editor, claim to see the Inquiry not as a purgative of toxins in the press but as a liberal-elite plot, run by their political enemies, staffed by those who despise them, advised by journalists from the Establishment who know nothing of popular taste and wish to know less.

Asked Dacre, rhetorically: “Am I alone in detecting the rank smells of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation over a British press that dared to expose their greed and corruption – the same political class, incidentally, that, until a few weeks ago, had spent years indulging in sickening genuflection to the Murdoch press?”

At stake in the courtroom – “the right to publish private lives; to judge the famous as hypocrites” for being “role models” and committing adultery, or indulging in kinky sex, or – like the McCanns – just being fodder for a ravenous appetite for detail on a mystery, and a suffering. The tabloid defense: people want it (they do); it can upset the powerful (it can); it sells newspapers (it does). And if, by some monstrous stroke of a censorious pen, the tabloids were prohibited from printing such stuff, it would migrate anyway to the web, to Facebook pages, to Twitter (it would).

This story has a way to run. Still to be exposed – the power the newspapers have exercised over politicians; and the nature of their relationship with the police – the evidence already seems to say they paid, at times lavishly, for information. At the end of it, we will have a portrait of how papers, many of them the most popular in Britain, operate: and not just the British press, but papers in many countries, where the craving for living vicariously through the private lives of strangers and the famous can make a market.

Just this month, in Oxford, a world away from the tabloids, a philosopher named Onora O’Neill gave the annual Reuters Institute lecture, and in a grave and deliberate way, pointed out that the freedom of expression which the newspapers proclaim as their own is not theirs to own. That freedom to express is an individual right: but these papers are parts of large – in the Murdochs’ case, huge – corporations with global reach, with a consuming need to persuade or bully politicians into licensing their purchases and mergers, and with the daily imperative to make a profit. Their “freedom of expression” is not just the necessary condition of democracy: the untrammeled freedom they demand can be oppressive, mendacious, brutal in its operation.

The grand dilemma which has landed on Lord Justice Leveson’s plate is how to define freedom, and how to ensure it works not just for the hard-eyed men and women who pound the facts and fantasies into a daily paper, but also how it works for those who are the object of their attention. Whatever solution he reaches, Lord Leveson said, “it must have an ethical basis to which all adhere”. Now, there’s a phrase that might be heard round the world. And if the judge can produce such an outcome, he’ll be a Daniel come to judgment, indeed.

Photos: The procession carrying Queen Elizabeth in a gilded carriage makes its way down Fleet Street towards St. Paul’s Cathedral June 4, 2002. REUTERS/Chris Helgren; A demonstrator wearing a mask depicting BSkyB Chairman James Murdoch poses for photographers outside the Houses of Parliament in London November 10, 2011. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett; Dickens’ Story on Screen and Television,” published earlier this year by McFarland & Company, Inc. RCS/HB