When the wrinkled old chestnut of press regulation comes up for debate, as it does every couple of years, it tends to be discussed in terms of privacy. Can the media be restrained from intruding in private lives without impairing freedom of speech? Is the domestic conduct of public figures fair game for journalists? Where do you draw the line between public interest and prurience? And so forth. The arguments always end in stalemate or empty promises and probably always will.
There is another side to the issue of press conduct which tends to be neglected, and that is the matter of accuracy. Newspapers often get things wrong, both in harmless ways and in ways that cause hurt and distress, but they are very rarely called to account.
I thought of this not long ago when I was interviewing a senior policeman involved with the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence case. He was desperate to show me how much had changed in the way his officers went about their work. There was improved training and re-training; there were codes of conduct; there was monitoring internal and external; there was consultation with interested parties; there was transparency and accountability. In short, the police were straining every muscle to put right what had been wrong, and to be seen to do so.
A jolly good thing too, you might say, and you would be right. Are they doing enough? Probably not, but that is not my point here. What I thought as I listened was that all of this was the result of public pressure, much of it exerted latterly in the press. The Metropolitan Police has committed the most dreadful mistakes and there is a justified demand, not least in the newspapers, for reassurance that it could not happen again. But there is hypocrisy here.
Journalists – and I am one – tend to be intolerant of other people’s mistakes. We name names. We demand that they make apologies and pay compensation. We are unforgiving, endlessly raking up past problems. We are very quick to see signs of systemic failure. Could this happen again? Are there not systems to prevent it? Should senior management not carry the can?
All this is a good thing – the Lawrence affair is a case in point, even though the media woke up to it rather late in the day – but we do not apply these standards to ourselves. Journalists hardly ever ask themselves those questions, and when they do they do not wait for an answer. We want the banks and the police regulated, as well as the politicians and the utilities and the landlords and every conceivable institution and authority in the land – except ourselves.
God knows, we make our own mistakes. Take the response to Peter Stothard’s decision to step aside as editor of the Times. Several newspapers promptly speculated that this was the result of problems at the paper over the coverage of the Ashcroft affair, but it proved otherwise. The implication that he had been sacked left Stothard with little choice but to reveal a serious illness he had wanted to keep private. It was an ugly business and, as Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian (one of the offending papers), it “raises all sorts of questions about modern journalism”. Nobody is answering them.
If a utility company sent an aggressive final-demand letter to someone recently dead, causing distress to the bereaved, we would not be surprised to see complaints in the press. We might want to know why the company did not have systems to prevent such errors and what they were going to do about it. The signatory of the letter would find his name in print, as would the chairman or chief executive, especially if he was sufficiently highly paid to rank as a fat cat.
Apply the same test to the Stothard story. Were the offending reporters named? Were searching questions asked about the procedures and standards applied at the relevant newsdesks? Were editors accused of failing to do their job while continuing to accept enormous salaries (and they do receive enormous salaries)? The hell they were. And that was a story affecting a journalist. The press is more casual about inaccuracies that upset, offend, mislead or misrepresent people outside its own industry. Our job is to purvey information and comment, and yet when we get it wrong we simply snigger or shrug. It is not a luxury we allow others.
The libel laws and the formal press complaints procedures are no answer. The former are for the rich, while the latter make no difference. So what am I suggesting? As a journalist, I have made mistakes that hurt people and I still cringe at the thought of them. I would not relish the idea of being named and shamed in print because of them and I hesitate to suggest that this should be done to others every time there is a cock-up, although it would no doubt have a salutary effect. I wonder more about the systems.
Openness and accountability should bring about change. Newspapers should be ready not only to admit mistakes and apologise (as they occasionally do at present) but also to explain what went wrong and what they are doing to prevent any recurrence. They should have systems, which they are prepared to discuss openly, for checking and testing information. And they should have clear rules and standards about what is printable and what is not – rules that carry penalties for journalists who break them and for editors who fail to enforce them.
This has a smack of discipline that is frankly alien to much modern newspaper culture, and probably it could be enforced only by higher expectations among readers and a competitive desire among the papers to show that they are cleaning up their act. It might also involve proprietors in reversing some of the “efficiencies” that have purged so many good sub-editors and have so consistently placed youth before experience. It is probably a daydream.
So next time you read a headline or an editorial attacking some institution or business for lax practices and demanding that heads must roll and new procedures be introduced – it might be a railway company, or BNFL, or Yorkshire Water, or the CPS or the Metropolitan Police – think this: the people who write this stuff may be right, but they are also hypocrites.
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