When the News of the
World Fake Sheikh asked me to record every conversation I had with the
subjects of my stories for an investigation the paper did in India, I thought
it was an unnecessary, additional work. But this very policy of the News of the World saved
their journalist Bethany Usher when she was arrested for the hacking scandal under
Operation Weeting.
Usher was arrested for ‘transcribing a voicemail message in
an email’. "What saved me was the News of
the World policy about taping everything," says Usher who had taped her
interactions with the source who had had given her permission to use the
voicemail for a story, which led to charges being dropped against her within
eight days. “Tape everything” she advices journalism students at the ‘Journalism In The Dock’
panel discussion at City University yesterday.
“Tape everything”
- Bethany Usher, former News of the World journalist turned journalism lecturer (arrested under Operation Weeting and later cleared)
While Usher has taken this experience in her stride and
moved on to teaching journalism now, her colleague Neil Wallis, the former
executive editor of the News of the World, also arrested for his alleged involvment in hacking scandal and only cleared recently seemed
still agitated by the whole experience.
Wallis warned journalism students that Leveson is
‘destroying your future’. Speaking on press freedom, Neil added that ‘once it
is taken away; you will never get it back.” The bitterness in Neil’s arguments reflected
his experience as a suspect in Operation Weeting. Neil was on police bail for
21 months which he describes as ‘isolating’ and his arrest as ‘politically
motivated’.
Neil described his friend’s experience who was taken to the
police station in the wee hours of the morning while the police searched his
house, while his “teenage daughters watched them rifle through their underwear
drawers looking for alleged evidence.”
His angst against Leveson inquiry and police investigations
sparked off a heated debate with Brian Cathcart, the editor of the Hacked Off
blog, journalist and writer. Cathcart’s support to Leveson, smirked Wallis and
a row continued on the fine print in the Leveson recommendation. Wallis
believed that the politicians and police are using the low journalist
credibility in public now for “payback” against Murdoch’s papers. He is currently pursuing Masters in Criminology.
All though the panel discussion Cathcart and Wallis were
found taking pot-shots at each other. Did the hacking scandal create a “with us
or against us” mentality in the journalist fraternity, I wondered.
A sombre argument came from Peter
Preston, the former Guardian
editor who warned that Britain was setting
a dangerous example for the rest of the world. Preston who has travelled
extensively around the world described media freedom (or lack of it) in
other countries. “It’s become a norm to arrest journalists in UK”, said
Preston, and
added that now some countries justify the atrocities on journalists by citing
UK as an example. He mentioned that at the International Press Institute, the
Turkish Prime Minister defended locking up journalists or terrorism charges
because “it happens all the time in Britain.”
Losing
sources:
The most insightful comments on the
state of investigative journalism today came from Brian Flynn, investigative
editor of the Sun. “It feels we are
being frogmarched into a police state,” he said which generated an agitated
response from a professor in the audience that such a comment was “ludicrous”
and a by product of tabloid mentality.
" It feels we are being frogmarched into a police state"
- Brian Flynn, Investigations Editor, The Sun
Flynn argues that the fear of
arrests and no public interest defence in the bribery law has led to
journalists turning away stories that could be great investigations. “Sources
are motivated by a number of reasons, for some its money,” he said adding an
example of a worker in a care home asking for money to expose abuse which in
the atmosphere of fear today “would not be published even though it was clearly
in the public interest”.
Flynn said there was a “crackdown”
on journalists as now “journalists make unsympathetic victims”. Journalists are
also losing important sources that are paramount for good investigative
reporting as "officials are being arrested for speaking to journalists even
where no money is involved." Police have stopped speaking to local papers
after Leveson except on very official matters, he added. As an investigative
reporter, I can understand the importance of police sources and gag orders like
these do more harm than good to investigative reporting and are detrimental to
public interests.
Investigative journalism operates through grey areas, said Flynn adding, "After all remember the expense scandal was broken through stolen documents."
Hotline
for whistleblowers
Another Leveson suggestion of a
whistleblower hotline found no takers with Cathcart stating that “it was not a
good idea” and Usher declaring that she would never use a hotline. “You have to
trust your colleagues”, she stated. Preston said that the idea of a hotline was
discussed 20 years ago when he was involved in setting up the Press Complaints
Commission but “for real change of ethical standards, there has to be a
consensus (among journalists) to make it work,” he said.
The panel represented two distinct
views – one that believed that Leveson would bring ethics back to journalism
and another that thought Leveson would kill investigative reporting. Even among
the five journalists present on the panel there was no consensus.
Walking down the halls of City University, almost a decade
after I did my Masters in International Journalism, brought back good old
memories but it was also a little melancholic now because journalism has changed
so much.
Back then we mostly used tapes to record a lengthy interview
if we didn’t want to scribble notes. Journalism was also respected. We were
excited about entering a profession that strived to ‘make the world a better
place’. On this, my old professor Colin Bickler who passed away in January this year
would look at us in our conflict reporting class and remark that we were just
romanticising journalism.
‘Journalism is a dangerous profession. There are many forces
trying to stop journalists from doing their true job,” he said. In
the ten years of my journalism career, I slowly understood what he actually meant- not all forces are external; sometimes
these forces are just within journalism.
