The Leveson Inquiry and the Raucous Press – Julian Petley

‘Democracies require an unlovable press. They need journalists who get in the face of power’. So says Michael Schudson, one of America’s foremost media scholars, in a recent collection of essays, and most journalists would wholeheartedly agree. Such sentiments were much in evidence in the pre-emptive nuclear strike mounted by the press in the run-up to the publication in November 2012 of Lord Justice Leveson’s report into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press.

Lessons from Motorman, Part 4: Investigative Journalism and Conclusion – Julian Petley

But the ICO were not the only ones furious with Dacre and co over their lobbying against custodial penalties under section 55 of the Data Protection Act. Writing in the Guardian, 7 April 2008, the paper’s investigations editor David Leigh stated that: ‘Rarely has there been a more disgraceful behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign’ than the one outlined above. He continued: ‘Tabloid newspapers want the right to commit crimes with impunity …  And they have the brazenness to complain that this campaign is designed to protect “investigative journalism”’.

Lessons from Motorman, Part 3, Government action and inaction – Julian Petley

Notwithstanding the representations of the PCC and others the proposal to toughen the sanctions for infringing the DPA were endorsed by the DCMS Committee, which stated that ‘we believe that sufficient safeguards exist to protect legitimate investigative journalism and do not believe that the introduction of custodial sentences for offences under Section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998 would have the chilling effect claimed by the press”.  It also noted with approval the fact that the government had in February 2007 proposed to amend Section 60 of the DPA (via the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which was then going through Parliament) so as to introduce exactly the sanction recommended by the ICO.

Lessons from Motorman, Part 2: “What Price Privacy?” – Julian Petley

Intimidated by the press, disappointed by the PCC and thwarted by the courts, the ICO decided to go public about data theft,  in May 2006 publishing the report What Price Privacy? which discussed Motorman, inter alia. It also raised the question of the inadequacy of the penalties for breaking the DPA: 

Lessons from Motorman, Part 1: Whittamore, the PCC and Operation Glade – Julian Petley

In March 2003, investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), raided the offices of a private detective, Steve Whittamore.  As Tom Watson and Martin Hickman put it:  “They were amazed at what they discovered: Britain’s best-selling newspapers and magazines were driving a thriving black market in illegal data, requesting (and receiving) ex-directory numbers, car registration numbers, health records and criminal records. The targets ranged from glamorous actresses such as Elizabeth Hurley to the families of victims of newsworthy crimes, such as the parents of Holly Wells, a child murdered by the paedophile Ian Huntley at Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002. (28-9).

Opinion: Pale Pinks in Plain Sight – Julian Petley

In its diatribe against Common Purpose, the Mail notes that the organisation ‘has attracted the obsessive attention of the more outré internet conspiracy theorists such as David Icke, as well as bloggers on the far Right. This has provided a convenient smokescreen against a more rational investigation’. 

The Many Mythologies of Press Freedom, Part 2, Media Self-Censorship – Julian Petley

The Sun is far from alone in attacking other media organisations, but newspapers routinely calling for the censorship of other media is a paradoxical and extremely distasteful sight.  It is one which casts a good deal of doubt on the sincerity of their demands before the Leveson Inquiry that press freedom must be protected above all else. Press freedom is but one aspect of media freedom in general, and if newspapers cannot see that there is the starkest of contradictions in calling for their own freedom (self-circumscribed though it is) to be defended whilst bawling for the censorship of other media, then the clock really has struck thirteen.

The Many Mythologies of Press Freedom, Part 1, Free Speech and the “Sun” – Julian Petley

In the Sun, 13 February 2012, the paper’s  former political editor Trevor Kavanagh was given the best part of a page to protest that  ‘this witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’. The ‘witch-hunt’ in question was the arrest of five Sun journalists accused, as part of the seemingly endless fall-out from the phone hacking scandal, of bribing public officials, and the former eastern bloc countries were Poland, Estonia and Slovakia which, according to the World Press Freedom Index 2011-2012, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), all had better records on press freedom than the UK, which had dropped nine places to number 28 since the last such survey.