Thursday, July 17, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part three.

Robert Murat got his day in court and £600,000 in damages, but even he must be wondering whether it will change the way that the tabloid press in this country operates. Looking at the Sun and Daily Mail websites tonight, neither has mentioned the settlement announced in the high court. The only mention the Sun has made of any sort of settlement being reached is contained in a "Staff Reporter" story from Tuesday which doesn't mention that the Sun itself or the News of the World have agreed to pay him damages.

With damages to Murat of £600,000, six figure payouts to two of his acquaintances whose names were also dragged through the mud, and overall legal costs, Roy Greenslade estimates that it will have cost the four groups, Express Newspapers, the Mirror Group, Associated Newspapers and News International in the region of £100,000 per paper. Again, in the long run, we're talking of peanuts here. These are still peanuts which will have to be accounted for, and who knows, some employees may well lose their jobs as a result of the costs. That won't however stop any one of these newspapers from smearing individuals in exactly the same way as they did Murat. As elucidated before, it's far too profitable and the negatives are too few to make them think twice before declaring on their front pages that a man is a paedophile or that a missing girl DEFINITELY WAS in that man's villa.

Greenslade mentions that the dedicated legal teams on each paper has to take some of the blame. I'd agree, but I think the real blame lies with one individual only: the editor. They are the ones who decide what and what isn't ultimately printed, and each one in this instance thought that it was perfectly acceptable to print libel about a man whose only crime was wanting to help the police find the little girl that had gone missing close to where he lived. Here then is a roll call of shame: Rebekah Wade; the Sun. Colin Myler; News of the World. Paul Dacre; Daily Mail. Veronica Wadley; Evening Standard. Kenny Campbell; Metro. Richard Wallace; Daily Mirror. Tina Weaver; Sunday Mirror. Bruce Waddell; Daily Record. Peter Hill; Daily Express. Martin Townsend; Sunday Express. Dawn Neesom; Daily Star.

The other main reason why this will have no effect whatsoever on it happening again is that the newspapers have hardly even acknowledged that they've done anything wrong. The only way to make anyone take notice on these occasions when such repeated and hysterical libel has been committed is for the newspaper to be forced to print the apology on its front page, like the Express and Star both did after the action by the McCanns. Having seen the Daily Mirror and Sun front pages tomorrow, neither so much as mentions Murat. The Sun even has a story claiming that the McCanns are about to be cleared, just to rub it into Murat that he'd have more luck trying to get blood out of a stone than forcing a tabloid newspaper to own up to its errors.

If anything therefore ought to put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of self-regulation this ought to be it. Tina Weaver for example sits on the Press Complaint Commission's main board which decides on the cases brought before it for adjudication, while Paul Dacre is the chairman of the code committee! Digitagit summed it up very nicely in the comments on another Greenslade piece:

As with the Mosley case, the toxic combination of greed, vanity, self-importance, affected outrage and false morality is a trait common to all our popular press and is just repulsive beyond belief.

Indeed. These self-same newspapers preach at us day in and day out about law and order, respect and morals, and when it comes down to it, they are just as guilty if not more so than anyone else in society. Only a complaints body with genuine teeth, that could perhaps stop a newspaper from publishing for one day when they commit such outrageous libel, or which personally fines editors or proprietors like Ofcom does could potentially stop this rot.

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7/17/2008 10:42:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part two.

If the payout to the McCanns by the Express group over repeated, completely untrue allegations, not just about their "involvement" in the abduction of their own child but also about their sex lives was embarrassing, then the truly unprecedented payout to Robert Murat by not just the Express papers but every single one of the daily tabloids with the exception of the Daily Sport, three of the Sunday tabloids and also the Scotsman is an indictment of a journalistic culture that regards the lives of those who are being written about as being of no concern whatsoever.

After the apology and payola for the McCanns, Murat's chances of a settlement were always going to be greatly increased. While the McCanns settled on going after the Express because of its clear for all to see race to the bottom, by far the most egregious offender against them, Murat was smeared by all and sundry, leaping to the most lurid conclusions based on the tiniest glimpses of so-called evidence. The Sun, for example, claimed that his computer had child pornography on it, and that he looked at various other questionable sexual websites; that Murat has since had his computers returned to him and no action has been taken for possession of child pornography suggests that these allegations were completely groundless. Anything that might suggest he was in any way strange or abnormal was also seized upon, such as the apparent fact that he joined in with children when his former employers hired a bouncy castle, or that he had been "in a hurry" when hiring a car. The Sun (again) even aired allegations it knew to be completely false, quoting a taxi driver who said that he had driven Murat, who had Madeleine with him on the night she went missing. That this couldn't have been possible because Madeleine had not disappeared at the time he claimed to have driven them didn't stop the paper from printing such abject garbage.

The award for starting the entire ball rolling though has to go to the Sunday Mirror and their reporter Lori Campbell. As Private Eye noted at the time, the paper already had form, having carried an interview the December before with a man called Tom Stephens, who had known some of the prostitutes murdered in and around Ipswich. The police swooped on this clearly distraught individual and swiftly released him after it became completely clear he had no involvement whatsoever with their deaths, distracting the investigation from the real quarry, Steve Wright. Campbell, with a heightened sense of what's creepy and what's not, decided that Murat's behaviour was akin to that of Ian Huntley's after the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and noblely reported her suspicions to the police: "[G]iven the unimaginable horrors which Madeleine's parents were enduring, it seemed the very least I could do," she said at the time. Murat's real crime it seems was not to have tried to get away from Praia da Luz, as you might expect someone involved in the kidnap of a child from the area to do, but instead to stay and help. Indeed, Murat had been helping the police with translating. For his concern about the missing child, he was treated to the finest which the British press has to offer. Lori Campbell meanwhile was nominated for Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Roy Greenslade has outlined three reasons for why this story has so revealed the British tabloids' true colours, lest they really needed exposing anyway: firstly, because this was happening in Portugal, hence they thought they could get away with pushing their coverage further towards the line than they could if this had occurred on British shores. This was undoubtedly a factor, but what also influenced their reporting what that they felt that they could simply get away with it in any case. Without the Express group going too far over the McCanns themselves, Murat would have almost certainly failed in bringing any sort of action. In an interview with the BBC he said his own savings had gone; his mother's were also beginning to dwindle, reducing his chances of bringing an expensive action down to almost nil. As it was, if the McCanns could get some sort of settlement, Murat almost certainly could also, and the firm acting for him, Simons Muirhead and Burton already act pro bono on human rights case. Whether they'll be waiving their fee in Murat's case is unclear.

What's more, it was financially viable in any case for the papers responsible to do so. Murat may receive £550,000 damages; split that 11 ways and it adds up to just £50,000 a newspaper, which to the Daily Mail and Sun especially is absolute peanuts. They've had a year of fun, boosted their circulations, brought in far more than that through their race to the bottom, competing with each other as to who could print the more lurid stories, and at the end of it they have to cough up a whole £50,000? To spout a cliche, they literally must be laughing all the way to the bank. Sure, it's embarrassing that they're going to have to apologise, although it's not clear whether the apologies will be front page specials like the Express's ones to the McCanns were, but has it any way affected the Express or Star in the long term? Of course not. They're still printing the same old crap as they were previously, and if a few readers take umbrage, that's a casualty of the game. This time round those disgusted by the tabloid's behaviour can't even switch to a different rag to show their displeasure: all of them were at it (unless they switch to a broadsheet, which is unlikely). A man's life and his subsequent employability doesn't matter one jot to the editors, the journalists responsible or the owners and shareholders; if it did, there would been grovelling apologies and payouts to Colin Stagg, completely ruined by the press campaign against him. He is instead being compensated by the state, when it should have been editors who demand law and order and tough penalties for everyone other than themselves who paid up.

Greenslade's final reason for why this occurred is that the press has been pushing against the contempt laws in this country for years, and that is undisputably the case. He's missed out a fourth, and most important reason though: churnalism. The whole Madeleine McCann disappearance fits entirely into Nick Davies' rules of production, the very first of which is run cheap stories. This might have taken place in Portugal, and so have had higher costs than cheap stories over here, but these were easily recouped by rises in circulation. In fact, journalists didn't have to necessarily even be in Praia da Luz, where nothing much happened anyway. The Express, for instance, spent most of its time copying out of the local Portuguese press, which was just as guilty, if not more so of printing complete garbage. Secondly, once the ball was rolling, it had to keep on going, meaning journalists had to come up with something even if there was nothing new to report. To suggest that complete fabrication in some cases did not take place would surely be a naive statement. This also inspires ninja turtle syndrome, where if one paper is printing it, the others have to regardless of its veracity.

I wrote after the payout to the McCanns that it changed absolutely nothing, and neither will this latest admittance that they went too far. The benefits of doing so are too large while the penalties are so few and so weak; Murat was very lucky, while the newspapers this time round were unfortunate. The libel system, and indeed, the Press Complaints Commission were drawn and set up not to protect the genuinely little people who find themselves in the crossfire through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were drawn up to protect the rich and the famous and the newspapers themselves respectively. The PCC is utterly toothless while the libel laws are now rightly being described as a worldwide disgrace. The vested interests and industry standards are so vast however that any change is simply unconsciousable, whether by politicians or those within the organisations themselves. Only when the public themselves actually stop buying the despicable rags will they be forced to change their ways. They show no signs of doing that.

Related:
Enemies of Reason - Murat & libel

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7/15/2008 10:28:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals.

If the tabloid press in this country has had a worse collective day than Wednesday the 19th of March 2008, then it was a hell of a long time ago. Not only did the McCanns receive the most craven, sycophantic, crawling, boot-kissing, pathetic front-page apology from both the Daily Express and Daily Star, with the weekend papers to run the same on Sunday, something which is unprecedented and a new low for journalistic standards in this country, but the Daily Mail has also had to make a libel payout to the US billionaire Sheldon Adelson, which with costs from a three-year court battle could add up to the Mail having to sell out £4 million, while the Mail's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, has similarly had to make a front-page "apology/clarification" to the organisers of last summer's climate camp near Heathrow, for over-egging a story about the direct action which some of the protesters planned.

Actually, the latter part there is the Press Complaints Commission's judgement on the matter (website seems to be currently offline, otherwise I'd link to the adjudication. Update: adjudication is here). If the PCC wasn't such a toothless organisation packed to the rafters with the self-same editors of the national newspapers which are complained about on its board, with Peter Hill, editor of the Express currently on the panel, then it would have made clear that the Evening Standard article and indeed most of the tabloid coverage (and apart from the Guardian and Independent, also the broadsheet coverage) of last summer's climate camp were the most baseless smears, lies and scaremongering about the protesters' intentions and tactics. Unlike the Express that rolled over and played dead, the Evening Standard was still last week denying that its article was by any means inaccurate, with the paper's managing editor Doug Willis using the Guardian's response column to dispute George Monbiot's careful evisceration of the Evening Standard story, a taking-apart which even the PCC today endorsed. The damage though has long ago been done; the other newspapers took the story on, in a perfect example of Nick Davies' ninja turtle syndrome rule of production, while everyone has long forgotten about the protest itself. Justice cannot be said to have been done.

The McCanns picked on the Express/Star out of the sea of tabloids that ran very similar stories about them for two reasons: firstly because the Express and Star were the worst, most consistent offenders, day after day running MADELEINE front pages, with the Star in two truly shocking stories alleging firstly that they had sold Madeleine, and secondly that the two of them were involved in wife-swapping/orgy parties, without even the slightest smidgen of evidence to back up either; and secondly because they were also the easiest target. Can you seriously imagine Associated Newspapers or News International under Murdoch capitulating without even the slightest fight? Make no mistake, regardless of their chances of winning, they would have taken the battle all the way and strung it out for as long as possible. No, the Express and Star were the easiest to pick-off, newspapers cut to the bone by a predatory, repulsive proprietor not interested in the slightest in their history, only out to make huge amounts of money while destroying any reputation they had remaining in the process. £550,000 after all is peanuts to Richard Desmond, who has previously paid himself largesse in excess of £45m for a year's helming of his businesses. This was a warning shot across the bows to all the other tabloids, saying "you're next" if you keep it up.

Purely and simply, the Express' and Star's decision to keep publishing was based on two factors: churnalism and greed. The Guardian (which has gone to town on the payout, producing a leader on it, something that none of the tabloid press which would usually crow about their rival's downfall will do) is reporting that the decision on the Express to keep splashing on the Madeleine story was, in the words of Express hacks themselves, down to marketing. Rather than any intrinsic news values, which had long since departed Praia da Luz, the Express kept on and on because surveys showed that some fucked-up self-hating worms keep devouring the stuff. They didn't to such an extent that the newspaper actually made an increase in sales month-on-month, as the ABCs lay witness to, but it did halt the decline year-on-year; in October the Express was up by 0.15%, and the same was true in November, where it remarkably sold the exact same number of copies as it did the previous year. Only in December did the decline again accelerate, with the stories starting to dry up altogether. These stories were cheap, either copied out of the Spanish or Portuguese press or made up entirely; nasty; and they sold well, all the fundamentals that so underpin churnalism. Some in the industry have remarked that it's amazing that the Express and Star still manage to put out a newspaper, let alone have time to do such things as check facts or properly investigate and verify stories, so although this was a wilful assault on a couple who had lost their child, it was only a matter of time before something similar happened regardless of Desmond's greed.

The Express's fatal mistake was that it went too far and did so too often. Rather than simply blaming the McCanns for their daughter's apparent abduction, something that Allison Pearson did last week when she attacked Fiona MacKeown and placed the blame for her daughter's death on her and not on her actual killer, it instead went for invention and slander. As Davies relates in the chapter on the Daily Mail in Flat Earth News, the Daily Mail knows in general just how far to take its hatchet jobs, making it clear where the blame really lies, or on who is the real offender rather than a victim, but without libelling anyone, or at least anyone who has the money to sue or to dedicate time to putting a prolonged complaint through the Press Complaints Commission. When it does do so, it has the collateral behind it to pay out any damages without so much as a wince, although today's £4 million might make it suffer slightly more than usual. Hence Colin Stagg slandered for years in the Mail will only receive compensation from the government and not from the gutter press, nor has he ever received an apology from them for their 10 years' worth of lies and implications that he killed Rachel Nickell. Robert Murat, slandered, smeared and libelled in a similar fashion to the McCanns, is also unlikely to receive any similar payout, and he, rather than being thought of as a suspect initially by the police, was first targeted by the Sunday Mirror's Lori Campbell, who remembered Ian Huntley and made her suspicions known. Campbell will never have to make a grovelling apology to Murat; instead she's been nominated for Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards!

Fundamentally however, nothing that has happened today will change the Street of Shame in the slightest. The Express and Star, cut to the bone, pushed their luck too far and chose the wrong grieving couple to attack; had they done similar to Fiona MacKeown or the parents of Shannon Matthews, which the Star today splashes on, then they would most likely have got away with it. MacKeown or the Matthews won't be able to either afford Carter-Fuck or persuade them to represent them pro bono for similar actions, and so if they wanted to complain would have to go through the PCC, where their chances would be slight to non-existent. The Mail, although stung by the damages and costs, will be printing exactly the same things as they did about Sheldon Adelson tomorrow, and will do until the end of time or people finally stop buying the vile rag. The Evening Standard, although forced to apologise, has had no financial sanction put on it, and the incident will be forgotten within days. It'll be free to smear and attack the next grassroots protest movement that comes along, just as its stable-mates have done before and will do so again. This is the system, which according to John Whittingdale, the chair of culture, media and sport select committee has "worked". He is of course right. The system, which was set-up to protect both the press themselves and those with the money to defend themselves, has indeed worked. For everyone else, they're just as screwed as ever.

Related post:
Enemies of Reason - Is it a victory? No, it's a defeat

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3/19/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

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