Sex, Lies and Democracy

The Press and the Public

Hugh Stephenson, Michael Bromley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317886549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Do the Press have a case for asserting their right and moral obligation to call figures in the public eye to account? Or is it time for the government to abandon the Press Complaints Commission and introduce some legislation to deal with the problem? Is there really a problem?The question of the accountability and regulation of the Press has become a central theme of contemporary life and is the focus of this new book.

PART I

The press and its discontents

CHAPTER 1

Tickle the public: Consumerism rules

Hugh Stephenson

Private Members’ Bills are a curious feature of the British parliamentary system. They almost never turn into legislation and the rare exceptions only do so because the government of the day decides for some reason to take a particular Bill under its protective wing. But every now and then a head of steam builds up behind a particular Private Member’s Bill to a point where the administration, though still having no intention of accepting the legislation initiated by a backbencher, concludes that it must at least seem to respond.

Such was the situation in the summer of 1989 with two Private Members’ Bills introduced by the MPs who had won first and second place in the ballot for the 1988/89 parliamentary session. John Browne, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Winchester, had introduced a Bill on the protection of privacy. His own financial and marital affairs had been extensively raked over by the newspapers and he was subsequently deselected as a candidate by his constituency association before the 1992 general election. And Tony Worthington, the Clydebank Labour Member of Parliament, had introduced a Bill to establish a statutory right of reply for those finding their names in the media. Both Bills received substantial cross-party support in the House of Commons. The Home Office did not like either Bill as drafted, but it became clear when the Browne Bill reached its Report stage (having had its first and second readings and having been through committee) that it would require whipped votes to stop it going to its third and final reading. Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet did not like the prospect of having to use the Whips Office to kill a measure introduced by one of its own backbenchers and having wide support across the political spectrum. It, therefore, reached for the time-honoured compromise. It offered the House a committee of enquiry. In return John Browne agreed to withdraw his Bill and the Worthington Bill similarly fell.

Thus came into being the Last Chance Saloon. In order to comfort John Browne’s many supporters in the House, to put the frighteners on the national press and to give the enquiry a clear sense of direction, David Mellor, then a junior minister in the Home Office, produced his

now celebrated soundbite. The press, he said, was drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. If it did not get its self-regulatory act together this time, with the help of what became known as the Calcutt Committee, nameless things (by implication statutory controls) would be visited upon it. For several months uncertainty reigned, because the Home Office had not prepared the ground for its proposed enquiry. Another Royal Com-mission was out of the question, because Mrs Thatcher had closed this route on the grounds that Royal Commissions were cumbersome substitutes for the smack of firm government. However, neither the exact form of the enquiry nor its chairperson had been agreed. In the interests of saving public expenditure, private pressure was put on the press to fund the proposed enquiry itself. But these overtures were firmly resisted. In the event the Home Office settled on a conventional departmental committee of enquiry, with the barrister, David Calcutt QC, as chairman.¹ Its terms of reference were:

In the light of the recent public concern about intrusions into the private lives of individuals by certain sections of the press, to consider what measures (whether legislative or otherwise) are needed to give further protection to individual privacy from the activities of the press and improve recourse against the press for the individual citizen, taking account of existing remedies, including the law on defamation and breach of confidence; and to make recommendations. (Calcutt 1990:1)

Without question, during the six years or so from 1988 there was an air of continual crisis in the three-way relationship between the press (particularly the national tabloid press), the general public and the government. The sense of crisis continued until the summer of 1995, with the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the House of Commons National Heritage Committee, under its Labour chairman Gerald Kaufman, being in favour of introducing a new civil wrong of infringement of privacy and Calcutt (by now Sir David) in his personal review (Calcutt 1993) of things since his first Report in 1990 being strongly in favour of the Press Complaints Commission being replaced by a statutory Press Complaints Tribunal.

As time wore on it became clear that there were divisions within the government over how to proceed. A government White Paper expected in the summer of 1993, though drafted, did not emerge from the Cabinet sub-committee dealing with it. There was considerable confusion between the Home Office (and after its creation the Department of National Heritage) on the one hand and the Lord Chancellor’s Department on the other. Sensing these divisions, the Association of British Editors, the Guild of Editors and the International Press Institute mounted a lobby and published an ‘Alternative White Paper’ at the start of 1994, analysing the weaknesses of the various proposals for change that had been put forward (Stephenson 1994). By the end of 1994, with the next general election increasingly casting its shadow before it and with the national media continuing successfully to rattle John Major’s govenment with exposures of sexual peccadillos and financial sleaze, it became clear that substantial legislation to change the status of the press was no longer imminent. The whole issue was finally kicked into touch in July 1995 when the new Secretary of State for National Heritage, Virginia Bottomley, published the government’s reply to the National Heritage Select Committee’s 1993 recommendations. This reply contained a remarkably robust defence of the status quo, perhaps the most robust in any published government document in modern times. It asserted: ‘The right to receive and impart ideas and information, in other words, to freedom of expression, is one of the cornerstones of a democratic society.’ It referred to the protection of freedom of expression enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to both of which the United Kingdom is a signatory. In rejecting the recommendations of the Select Committee and from Sir David Calcutt, it went on to say:

A free press is vital to a free country. Many would think the imposition of statutory control on newspapers invidious because it might open the way for regulating content, thereby laying the Government open to charges of press censorship. Furthermore, the Government does not believe that it would be right in this field to delegate decisions about when a statutory remedy should be granted to a regulator such as a tribunal. (National Heritage 1995)

For the time being the issue of press self-regulation had been removed from the political agenda.

Nevertheless, for five years or more until that moment it had been widely accepted wisdom that the offending sections of the press were becoming ever more sensational and ever less responsible. Public support for this view was reflected in a series of high six-figure jury awards and out-of-court settlements in libel cases involving public figures. The size of some of the libel settlements during this period clearly implied that they were intended to be more as a punishment of ‘irresponsible’ newspapers than as a measure of the ‘wronged’ person’s personal hurt. Those arguing that the press was incapable of effective self-regulation and that some kind of statutory intervention, akin to the controls on the content of broadcasting, were necessary and inevitable became confident that public opinion and the political tide were with them.

The authority of the Press Council, the print media’s voluntary self-regulation system set up in 1953 in belated response to the criticisms of the 1949 Royal Commission on the Press, had been coming under increasing criticism during the 1980s. The most coherent single attack on it came in the form of a report written by the barrister Geoffrey Robertson on the basis of an enquiry into its workings by a group of individuals.² Robertson’s report reviewed the way in which major national newspaper figures flouted or mocked Press Council adjudications (Robertson 1983: 4). In one case, Robertson noted, Sir John Junor, the editor of the Sunday Express, criticized for writing an offensive racial slur, had repeated it and counter-attacked the ‘po-faced, pompous, pin-striped, humourless twits who sit on the Press Council’ (Sunday Express, 3 September 1978). Another adjudication in October 1982 condemned The Sun for publishing a ‘sensationalized, distorted and racially emotive account of a demonstration by black people’. The Sun responded (8 October 1982) under the headline ‘Paper They Can’t Gag’ by repeating the original charges, attacking those who had brought the complaint to the Press Council and boasting that ‘The Sun is flattered to be singled out as the target for complaint’.

Geoffrey Robertson also drew attention to the general flouting in 1983 of the Press Council’s declaration of principle on cheque-book journalism in the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. The Press Council conducted a thorough investigation of the conduct of newspapers in reporting the case and in buying up the stories of members of Sutcliffe’s family and other witnesses (Press Council 1983). Its criticisms were particularly severe of the Daily Mail and of its editor, Sir David English. It found that it had been hampered in its consideration of complaints against the paper ‘by the behaviour of the Daily Mail which failed to disclose to the Council material clearly germane to the inquiry’. It regretted ‘a persistent refusal by the editor of the Daily Mail to attend an oral inquiry and answer the complaints committee’s questions in the presence of the complainant’. It found that, in the matter of cheque-book journalism, ‘the explanation offered by the newspaper amounts to a confession that the Daily Mail was guilty of gross misconduct’ (Press Council 1983: 148–54). The response to the Press Council’s report by Sir David English in his own newspaper (under the headline ‘Decision that Shackles Freedom’) was to describe it as ‘short-term, short-sighted and smug’ and as proof ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Press and Its Discontents
• Part II Press Regulation and Accountability
• Part III People and Processes in Accountability
• Appendix 1: The Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, 1995
• Appendix 2: The National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct
• Index