Category Archives: Comment

Comment: Two outstanding questions over phone hacking

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Despite a gentle Press Complaints Commission (PCC) report and News International’s attempts to play the affair down, the Guardian’s phone hacking exposé just won’t go away.

This weekend, it was back under the spotlight with Lady Buscombe, the body’s chair, in her second public interview since taking up the reins, defending the fact the PCC found no new evidence of phone hacking at News International since its 2007 inquiry.

“Alan [Rusbridger] has damned our report because he doesn’t like the result,” Buscombe told the Independent. “Because we haven’t produced this evidence which nobody else has managed to procure, including the police.”

She said she won’t resign, despite solicitor Mark Lewis’ request that she should following her public citation of police lawyers’ claims which contradicted Lewis’ parliamentary evidence.

Buscombe claimed in the interview that the PCC received no help from The Guardian. “Those who say there is more to the story than meets the eye have never helped us produce the evidence.”

The Independent took up one very important question: ‘why did the PCC not question those accused of the hacking, such as private investigator Glenn Mulcaire?’

“We didn’t ask Mulcaire because we were absolutely clear we were not going to go down routes where it was fallow ground. The remit of the PCC is set by PressBof [the Press Board of Finance], and we have already stretched our remit through this whole process,” answered Buscombe.

Writing on his blog yesterday, Roy Greenslade found this unsatisfactory:

“Fallow ground? In truth, it is ground that has never been properly tilled, and the PCC passed up the chance to put it to the plough. As for the stretching of the remit, that’s disingenuous nonsense.

“The remit of the PCC is to ensure that editors and journalists obey the code of practice. Nick Davies produced evidence that strongly suggested that the News of the World had breached the code.

“What the PCC stretched was our credulity by claiming that it had held an inquiry into those allegations. An exchange of letters with an editor who was not even on the paper at the time of the (alleged) code breaches is not an inquiry.”

Here are, in my view, two other important questions that should be raised by any further inquiry into the Guardian’s reports / phone hacking evidence:

  • What’s the truth about the reporter behind the ‘Neville’ email?

Private Eye claims that the ‘junior’ reporter, who penned the ‘Neville’ email [background here], a crucial part of the evidence, held two by-lined identities before he went off on his round-the-world-trip; if true, it raises questions about the evidence given to the Parliamentary select committee (see Private Eye No 1249, page 7).

Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter behind the revelations, believes the PCC was ‘dishonest’ in its handling of the report. “It’s completely clear that all of our allegations about phone-hacking referred to the activities of Glenn Mulcaire, who was sacked by the News of the World in January 2007; and occurred under the editorship of Andy Coulson, who resigned in January 2007.”

The allegations that confidential databases had been ‘blagged’ referred to an even earlier time, Davies told Journalism.co.uk. He also defended the Guardian against the PCC’s allegation that there were a lack of dates in the July 2009 articles, leading to misinterpretation in some ‘quarters’:

“There is no lack of clarity about the timing at all,” claimed Davies. “But the PCC – desperately looking for more whitewash to slap all over the scandal – pretend that our story concerned the period after the PCC’s first report, published in May 2007, and on that completely fictional basis, they complain that we have no evidence. Of course we have no evidence about what happened after May 2007 – it’s not a subject we’ve even attempted to address. I’m afraid it doesn’t surprise me that the PCC won’t expose the newspapers who fund it. What is surprising is that they have covered up in such a stupid way. I believe that as events unfold, this deeply misleading report of theirs may prove to be a fatal blow to their surviving credibility.”

As I’ve said before, the outcomes of the House of Commons select committee inquiry, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) PCC report inquiry, and the PCC’s own review will be interesting to see – I hope we get some answers to these questions. Any more to add?

Biscuitgate myth revived as Cameron gets ready for Mumsnet

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Any crumbs of truth in the so-called Biscuitgate episode, when Gordon Brown allegedly refused to reveal his cuppa accompaniment of choice? Short answer: no. (myth at this link)

Unless Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts was engaged in some bizarre get-on-the-good-side of Downing Street cover-up exercise.

It was quite some ago (22 October) that Roberts clarified:

“Now I can’t say I often find myself feeling sorry for politicians but I have to admit to feeling more than a pang of sympathy for the PM over the past few days. Because the truth is that Gordon Brown didn’t follow the live chat on the screen directly – he answered the questions grouped and fed to him by MNHQ and his advisors. He didn’t avoid the biscuit question because it didn’t cross his path (as I said on Radio 5 on the day, in fact).

“Why did we do it that way? Well, there were so many questions and they were coming in thick and fast on every subject under the sun, so we reasoned that the most effective way of getting as much ground covered as possible was to group them together for him, rather than him answering random ones that he happened to notice.”

But as David Cameron gets ready to step up to the mumsnet challenge, the truth hasn’t stopped people bleating on about blimmin’ biscuits.

For more pertinent comment, visit POLIS director Charlie Beckett’s blog:

“Mumsnet, in particular, has become the destination of choice for politicians who see it as the way to reach a large and significant section of the electorate. But are there other online forums who do a similar job?

(…)

“[I]s Mumsnet the exception or, as I keep saying, the new rule? And if so, are there forums for teachers, medics or even just men?”

Will inquiries find PCC a chocolate teapot, or a serious ‘mediator’?

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The Press Complaints Commission enjoyed mainstream coverage this week, as newspaper titles lapped up the comments of the body’s chair, Lady Peta Buscombe, at the Society of Editors’ conference: she not only called for greater press support, but cited evidence allegedly showing that 6,000 attempted phone hackings were ‘wrongly quoted’ by solicitor Mark Lewis in the House of Commons.

Funnily enough, the papers who were so eager to report Buscombe’s words, didn’t then – save the Guardian it would seem – pick up Mark Lewis’ call for Buscombe’s resignation as PCC chair. You can read Lewis’ letter, sent to Buscombe, the select committee and copied to the Press Association, in full at this link.

Lewis has since told Journalism.co.uk:

“As I said in my [House of Commons] evidence, given immediately after that of Mr Yates [Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner], it wasn’t that I had access to documents that the police did not have, I got the documents from the police. Didn’t they read them? Didn’t they understand them?”

“The PCC has shown its true colours. If there is to be non-court regulation then it has to be from an independent tribunal that is not constituted by the press. Oddly, it would work in the press’ interest if there was a body that was willing to challenge and censor the press. As I said on Monday, we need an ‘honest and free press not just a free press’.

“My next step will be to carry on in the pursuit of honesty in reporting. If you are in any doubt, look at how many newspapers chose not to run a story that there had been a demand for Lady Buscombe to resign. The newspapers reported Lady Buscombe’s speech but not my response to it.”

Then, just as QC Geoffrey Robertson had hoped when he encouraged editors to abandon the body, news broke of Alan Rusbridger’s resignation from the PCC Code Committee.

“I have enjoyed being on the Code Committee, which does very useful work. I look forward to the results of the review of the PCC which Baroness Buscombe has announced.  The PCC is a valuable mediator. It needs to ask itself whether, as presently constructed and funded, it is a very effective regulator,” was all that the Guardian editor had to say afterwards.

His comments last week, following the PCC’s less than critical findings about phone tapping activities at News of the World, were somewhat stronger:  speaking on BBC Radio 4, the Guardian editor described the PCC’s report as ‘worse than pointless’. “If you have a self-regulation system that’s finding nothing out and has no teeth, and all the work is being done by external people, it’s dangerous for self-regulation,” he said.

The PCC has not yet responded to Journalism.co.uk’s request for comment over Rusbridger’s departure, but Buscombe today appeared on Radio 4 Media Show [as noted by Jon Slattery at this link]. Rusbridger is right, she said. “We don’t have serious powers of investigation. We are not a police force. Even Ofcom doesn’t have it. A state regulator doesn’t have it. We cannot and we must not tread on the toes of the criminal justice system. We act in many ways more as a mediator, so that we actually stop and prevent harm and therefore have a very strong role in terms of pre-publication, for example,” she said.

So what’s the point of the body at all? MP Tom Watson, who sat on the House of Commons culture and media select committee for the phone hacking inquiry, thinks not much. Running the PCC like a clan has led to Rusbridger’s resignation, he said on Tuesday. “It could spell the end of self-regulation. How silly of the new chair,” he tweeted. While in favour of self-regulation, the PCC simply isn’t doing it, he later clarified in another tweet: “[I] believe in self-regulation. And I’d like to see the PCC try it some time.”

A toothless chocolate teapot as alleged by some, or is there a realistic future for the PCC? Investigations of the self-regulation body, such as the one launched by the International Federation of Journalists; the select committee’s inquiry; and the PCC’s own review (led by a former commission member) are anticipated with interest…

NB: This post was later updated with a corrected transcript from the Radio 4 Media Show (19.11.09).

Malcolm Coles: Gordon Brown letter – Sun misjudges readers’ mood

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This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ website www.malcolmcoles.co.uk.

Update: There are suggestions on a Guardian story that the Sun moderators haven’t been putting through comments that are critical of the Sun’s position …

Is the Sun censoring pro-Brown comments?

Is the Sun censoring pro-Brown comments?

Original post
The Sun is running a campaign against Gordon Brown. But I’ve analysed the comments on its website – and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2.

Gordon Brown letter story in the Sun

Gordon Brown letter story in the Sun

The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her son Jamie’s death in Afghanistan to attack the PM – because his handwritten letter of condolence was supposedly disrespectful due to sloppy writing and (disputed) spelling errors.

It’s loathsome journalism that ignores the effect of his disability (the PM is blind in one eye).

And it seems Sun readers are mostly on the Prime Minister’s side.

Of the 100+ comments on the story (don’t worry, I’ve nofollowed those links) when I checked, 111 expressed a view for or against Jacqui Janes or Gordon Brown (the rest commented on other issues or corrected people’s spelling errors). Of these:

  • 42 were anti Gordon or pro the Sun’s stance.
  • 69 were pro Gordon or anti the Sun’s stance.

So that’s more than 60 per cent who don’t agree with the Sun, and less than 40 per cent who do.

Sample comments from those who agree with the Sun’s stance:

Comments agreeing that Gordon Brown was wrong

Comments agreeing that Gordon Brown is “discusting”

Some comments from those opposing it:

Comments defending Gordon Brown

Comments defending Gordon Brown

Conclusion
The Sun is channeling this woman’s grief into a personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s refusing to make allowances for his disability (maybe we could next attack the war wounded for being workshy benefit scroungers?).

And it’s facilitating her breaking data protection laws by releasing a recording of a private phone call.

The whole thing is sickening – let’s hope that observing its readers’ reactions will lead to an end to this (not that this happened in the Jan Moir case) – and preferably prosecution of the Sun over the data protection offence.

Comment: The problem with PR email

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As Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this year, former PR Manager and national newspaper journalist Iain Fleming decided to try and assess which PR distribution methods work and which don’t, by conducting a small survey as part of his CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations Diploma) course at Queen Margaret University. He now works as the business development manager for Wirefast, which provides the Newslink story and picture wire service and is launching a new multimedia management, distribution and syndication service, called Tradeclips, on 19 November.

As the PR industry has grown – from being worth just over £106 million in 1986 to £6.5 billion in 2005 – so has the number of people working in it and inevitably producing material to send to the media. Back in 1985 fax machines were just coming in and were expensive to buy and run, and most material was still sent by post, so there was a direct financial link to distribution.

Jump forward 20 years and there has been a huge increase in media outlets. So most people in PR have to use some form of directory. If it costs an agency several thousand pounds per year to access an online database, but they are allowed to email as many addresses as they like free of charge through that database, then it is no wonder that content is literally being sprayed in a scattergun approach by many.

Now add in to the mix the growing adoption by publishers and broadcasters of websites linked to their traditional products and the need to use multimedia content, but source it for as little as possible – preferably for free from readers and viewers/listeners – and we now have a situation where an industry is rapidly shedding staff but expecting those who are left to take on more work and learn new techniques. It should also be noted that winnings from online gambling in the UK are not taxed. However, there are exceptions, for example, for professional players. In addition, although winnings are often not taxed, they still need to be declared to the tax office. Find all the details at https://www.newukcasino.co.uk/ . In short, there is no gambling tax as such in the UK. Only if gambling becomes a profession, so to speak, and the tax thus falls into another category, would tax actually have to be paid for it.

So it came as no surprise to me that the results of my small survey – including responses from 101 editors, section editors, journalists and IT managers – showed just how much those working on news desks disliked the PR industry – despite their growing reliance on it. So much of what is being thrown at them is completely irrelevant – if it gets to them at all.

What does get through – and 95 per cent reported problems with email of which around a quarter said it was ‘every day’ – is sent in ways which either crash their systems or can’t be opened because their employers simply cannot afford to upgrade software on 200 computers as regularly as a small PR agency of just a few people can – and does.

And that is just for ‘traditional’ text and pictures. The message that a national newspaper can happily use a picture – even across several columns – if it is only a few hundred Kb in size has not got through to the PR people, who keep sending out 10Mb files at a time.

Move on to ‘new’ media and the situation is even worse, with the same issues of incompatible file types, too large files, poor quality content and stuff that is ‘just not newsworthy’ topping the list of complaints. A senior manager within ITV told me just last week how one station struggled for several hours to get video sent by a fire brigade into a format suitable for broadcast, but ran out of time and the bulletin went out minus the footage.

This isn’t a rant about email – I don’t know how we managed to exist before it came along and I was an early adopter, although I can’t now remember my first Telecom Gold address back from 1984. It is ubiquitous and for many – probably most – people working in PR – it is all they know and is an appropriate method. It is a system which has mushroomed and in the space of five years moved from being a ‘nerdy’ plaything to universal acceptance and usage.

But there are many PR practitioners who don’t know of anything else but really should, for every day they are flying by the seat of their pants and taking an unnecessary risk, potentially with the lives of many others. They are the people working under civil contingencies legislation and have a responsibility to ‘warn and inform’ the public – they work for the ‘blue light’ services, the NHS, local authorities and the like. They are supposed to use what the legislation says is a ‘robust’ form of communication, and by no stretch of the imagination is e-mail ‘robust’.

The governments in both Westminster and Holyrood have been investing millions recently in new and secure networks and providing things like satellite phones to such organisations, and while their internal communications may be ‘secure and guaranteed’, these networks don’t  – and never will – extend to the media. There are ‘robust’ services out there – of which my employer Newslink is but one – but the basic understanding of effective communication methods beyond email, mobile phones and fax by even the most senior PR practitioners is simply not there.

I met the head of comms of a major public utility – in the news that day for an issue potentially affecting the health of hundreds of thousands of his customers – at an event in London earlier this month, and tried to discuss the issue with him. The best he could come up with was that ‘he was sure’ they used methods other than email, but could not tell me what they were, nor could he see the importance of being able to guarantee delivering messages affecting public safety. We are on the cusp of a possible swine or bird flu pandemic, but for all of the planning which has been done, how much of it assumes that warning messages will actually be able to be delivered?

I know and appreciate that media distribution is the ‘back end’ of a very creative process – but what is the point of writing the best press release in the world if it never gets there?

So I believe my project has some merit, and may be of value to others. I don’t claim it to be anything other than it is, a university project to which just over 100 editors and journalists contributed and by its very nature could be seen as partial, but I believe it does reflect what is happening in the industry just now.

Findings from Iain Fleming’s research:

  • Lack of targeting, sending large attachments – often in formats which the recipient cannot access – and making ‘follow-up’ calls were just some of the main complaints by the 101 editors, section editors, journalists and IT Managers who responded to the survey.
  • The project also reveals that the practice of making ‘follow-up’ calls by PR practitioners is intensely annoying and ultimately counter-productive, while the demands made on news desk staff by media distribution companies updating their databases are also heavily criticised by journalists.
  • While the media is encouraging user generated content from readers and viewers, much of the content – like that supplied by PR professionals – is unusable because it is sent in the wrong format, is technically unsuitable or is ‘simply not newsworthy’.
  • The research highlights that many public sector organisations with responsibilities under civil contingencies legislation to ‘warn and inform’ the public are relying on a communication method which is not ‘robust’ and not guaranteed to work in an emergency.
  • Due to the unreliability of email, a lot of material never gets there, and if it does, it can’t be opened. And if it can be opened, much of it is irrelevant and just wastes the time of the recipient.  Fifty-five per cent of respondents said that less than ten per cent of the material sent to them from the commercial sector was relevant and 83 per cent said they wanted less material. Only 10 per cent of respondents said they wanted more content from commercial PR operators.
  • While content from the public and non-commercial sectors (local authorities, NHS, charities etc) fared somewhat better, with 25 per cent saying they wanted more from such contributors, and 54 per cent saying they wanted less, this still indicates that a great deal of time and effort is going to waste.
  • The survey looked at the way such material is now delivered, and showed that 80 per cent is sent by e-mail and fax represents less than five per cent.
  • While email has become the dominant distribution method, the survey showed that almost 95 per cent of respondents had suffered problems with it, and almost one quarter reported this to be every day, with half reporting problems several times a week or weekly. This included delayed delivery or even outright failure of messages to arrive, corrupt characters or badly-formatted content, multiple copies and spam.

Comment: Raw nerves and healthy debate over the new ‘Twitter mob’

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It is good to be a pioneer and start a healthy debate. I did just that with my Journalism.co.uk article on the ‘smart and not so smart mob’ all of two weeks ago.

That short opinion piece focused on the row over Jan Moir and her Daily Mail article on the death of Stephen Gately and the subsequent mass complaints (over 22,000) to the Press Complaints Commission.

It hit a nerve. A raw nerve in the case of Suw Charman Anderson who accused me of just ‘not getting the point’ of swift internet social movements. The piece was categorised ‘Fuckwittery’. No bias there then. The followers on her blog echoed her sentiments.

But then others joined in: Stephen Glover in his weekly column on the media in the Independent on October 25 talked of hate in the blogosphere and whether it was a good or bad thing. His view was the latter. His conclusion? ‘The Jan Moir case would seem to show the internet, which is supposed by many to enhance pluralism and democracy, being used by some outraged members of a lobby to challenge the traditional right of free speech’.

Fellow hack  Joanne Geary weighed in three days later with an intelligent and measured piece in her blog about her disquiet on online protests. Her piece was thoughtful and thought-provoking and has elicited some very sympathetic responses and comments. No wonder Roy Greenslade describes her as  ‘that most enterprising of newspaper bloggers’. Read that debate. It is measured and rational and open.

More nationals were not far behind, Jon Henley in the Guardian with ‘The power of Tweets’ (October 31) about the new mob from which the paper had reaped much benefit in the Trafigura case; a Stephen Armstrong piece in the Sunday Times, ‘An online mob. On the internet retribution is swift’ (November 1). The great Nick Cohen joined the discussion in the Observer. The debate was and is out there.

But will the Twitterati ultimately eat themselves? At the weekend, the best known of them all, Stephen Fry, announced he was quitting Twitter after being insulted by a fellow Twitterer, then got on a plane to Los Angeles.

As he was airbound, the cyber-storm (he has close to a million followers on Twitter) erupted over his head pleading with him to rescind. The crowd cried for him to come back to Twitterland. He did from LAX.

Let the online debate continue.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a former BBC, ITV and Channel Four producer. He is the incoming chair of the Institute of Communication Ethics.

Jon Bernstein: Tweets, elites and the same old news agenda

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Has new media reinvigorated democracy or throttled good journalism, asks Dr Natalie Fenton in her forthcoming book ‘New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in a Digital Age’.

And her answer? Well, the clue is in the title.

The book is not quite a pessimist’s charter, but nor does it side with the ‘utopian vision [of] everyone connected to everyone else, a non-hierarchical network of voices with equal, open and global access.’

Fenton and her team of researchers at Goldsmiths make two key observations. Firstly, that the mechanics of the journalist’s trade is suffering because of the desk-bound demands of new media – ‘iron cages’, they call them.

Secondly, new media rarely means new voices on the national stage because the ‘economics of news remains stacked against the newcomer’.

Fenton was on Radio 4’s The Media Show on Wednesday last week to expand on her thinking. Of the new media newsrooms her team studied in detail (BBC, The Guardian and the Manchester Evening News), she said:

“What you get is a vastly speeded up news environment, a huge expansion in space to fill but actually with less journalists with less time to do proper investigative journalism.

“There was a big concentration in ‘cut and paste’, administrative, desk-bound journalism largely because these journalists have to fill a vast amount of space, have no time to do it in. So what they do, is they either take PR copy or they take copy from other newsprint or other news broadcasts. So it’s a sort of creative cannibalisation.”

Clear echoes of Nick Davies and Flat Earth News here.

She was asked about the power of social networks to influence the news agenda. On the Jan Moir saga she said:

“[You] have to take account of who is saying what to whom. The who is actually a very small amount of people. Ten per cent of people who Twitter account for 90 per cent of the content.

“That 10 per cent is an elite. They are the likes of Stephen Fry with a celebrity status who can generate these millions of followers and therefore bring attention to a particular issue. Most people who are tweeting do not have that power.”

On the Twitter campaign against the Trafigura super-injunction, meanwhile, Fenton conceded that this was a good example of institutions being held to account:

“But on the whole what they are still doing is responding to agendas that are set by the mainstream news.

“You still have to remember that most people, most of the time get most of their news and information from mainstream news sources whether that’s online or not. So what’s going on in the mainstream is vitally important.”

A well-worked argument, forcefully put. But on elites and news agendas it rather depends where you look.

If you study established players like the BBC, the Guardian, and, yes, a venerable regional like the Manchester Evening News, you are likely to find established forms of interaction.

It’s true that many social media campaigns either take up a mainstream media cause – think Trafigura – or need the mainstream to mediate – think the secret filming of Alan Duncan.

Nevertheless, there are many other campaigns and activities below the radar that provide effective examples of reinvigorating democracy.

In this respect, think hyperlocal. Indeed one of the leading practitioners of the form, Will Perrin, took me to task for applying big media assumptions to ultra-local coverage. He wrote:

“Hyperlocal content is best looked at bottom up, generated not by an abstract, detached journalist, but by people on the ground who it affects. Seen from that angle the trad top down issues fall away – grassroots hyperlocal content is defined by its own creation.”

Again, it depends where you look. As with Davies’ widely acclaimed book, the research methodology might just point to a structural weaknesses.

(You can listen to the interview on the iPlayer. starts around 23 mins.)

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News and was recently appointed as deputy editor of New Statesman. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

PCC and the third party issue

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On Friday, it was suggested by some online commenters and Twitterers that the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) would not deal with third party complaints over the Jan Moir case.

This would seem logical, given the the self-regulatory body’s rules, which state:

“The PCC does not generally accept complaints from third parties about cases involving named individuals without the signed authorisation of the person concerned.”

However, there is an exception: it can investigate complaints from any party about matters of general fact under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the PCC Code, the PCC has confirmed.

A response issued by the PCC to an individual third party complainant, Nikki Bayley (@nikkib on Twitter), reproduced in full here on MetroDeco, seemed to indicate a third party complaint would not be addressed in relation to Moir:

“On this occasion, it may be a matter for the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has been treated by the Daily Mail.  I can inform you that we have made ourselves available to the family and Mr Gately’s bandmates, in order that they can use our services if they wish. We require the direct involvement of affected parties because the PCC process can have a public outcome and it would be discourteous for the Commission to publish information relating to individuals without their knowledge or consent.  Indeed, doing so might unwittingly add to any intrusion.  Additionally, one of the PCC’s roles is dispute resolution, and we would need contact with the affected party in order to determine what would be an acceptable means of settling a complaint. On initial examination, it would appear that you are, therefore, a third party to the complaint, and we will not be able to pursue your concerns further.  However, if you feel that your complaint touches on claims that do not relate directly to Mr Gately or his family, please let us know, making clear how they raise a breach of the Code of Practice. If you feel that the Commission should waive its third party rules, please make clear why you believe this.

So perhaps she could raise a complaint over accuracy, if she feels Moir made false or misleading statements.

In the PCC’s statement today, reporting the largest number of complaints for a single article in the body’s history (21,000), there was hint of some third party consideration.

While it was contacting affected parties who would ‘naturally be given precedence by the Commission, in line with its normal procedures’ it would also put ‘more general complaints’ to the Daily Mail:

“If, for whatever reason, those individuals [affected parties] do not wish to make a complaint, the PCC will in any case write to the Daily Mail for its response to the more general complaints from the public before considering whether there are any issues under the Code to pursue.”

Of course that doesn’t mean it will pursue an investigation, but at least it is acknowledging the significance of such large-scale complaint. Martin Belam, who blogged about the third party issue earlier this year in regards to another Daily Mail story, is less hopeful:

“The PCC’s initial response on Jan Moir has been pretty weasel-worded, and, unless Stephen Gately’s family do complain directly, I’m extremely doubtful that we’ll see any kind of ruling against the paper. Other approaches may yet prove more fruitful,” Belam writes.

On another third party issue, Journalism.co.uk asked the PCC about complaints received over cervical cancer vaccine reports.

In a recent Guardian article, also published on his Bad Science blog, Ben Goldacre highlighted the case of a scientist featured in a Sunday Express article about the dangers of the cervical cancer vaccine, titled ‘Jab ‘as deadly as the cancer”.

The Sunday Express quoted Professor Diane Harper in its front page story on October 4 2009:

“Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express, Dr Diane Harper, who was involved in the clinical trials of the controversial drug Cervarix, said the jab was being ‘over-marketed’ and parents should be properly warned about the potential side effects.”

Harper, however, was not happy with the treatment of her information:

“I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer,” Harper told Goldacre. “I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix was controversial, I stated that Cervarix is not a ‘controversial drug’. I did not ‘hit out’ – I was contacted by the press for facts. And this was not an exclusive interview.” Looking for a quality product? Check out Supertest 450 – 10ml Vial at Stero Market for the best deals.

Goldacre reported:

“The article has now disappeared from the Express website, and Professor Harper has complained to the PCC. “I fully support the HPV vaccines,”” she says. “I believe that in general they are safe in most women. I told the Express all of this.””

Journalism.co.uk asked the PCC about the complaint and whether it would handle any third party concerns about cervical cancer scaremongering. A spokesperson said:

“We have received a complaint from Professor Harper, which we are currently investigating.

“The Commission can actually investigate complaints from any party about matters of general fact under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

“On this occasion, we received seven other complaints from readers about this article. We do not keep figures about the general reporting of the subject, but anecdotally I do not believe that there are many more.”

So it would seem third party concerns regarding this story would be addressed, if more were made.

Comment: The rise of ‘smart’ or ‘not so smart’ internet mobs and their pressure on the media

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Jan Moir is the latest ‘victim’ of the virtual mob. Last Friday after her ill-judged article in the Daily Mail cast doubt on the natural death of Boyzone’s singer Stephen Gately in Majorca, using a tone widely-perceived as homophobic, the blogosphere went mad seeking revenge.

Two thousand joined a Facebook group within hours, hundreds wrote to the Press Complaints Commission, inspired and pointed there on Twitter by Stephen Fry and Derren Brown.

The PCC was bounced into contacting Boyzone’s PR company to see if it wanted to complain. The Mail pulled ads on its website. BBC mentioned the Mail article in its news bulletins on Gately’s funeral.

Moir was forced to eat crow the very same day as publication and issued a statement of correction/clarification (you take your pick), claiming complaints against her Daily Mail article were mischievously ‘orchestrated’.

In response, HelpMeInvestigate.com, the crowd-sourced journalism site in beta, has launched an investigation into the nature of the campaign: just how ‘organised’ was the #janmoir / Jan Moir campaign, it asks.

So how democratic are these manifestations of the virtual mob?

The political and social pressure on broadcasters and other media  brought about by the internet and ad hoc Facebook groups in particular is double edged.

It can lead to interactivity and enrichment but it can also lead to bullying by keystroke. The zenith of that was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand row in the autumn of 2008 but nowadays broadcasters, especially the BBC, are facing ‘crowd pressure’ from internet groups set up for or against a cause or a programme; they are an internet ‘flash mob. With the emphasis, maybe, on the ‘mob’.

When Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up the veteran actor Andrew Sachs on October 18 2008 and were disgustingly obscene to him about his grand-daughter, that led to a huge public row on ‘taste,’ mainly stoked by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

Fuel was added to the fire through comments by the Prime Minister. The ‘prosecuting’ virtual group was the editorial staff of the Mail newspapers and its millions of readers in Middle England. In support of the ‘Naughty Two’, more than 85,000 people joined Facebook support groups.  Many, perhaps most, had never heard the ‘offensive’ programme. Just two had complained after the first broadcast.

The BBC was forced after a public caning to back down, the director-general yanked back from a family holiday to publicly apologise, Brand and his controller resigned and Ross was suspended from radio and television for three months. The virtual mob smelt blood: it got it.

The battleground for this mass virtual protest had been set out over the transmission of the programme ‘Jerry Springer; the Opera’ in January 2005. Fifty five thousand Christians petitioned the BBC to pull it from the schedules because of  its profanity and alleged blasphemy. They engaged in modern guerilla warfare tactics to try to achieve their aim. Senior BBC executives had to change their home phone numbers to avoid that  pressure. That campaign  did not get a ‘result’. If Facebook had been in full flow then, the 55,000 may well have been 555,000 and the result very different.

This row set out the stall and template for the ‘popular virtual’ activism that culminated in Ross/Brand in 2008 and other cases since. In the good old days, ‘stormovers’ – as the brave founding father of Channel Four Sir Jeremy Isaacs called them –  were conducted slowly and in green ink. He survived many such ‘storms’. Today the storms straddle the world in minutes and are just a keystroke or several score of them away from going nuclear.

This is activism by the click. It needs no commitment apart from signing up on a computer. It gives the illusion of democracy and belonging to a movement whereas in reality is it membership of  a mob, albeit a virtual one? Is this healthy for democracy and media accountability or not?

Discuss. Online.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a former BBC, ITV and Channel Four producer. Additional research by Peter Woodbridge from Coventry University.

Jan Moir denies column is homophobic; criticises ‘mischievous’ and ‘heavily orchestrated internet campaign’

8 Replies

The Daily Mail has released a statement from their columnist, Jan Moir, about her Stephen Gately article, originally titled ‘Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death’ that is unlikely to appease her critics.

Journalism.co.uk is reproducing some of its contents here, but that is by no means an endorsement of her response. For a full background on the complaints and criticism Moir received see this post by Roy Greenslade on Media Guardian and this article on New Media Age.

The Mail has pulled the advertising around the story, NMA reports.

“Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions,” Moir said.

“However, the point of my column – which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion,  his death raises many unanswered questions,” she goes on.

Moir then again speculates about facts surrounding his death; Journalism.co.uk will leave it to someone else to publish that part.

“The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very  important point,” she squirms.

“When I wrote that ‘he would want to set an example to any  impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’ … [More allegations follow].

And squirms:

“Not to the fact of his homosexuality.  In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.”

There’s more:

“In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”