A fantastic spot from Michael Acton Smith after the Sun’s criticism of PM Gordon Brown this week for misspelling the name of killed Guardsman Jamie Janes in a letter to his mother, which included the paper publishing a transcript of a phonecall between Brown and Jacqui Janes.
(Hat tip to @joe on Twitter for sharing the link)
The Sun is ‘praying’ for the Tory leadership today, winning lots of coverage overnight for Britain’s highest selling daily newspaper. If you somehow managed to miss it, it reckons ‘Labour’s Lost It’.
Once again, in true lightbulb / ‘wot won it‘ style, it proclaims its political influence:
“At the 2005 election, we and our readers believed Labour had many failings but gave them one last chance over a lacklustre Tory party. They have had that chance and failed.”
Gordon Brown says he doesn’t care: “it is people that decide elections”.
Three high-profile political figures mired in controversy, two thrown out of their jobs, one suffering a humiliating demotion – all thanks to internet activists of differing political hues from green to darkest blue.
Hang your heads in shame video-sting victim Alan Duncan, and Smeargate’s Derek Draper and Damian McBride. Take a bow Tim Montgomerie, Guido Fawkes, and Heydon Prowse.
But was it really the web wot done it? I’m not so sure.
Or at least I don’t think the web could have done it without the traditional media, television news and newspapers in particular.
Clearly this is at odds with Guido’s reading of the situation.
Writing on his blog this morning yesterday Paul Staines (for it is he) asks who forced Alan Duncan from his role as shadow leader of the House of Commons.
Not Tory leader David Cameron, that’s for sure. Rather it was the unlikely pairing of Tim Montgomerie and Heydon Prowse, ‘the blogosphere’s shepherd of the Tory grassroots and the angry young man with a video-cam’.
Of Prowse, who filmed Duncan on the terrace talking of ‘rations’ in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, Guido notes:
“Heydon Prowse, who is he? He just destroyed the career of a greasy pole climbing Westminster slitherer. No house-trained political nous, no insight, in fact a little naive. He still did it.”
And Guido is in no doubt what this means in the wider context:
“The news is now disintermediated.”
The same applies, apparently, to the sacking of Damian McBride and Derek Draper, both prime ministerial advisors in their time. McBride and Draper were outed for their parts in a plot to use a pseudo-activist blog to spread rumours about various high-profile Tories.
The emails incriminating the two men found their way to Guido/Staines, and were in turn picked up by the media.
(Ironically, the site was meant to be the left’s answer to right-wing blogosphere attack-dogs, Guido among them.)
This week saw the story take another twist. Would-be smear victim Nadine Dorries MP carried out a threat to sue Draper and McBride and enlisted the help of Guido and fellow blogger Tory Bear to be servers of writs.
No one is doubting the origin of both stories, nor the journalistic craft in exposing the men at the heart of them. But it took the mainstream media to push these events into the public consciousness, into the mainstream.
And it took the attentions of the mainstream media to effect the sackings and demotion.
On the day it broke, the Duncan story led the BBC 10 o’clock News and featured prominently on other channels. In the ensuing 48 hours it spawned dozens of national press stories – the Daily Star went for ‘Dumb and Duncan’, The Mirror for ‘Duncan Donut’, others were more po-faced – as well as leader comments, opinion pieces and letters.
The coverage continued into the weekend and despite Duncan’s very swift apology and Cameron’s initial willingness to draw a line under events (“Alan made a bad mistake. He has acknowledged that, he has apologised and withdrawn the remarks.”) the drip, drip of media focus eventually forced the Tory leader to act.
It was a similar pattern with Smeargate.
Would PM Gordon Brown and Cameron have acted if these had remained just web stories? Not in 2009.
Is the news disintermediated? Not yet. Instead we have a symbiotic – if dysfunctional – relationship between the blogosphere and the traditional media.
The latter fears and dismisses the former in equal measure, but increasingly relies on it to take the temperature of various constituent parts of society and, yes, to source stories. Guido is such a good conduit through which to leak precisely because the media reads him.
The former, meanwhile, is disparaging about the latter (sometimes for good reason) but nonetheless needs it to vindicate its journalistic endeavours.
A final twist to the Alan Duncan story. Heydon Prowse offered Guido first refusal on his secret video recording back in June. Guido turned it down. “D’oh!” he later wrote in a confessional blog post.
Guido always has the good grace to admit when he’s goofed, as he did earlier this year over James Purnell’s fictitious leadership bid.
Will he accept with equally good grace that the mainstream media were a vital ingredient in the sackings and demotion of McBride, Draper and Duncan?
Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at jonbernstein.wordpress.com.
Sky News’ online petition calling for a live television debate for the General Election had attracted 4080 signatures at the time of writing.
Additionally, the Sky ‘Leaders’ Debate’ Facebook campaign launched on Tuesday has 176 fans so far – as yet a counter group doesn’t seem to have been set up by its critics, ITV and the BBC.
Yesterday the Guardian reported that ITV and BBC ‘have accused Sky News of potentially scuppering a televised debate between the three main party leaders ahead of next year’s general election after the satellite channel broke cover today by saying it would hold one even if Gordon Brown did not take part’.
The influence of UK-based democracy organisation, mySociety, often gets forgotten, perhaps deliberately downplayed, in the British press. Let’s go back to the MP expenses row, for example. Well before the Telegraph played its central role in exposing the various scandals, mySociety saw a significant campaign victory when Gordon Brown U-turned on an attempt to keep certain MP expenses details private, back in January.
At the time, mySociety’s founder, Tom Steinberg said: “This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.” But did mySociety’s, in my view, undeniably influential part get reported in the UK press? Not really.
So it was good to see that in Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s speech at the Media Standards Trust event earlier this week, all of which will be available to watch here, he opened with examples of online projects (two mentions for mySociety) – that do exactly what newspapers do – or used to – do. Is it journalism, but does it matter, he wondered.
Rusbridger gave three examples that showed, he said, ‘changes in how information is organised, personalised, ordered, stored, searched for, published and shared.’ These sites, he said, have many things in common with conventional journalism, ‘dealing with facts, with statistics, with information about public life, politics and services.’
This is the relevant part of Rusbridger’s speech:
On Monday (July 13) Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg will take part in a public question and answer session with a difference.
Clegg will respond to questions solicited via a range of social media sites in a livestreamed event – something that the politician himself has described as changing ‘the way we do politics’.
The event is the latest in a series of sessions subjecting high-profile figures in the world of politics and business to social media scrutiny – but previous participants, including Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Bob Zoellick, used the q&a session as a follow-up to a speech. Clegg will just be responding to questions from the public and online audience.
Journalism.co.uk is going to co-host part of the proceedings – it’s a great opportunity for us to see how Reuters runs these events and why and how they are opening it up/distributing it in this way.
How to get involved:
According to Reuters, nothing is off limits. If you want to put a question to Clegg before or during the event, you can:
Clegg has posed some questions of his own on 12 Seconds; or perhaps you’d like to challenge his statements on the war in Afghanistan?
How to follow the event:
There will be a live video stream of the event on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ blog and on the Reuter’s hosting page. You can also follow some of the event on the Reuters New Editors Twitter channel.
Journalism.co.uk will attempt to aggregate some of the tweets around the event as well as featuring coverage on @journalism_live.
Any other suggestions of how you’d like us to cover it – please chip in.
Someone has left a comment beneath Journalism.co.uk’s article looking at the Telegraph’s transparency over MPs’ expenses. They suggest that a member of staff at the Telegraph uploads the original data to Wikileaks.org. It’s probably unlikely to happen.
What has happened is this: following Gordon Brown’s promise last week, the speaker’s office yesterday confirmed that details of MPs’ expenses will be released tomorrow (Thursday), on the parliament website. Official, but edited.
“The Daily Telegraph obtained a copy of the unedited expenses details and has been publishing extracts since the beginning of May.
“Attention on Thursday is likely to focus on how much damaging information would have been ‘redacted’ and hidden from the public if the Telegraph had not got hold of the details.”
WelshBlogger leaves this comment beneath the Guardian article:
“The ‘official’ one will be sanitised. I’ll only believe the Telegraph version. We, all, owe them a debt of gratitude. Why didn’t the Guardian do it?”
Will we ever see the unedited Telegraph version so we can compare the two? And compare the data with the stories generated by news organisations? Time will tell. WikiLeaks’ editor, Julian Assange, thinks it should be publicly archived information.
The Guardian, as WelshBlogger points out, didn’t get the data. It has, however, plotted information obtained via the Telegraph’s stories, in a spreadsheet.
Official documents, apart from ‘sensitive information’, Royal Family and Cabinet papers, could be released after 20 years instead of 30 under new government proposals, Gordon Brown announced yesterday.
The government is also looking at extending the remit of the Freedom of Information (FoI) act to cover organisations that spend public money.
The measures will aim to improve the transparency of the UK parliament following the expenses scandal.
The official publication of the MPs expenses data by parliament will happen in the next few days, Brown added.
So who wants the films rights to MPs’ expenses? It’s on a far less grave subject, but maybe it will be like the 9/11 films; the aftermath still permeating society, when the scripts are sold and production started. The next general election may not even have happened. Gordon Brown could still be Prime Minister. Just.
Or perhaps (Sir? ‘Lord’ is less likely given the target) Will Lewis’ memoirs will have been on sale for a while first, before the 21st century’s equivalent of ‘All the President’s Men’ is released, to allow the dust to settle.
Whichever way, this archetypal British plot is the stuff of a (Working Title, maybe) director’s dream; even if the journalism itself is markedly not Watergate, as most hardened investigative hacks and other journalists at rival titles are quick to point out. The gate of significance in this story is the one at the end of the second home’s garden path. No Deep Throat, just Deep Pockets.
A small group of privileged Telegraph journalists has been embedded from early till late in what’s apparently known as ‘the bunker’ – a room separate from the main newsroom, away from the ‘hub and spokes’, away from the Twitterfall graphic projected on the wall – sifting through the details of thousands upon thousands of supermarket, DIY store and restaurant receipts and other documents.
It’s got all the ingredients for the heroic hack flick: the furtive deal with the middle man and the original whistleblower, for an undisclosed sum (no doubt to be revealed in Lewis’ or possibly Ben Brogan’s memoirs), at one point rumoured to be £300,000.
While this whole expose – the ‘Expenses Files’ as the Telegraph first called it – is most definitely built on a film-like fantasy, it is grounded in career-breaking political change, and last night’s audience at the Frontline Club for a debate on the paper’s handling of the stories, got a little insight into the process; a rare chance, as the paper has mainly been very quiet on just how it’s done it.
The ‘consequences were massively in the public interest,’ argued the Telegraph’s assistant editor, Andrew Pierce, who popped up on BBC Breakfast news this morning as well. “It was brilliant, brilliant old fashioned journalism (…) at its finest.
“It’s so exciting – you were aware you had stuff, it was going to change things, and boy it has…
“Of course it’s been terrific for the circulation – we’re a newspaper and we’re there to make sales.”
According to Pierce, 240 broadsheet pages covering the story have been published so far.
“So far we’ve published one correction: we got a house mixed up. I’d say in terms of journalism that ain’t a bad ratio.”
That was disputed by one member of last night’s panel, Stephen Tall, editor-at-large for the Liberal Democrat Voice website; he’s unlikely to get a cameo as it would rather spoil the plot.
Tall’s complaint was that three stories on Liberal Democrats have been misrepresented in separate stories and received insufficient apology; something Journalism.co.uk will follow up on elsewhere, once we’ve moved on from this romanticised big screen analogy.
Back to the glory: Pierce described how journalists from around the world had been to peek at the unfolding scene of action – they’ve had camera crews from Turkey, Thailand and China, in for visits, he said.
There’s a ‘sense of astonishment’, he added. ‘They thought quaint old Britain’, the mother of all democracies, ‘was squeaky clean.’
The story, Pierce claimed, ‘has reverberated all the way around the world’. “We actually are going to get this sorted out. Were MPs really able to set their own pay levels? Their own expenses levels? And it was all tax free.”
‘Old-fashioned journalism lives on’ has become the war cry of the Telegraph and its champions, in defence of the manner in which it acquired and dealt with the data.
For raw blogging it is not. Any CAR is kept secret in-house. Sharing the process? Pah! This is as far away from a Jarvian vision of journalism built-in-beta as you can imagine. While other news operations – the Telegraph’s own included – increasingly open up the inner workings (former Telegraph editor Martin Newland’s team at The National in Abu Dhabi tweeted live from a significant meeting yesterday morning) not a social media peep comes from the bunker till the paper arrives back from the printers.
There might be little teasers on the site with which to taunt their rivals, but for the full meaty, pictorial evidence it’s paper first, online second. Rivals, Pierce said, have to ‘wait for the second edition before they rip it off’.
Nobody has it confirmed how much they officially coughed up for the story – ‘we don’t use the words bought or paid,’ said Pierce. Though last night’s host, Guardian blogger and journalism professor Roy Greenslade, twice slipped in a speculative reference to £75,000, Pierce refused to be drawn.
“Fleet Street has existed for years on leaks,” said Pierce, as justification. “We will stick to our guns (…) and not discuss whether money changed hands.”
Enter the hard done by heroine of the piece: Heather Brooke. Much lauded and widely respected freedom of information campaigner, she and other journalists – one from the Sunday Telegraph (Ben Leapman); one from the Times (Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas) – did the mind-numbingly boring hours of Freedom of Information requests and tedious legal battles over several years, only to lose the scoop to a chequebook.
Will she get a part in the government-destroyed-by-dodgy-expenses film? If Independent editor, Roger Alton, was casting she certainly would. In fact, she deserves a damehood, he declared last night.
A member of the audience asked whether Alton would have paid for the information himself if he had had the chance. Unlike his last foray to the Frontline, the Independent editor knew he was being filmed this time. A pause for ethical reflection before he answered, then:
“We’ve barely got enough money to cover a football match for Queens Park Rangers. Take a wild guess! Any journalist would cut off their left arm and pickle it in balsamic vinegar!”
That’s a yes then, we presume.
Apparently, Sun editor Rebekah Wade turned it down after being told there wasn’t much chance of a Jacqui Smith style porn revelation or a cabinet resignation. “She asked ‘would this bring down a cabinet minster?’ And she was told it wouldn’t,” claimed Pierce. How wrong the data tout(s) were about their own stuff.
More embarrassing for the Telegraph, though Pierce said he knew nothing of it, was Brooke’s revelation that the Sunday Telegraph had refused to back their man financially, a case which Brooke, Leapman and Ungoed-Thomas finally won in the High Court – the judge ordered disclosure of all receipts and claims of the 14 MPs in original requests, along with the addresses of their second homes.
Update: Ben Leapman responds on Jon Slattery’s blog here: “I never asked my employer to pay for a lawyer because I took the view that journalists ought, in principle, be able to go to FoI tribunals themselves without the barrier of having to pay. I also took the view, probably rather arrogantly, that in this emerging field of law I was perfectly capable of putting the arguments directly without a lawyer.” Leapman was represented by solicitor advocate Simon McKay ‘very ably for no fee’ in the High Court, he writes.
Publication of all MPs’ expense claims are now forthcoming, after redaction (‘a posh word for tippexing out,’ said Pierce.) In July 2008, ‘parliament went against the court by exempting some information – MPs’ addresses – from disclosure,’ the Guardian reported.
Now, for a name for our blockbuster. ‘The Month Before Redaction‘? ‘Bunker on Buckingham Palace Road‘? ‘646 Expense Forms and a Re-shuffle‘? I can predict a more likely tag line at least, the now all too familiar: ‘They said they acted within the rules’.
The ending to this expenses epic is not yet known, but there won’t be many happy endings in Parliament. Pierce promises more stories, with no firm end date, but unsurprisingly, didn’t give any hint of what lies ahead. Could an even bigger scoop be on its way? Who’s left?
@PollyToynbee’s first tweet is an apology for a comment piece in which the Guardian journalist made a comparison between Gordon Brown and a crashing plane. This is the first paragraph of her piece for the Guardian on June 4:
“Another engine breaks away from Gordon Brown’s fuselage, and the damage done looks set to bring him crashing out of the sky. Even if he can judder on, the injury done will diminish him further. Which other engines may now break away too? Those who would bring him down say the prime minister is beyond repair. The party faces a terrible choice it can no longer avoid.”
Commenters raised questions about the metaphor used, given this week’s Air France disaster. As Jon Slattery noted on his blog, one Comment is Free user, ‘ShamelessWords’, complained:
“Are there no editors working at the Guardian tonight? This opening line, in light of the Air France tragedy this week, is astounding! It is beyond belief that this was written and then published, without anyone realising that the words are in extremely poor taste. What an insult to all those families grieving for loved ones. I hope they don’t see this article.The offending phrases need to be retracted and a quick apology is needed.”
Matt Seaton, the Guardian.co.uk Comment is Free editor, confirms in the comments that Polly Toynbee has apologised for the analogy via Twitter: “As many users have observed, the plane crash metaphor in the first paragraph has an unfortunate ring. Sorry Polly hasn’t been here herself, but she has twittered an apology.”
@PollyToynbee tweeted this morning:
“My sincere apologies for ‘plane crash’ Gordon Brown analogy in Guardian piece yesterday. Utterly crass and insensitive, mea culpa.”