There are still journalists who believe in the honourable aims of their trade. They want to bear witness to history, hold the powerful to account, campaign for justice and so on. We’ve seen it this week with reporters from the Times, Guardian and Sunday Times digging into Nigel Farage’s finances and uncovering stuff so murky that the Reform leader may well, in the long run, be finished.
The Daily Mail, at its best, has produced some truly outstanding journalism. Its former editor, Paul Dacre, stood yesterday in front of giant blown-up front pages celebrating his nerves-of-steel decision to name the killers of Stephen Lawrence. He was acclaiming yesterday’s High Court victory as “an overwhelming vindication of our journalism”.
Up to a point, Lord Copper, as the minions in Evelyn Waugh’s magnificent comic novel Scoop would mutter at the proprietor of the Daily Beast. This was a vindication of sorts—but also an unhappy reminder of an age and style of journalism we have, hopefully, left far behind.
Mr Justice Nicklin’s War and Peace-length judgment introduces us to a Mail journalist called Katie Nicholl, and her own account of how she devoted days of her working life looking for the pathetic, sad, squirmingly salacious details of whether—and, if so, how—a woman in the public eye had become pregnant.
She discovered the name of the likely father and whether the couple had been using contraception. She found out that the woman was indeed expecting, and that it was an ectopic pregnancy. She obtained the name of the doctor treating her, as well as the name of her psychologist and the exact date she had recently visited her.
Ms Nicholl eventually calls the target and asks about an ultrasound test. Her victim denies everything, but Ms Nicholl is not to be deflected. She scribbles in her notebook: “Found out about Ectopic pregnancy beginning of last week. She’s very angry with herself. They were using condoms. St John and Eliz (took a tablet to flush it out)... and was treated there and was out in an hour.”
Now, in the great majority of newsrooms—even in 2003—no reporter would have been expected to dig around something so deeply intrusive, personal and painful. Most news editors would have taken the view that, yes, this might sell newspapers, but it was none of anyone’s business. Ms Nicholl would have been told not to waste any time on it. It was private.
That’s how a decent newsroom would behave.
The Mail took a different view. It was, as well as a hard-hitting news machine, a gossip factory. Once upon a time it penned off all the salacious muckraking into a single page edited by a creepy snout called Nigel Dempster. But over time it spread throughout the paper and, ultimately, morphed into the so-called sidebar of shame on the Mail website, which generates celebrity tittle-tattle by the yard. Every single minute of the day.
Harry’s girlfriends, Simon Hughes’s boyfriend, Liz Hurley’s heartache over wanting another baby, Jemima Kham’s private phone calls about her love life, Sadie Frost’s dilemma about her son’s schooling. None of this was anyone’s business. But it was highly lucrative meat and drink to the Mail.
Even Associated Newspapers’ KC, Antony White, accepted that the draft pregnancy article was “distasteful… ugly… of its time”. The judge said that, had the story been published (someone eventually had second thoughts about it), it would have been “grotesque and unjustifiable”. Ms Nicholl, to her credit, admitted on Wednesday’s Today programme that she didn’t feel proud of some of the stories she had pursued back in the day. “Some of them were intrusive and veered into deeply private territory,” she said—adding that the media landscape back then was “completely different”.
Well, some parts of it were. Three things helped change it. One was my colleague Nick Davies’s relentless reporting about the widespread criminality in some parts of Fleet Street. The second was the subsequent Leveson Inquiry, with the bright light it shone on the ethics and dark practices that a small group of editors and journalists had convinced themselves were just fine. And the third were the multiple lawsuits which proved beyond doubt that Murdoch and Mirror Group newsrooms had become lawless bear pits.
A group of claimants behind those legal actions were intent on proving that the journalists at Associated were no different. Credit is due to Dacre for at least allowing his journalists to give evidence. His counterparts at the Mirror and Sun wrote a series of enormous cheques rather than have their newsroom practices examined under oath. Murdoch would rather pay out £1bn in costs and damages than risk a series of trials about what happened at the Sun.
But, with the Mail case, that meant that the burden of proving criminality fell on the claimants. In 57 different instances, Mr Justice Nicklin found that—after a gap of more than 20 years in some cases—the evidence didn’t exist. There might be strong suspicion, or reasonable grounds to infer that illegal methods had been used, but that didn’t count as proof. The claimants did establish that Associated had forked out an eye-watering £3m to private investigators over the years. But, again, no clinching proof that those investigators had been tasked with illegal actions.
Much hinged on an extraordinary witness statement from a private investigator named Gavin Burrows. But Burrows turned out to be either flaky or a fantasist.
And so Prince Harry and his band of claimants fell at the last hurdle. They should be congratulated for their tenacity over the years, but there are serious questions about the ropey legal advice they received in this final case, especially once it turned out that their star witness was a dud.
The Mail, in its celebratory issue on Wednesday, tried to convince us that this was a sinister conspiracy to destroy the paper, not to mention a free press in this country. All nonsense. You don’t have to be “anti-press” to refuse to shed tears for the gruesome, cruel, intrusive age which was revealed in multiple court actions and by Lord Leveson. Even journalism needs scrutiny.
Let’s hope Ms Nicholl is right: these were the excesses of a different era. And let’s celebrate the majority in our tattered old trade who will continue to bear witness to history, hold the powerful to account and campaign for justice.
