Decency can never be a luxury for the press

I started in high-end current affairs in ITV, in the days when advertising revenue sloshed around the place and the terms of the franchise required pointy-headed broadcasting. When the revenue stream dried up, the programmes stopped. By then I was at the Beeb, where the licence-funded journalism was regulated out of a thick book called The Producer’s Guidelines, helped by a manager titled Chief of Editorial Policy.

These guidelines were elaborate, frustrating and restrictive. They dealt with matters from how to report opinion polls to the question of when doorstepping people or secret filming might be justified. They were not about the law, but about something much more important — ethics. What were we, as people exercising power, permitted to do to others in order to tell the stories we wanted to tell?

The guidelines didn’t allow “fishing expeditions” of the Vince Cable kind, the financial rewarding of illegal activity (the MPs’ expenses disk was acquired for money from someone who had stolen it), going through the dustbins of celebrities, let alone phone hacking — even in the days when it was not illegal. BBC investigations teams jibbed at the rules continually, but understood (I think) their value.

My next job was at The Independent. By that time the paper was losing money and was run by a consortium that included Mirror Group Newspapers. In the lift at Canary Wharf we would encounter Kelvin MacKenzie, once of The Sun, now a Mirror exec, who would treat us to disobliging jokes about what a lot of stuck-up, unread, loss-making no-marks we all were.

In the world of newspapers there was no set of guidelines (in five years I never met anyone who had so much as read the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct). There was some understanding of libel law, and some broad agreement on what it was wrong to do. You shouldn’t make stuff up, you should check things if you could, you shouldn’t be gratuitously offensive to people. I think there was a broad understanding that the issue was not the law — that some things were bad to do, even if they were legal.

But we were in the loss-making part of the business. In 2008 the Editor- in-Chief of the Mail titles, Paul Dacre, gave a very important speech to the Society of Editors. In a throwaway sentence he referred to people like me as part of a “privileged elite ... who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments, and are impervious to what the great majority of people are thinking, removed as they are from the commercial imperative of actually connecting with enough readers to make their papers — or media outlets — financially viable”.

Dacre traced his own history in journalism. What he loved, he said, were the “campaigns, passions, sensation and the sheer bloody mischief that is the chemistry of any good paper”. And that, he suggested, was what a large number of paying readers wanted too.

Sensation may be lucrative but it is not easily produced. In his much loved Sunday Express of years ago, Dacre cheerfully revealed, the staff — including his own father — were paid “handsome bonuses” to make up letters for the letters page.

Dacre, at that point chairman of the PCC’s editors’ code committee, clearly considered such a minor fraud as entirely admirable. Readers liked it and it sold papers.

There could have been a fuss, and it would have stopped for a while, for that has been the pattern. When the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, led to a furore about paparazzi, aggressive and intrusive photography was forsworn, the PCC harrumphed — then it all died down and the practice resumed.

I am not concentrating on Dacre here to somehow deflect readers’ attention from what has been going on at the News of the World, but because his is such a brilliant and frank expression of a reality and an attitude. Dacre made the point that the public buy sensation and will absorb some journalism with it, rarely the other way round. So, as he put it, “if mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations . . .”

Space precludes an analysis of what a competitive market modern journalism is in. Keeping going while adapting to the knowledge revolution is taxing every atom of inventiveness that media managers possess. The need for the story, the absence of any proper agreed ethical framework, the absurd weakness of regulatory bodies: all combine, it seems to me, to turn propriety into an absurd luxury for part of the journalistic world.

This lack of scruple allows them to be vigorous, bloody-minded, lacking in deference and full of humour. Mass-market journos say of us, with some truth, that where they lead we sometimes follow, but with a nosepeg prominently displayed. As for the readers, they’ll answer, if asked, that they don’t like the methods, but they’ll buy the product.

None of this constitutes an excuse, or even a mitigation. For myself, I agree with David Cameron and want a public inquiry into phone hacking, and, if merited, I would expect the culprits to be treated only moderately less severely than we as a profession would have demanded of some feckless social worker or offending public servant. I think there’s a lot that’s right and far too much that is wrong with British journalism. That’s as true in its way of the shoddy reporting that led to the MMR scare as it is of phone hacking.

The latter just makes it too clear, too bloody blatant. Presented with an opportunity to plunder stories from private miseries, some in the profession felt entitled to treat others as just collateral in their war. When we do that, we lose our souls.