AS HE PREPARES for his annual Tuscan holiday, without any guests from national newspapers, Guy Black, the director of the Press Complaints Commission, can reflect on a successful seven months during which the PCC has seen off three potential threats to self-regulation of the British press.
The Lord Chancellor yielded on banning payments to witnesses after the PCC Code of Practice was amended; newspapers have not been put within the remit of Ofcom; and Gerald Kaufman’s select committee, against expectations, endorsed self-regulation.
Yet the response to this catalogue of success, as Black observes, has been an outbreak of bickering between the PCC and editors over the issue of what constitutes the public interest.
There is now a serious rift between serious people, provoked by a PCC ruling that The Guardian breached the code by paying John Williams, a prisoner at Hollesley Bay prison, for a diary about his encounters with Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare.
It is worth listing the lay commissioners who made the unanimous ruling that has so upset Alan Rusbridger, the Editor of The Guardian. They are Matti Alderson, former director of the Advertising Standards Authority; Lord Chan, a former member of the Commission for Racial Equality; Mary Francis, director-general of the Association of British Insurers; Arthur Hearnden, former general secretary of the Independent Schools Joint Council; Vivien Hepworth, former chairman of the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust; Robert Pinker, professor of social administration at the London School of Economics; Diane Thompson, chief executive of the Camelot Group; and the Rt Rev John Waine, the former Bishop of Chelmsford.
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There were also six experienced editors, although none was from a broadsheet. Roger Alton, Editor of The Observer, which is owned by the Guardian group, did not attend.
Their ruling, however, has prompted an equally unanimous response from the editors of the five daily broadsheets, Rusbridger, Robert Thomson (The Times), Charles Moore (The Daily Telegraph), Andrew Gowers (Financial Times) and Simon Kelner (The Independent), all equally experienced and as high-minded as the commissioners. They have written to Sir Christopher Meyer, the chairman of the PCC, asking for a review of the ambiguities in the code’s Clause 17, which bans payment to criminals except in the public interest.
The issue at stake has returned to prominence this week with the serialisation by the Daily Mirror of “My Story” by Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who killed a 16-year-old burglar and who was released from prison this week.
The difficulty that the PCC confronts in determining the public interest was demonstrated again when Andrew Neil, the former editor of The Sunday Times, and Professor Roy Greenslade, the Guardian’s press columnist and a former Mirror editor, took opposing sides on Martin’s story. Few matters were of greater public interest than how far we can go to defend our houses from unwanted intruders, especially when the police seem powerless, said Neil.
Nonsense, said Greenslade. Martin’s story was “laughably trivial”, portraying a befuddled individual who showed no signs of remorse. Why didn’t he just give a press conference? One inevitable result of the Martin affair has been renewed interest from the Lord Chancellor in legislating to stop criminals profiting from newspaper deals. A similar threat was averted in 1998 when, as a quid pro quo, the PCC agreed that it would itself investigate any payments to criminals.
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Since then, if editors admit that they have paid for a criminal’s story, there is a PCC inquiry. The Guardian case was open and shut, says Black. The author of the article was a prisoner retailing opportunistic tittle-tattle about Archer — who might have had a case for intrusion into his privacy.
Imagine the outcry there would have been, moreover, if the News of the World had published the story of a “Broadmoor killer’s life with Peter Sutcliffe”. “Some broadsheets seem to believe that the code exists only to control the tabloids,” Black says.
Under Clause 17, the Martin story must be an equally open and shut case. He killed a man and is profiting to the tune of a reputed £100,000-plus from his crime. The Mirror is guilty. When newspapers err, the PCC’s phones start ringing with complaints. But this week, for the first time that PCC staff can remember, there have been 20 to 30 calls in support of the Mirror.
The problem for those who draft the PCC code is that as readers we differentiate between crimes. We don’t think that bank robbers or drug dealers or child abusers should profit from their crimes. But no court of public opinion would convict the Mirror for paying Martin. As Allison Pearson wrote in the Evening Standard he is the wrong person for the right cause, but the cause would win.
I read the offending article in The Guardian with pleasure and without the slightest inkling that it offended the code. It was arguably in the public interest whether Archer was being treated fairly — or unfairly simply because many don’t like his bumptiousness.
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The PCC must obviously be aware of the signals again being given by the Lord Chancellor. But it ought to rise to the challenge from the editors and think very hard about Clause 17. Why not, as Rusbridger suggests, ban the “glorifying of crime”? Then the gulf between the editors and the commissioners might disappear.