Press
Investigation and privacy
Bill Grundy
"Investigative journalism" is a phrase that can only be said to trip off the tongue if "trip" means stumble. It is a phrase so clumsy that I doubt whether anyone actually ever says it; not even those earnest students of the press who give awards for it round about this time every year. And if it's hard to say, it's even harder to define. Are revelations of the love life of a soccer star investigative journalism? Was the disclosure of the thalidomide scandal an example of it? Do those Sunday exposes that look more like an excuse for printing porn qualify for the title?
I think I know which of those three you'd answer 'Yes' to, and which you wouldn't. But why one and not the others, since all journalism is by definition investigative? Or should be (which makes some political correspondents look sick, since all they do is fly government kites).
Nevertheless, we seem to know instinctively what is investigative journalism and what isn't, without necessarily being able to pin down the reasons for our decision. Which puts me in•mind of the elephani. about which, you will remember, Clem Attlee remarked that it was difficult to describe, but you'll recognise one the moment you see it.
We also know, or think we know, what is good investigative journalism and what Isn't, although here the distinction may have more to do with our own f interests than With any real difference in quality, The revelation that a footballer has accepted a bribe may not strike you as being as important as disclosures about the level of black African wages. But that could be because you're a rugby man and a reader of the Guardian, rather than because one set of facts was harder to uncover than the other. (If anything, I'd hazard a guess that the football story would be the harder to crack.)
But there are more important considerations than this nitpicking. For instance, how far can you go in investigative journalism? Is there a limit? If so, what is it? If not, where does that leave us? And where does investigation become an intrusion into privacy, a question that has exercised the Press Council repeatedly over the years?
These are the sorts of thing Mr Alastair Hetherington, the Editor of the Guardian, has been thinking about recently. I didn't think he would come :.to any startling conclusion
when he finally uttered. And he hasn't. Delivering the Frank Newsam Memorial Lecture to an audience of policemen the other day, he answered the question: "How tar should newspaper investigation go?" with the words "It must go to the point at which the newspaper possesses hard evidence."
This is not the most staggering announcement the world has ever heard. (You wouldn't expect it to be. Mr Hetherington is a sober man, as colleagues visiting his home find to their thirst.) But it will do to be going on with. For one thing, it puts a stop to the publishing of unsupported rumours and suspicions, however tempting it may be to use them to flush out further hard evidence. And that temptation can be Strong. Hard evidence is not only hard in the sense of being impossible to chip away; it is often hard in the sense of being difficult to discover. It was presumably such difficulty that led certain newspapers to print two apparently different rumours close together in the prelude to the Lambton affair, as they had done ten years earlier in the Profumo scandal. The prin-‘ ciple seems to be that he who reads can run. And once he's made a dash for it. you know that hard evidence will be easier to pick up. But as every journalist knows — and as every policeman in Mr Hetherington's audience knew — there are times when you are certain something is true, but you just can't make it stand up. The last piece of the jigsaw seems to have fallen on the floor somewhere. What then?
Well, it's a problem the Times had' to face four years ago. They were on the trail of CID corruption, you will remember, and had come to a -full stop, So, in a most unTimes-like manner, its reporters did a little quiet bugging and came up with some clinching tape. There were, of course, cries of "It is a moral issue"; Mr Maurice Edelman, an almost unnaturally respectable MP, thundered that it was "a grave invasion of these policemen's rights as citizens"; and a lot of other worthy people suffered attacks of splendidly enjoyable moral outrage. Yet, as Mr Hetherington reminded us in his lecture, the appeal judge said that the Times and its reporters had "rendered a great public service." Mr Hetherington agrees with the judge. There was always the chance that if the evidence had been handed over to the police before the clincher had been obtained, the case might never have come to a head. In fact, Mr Hetherington says, exactly that did happen in one of the Guardian's own investigations into the police. So he comes down firmly on the side-of the Times. But, as his lecture reminds us, any investigation has got to be done dispassionately and responsibly. And — and this is implicit in Mr Hetherington's apparently innocent conclusion — it has got to be done, however far the evidence takes you. Because all such investigations are ultimately in the public interest, which, as Mr Hetherington points out, is not necessarily the interest of the police, the politicians, the Civil Service, company boards, or the legal fraternity. Or, one might add, newspapers, an observation I am driven to make after seeing in the same issue of the UK Press Gazette which reported Mr' Hetherington's lecture, that the Blessed Arnold Goodman is down as saying it is "a total absurdity" to believe "that newspapers suppress the truth, that you can influence ediitorial observations, that proprietors somehow contrive to ensure that things are put in or left out,"
Well, all I can say is that if Lord Goodman doesn't think those things happen, there is another itotal absurdity I can think of, It is burly to the point of fatness, has bushy eyebrows, knows everybody and everything, and can quite often be seen getting into and out of a car in Bouverie Street. But wild horses wouldn't drag Lord Goodman's name from me.
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