The press
Carry on deceiving
Paul Johnson
rr he Press Council's adjudication in 1 favour of the Sunday Times in the Barclay's Bank-Denis Thatcher case is not only wrong in itself but may prove the beginning of the end for the Council. The Council has not got many friends, either inside or outside the industry, and the journalists who are now applauding its green-light signal for unsrupulous 'inves- tigative reporting' are the last people on earth who support its supposed object of upholding newspaper standards.
Bank-tapping is morally just as objec- tionable as phone-tapping. In some ways it is even worse. For phone-tapping, in prac- tice, is virtually confined to government and its agencies, or someone acting with official approval, and there are now con- siderable safeguards against its misuse. They may not seem adequate to the more paranoid people on the Left, but they almost certainly eliminate serious abuses. Bank-tapping, by contrast, can be prac- tised by any reporter willing to deceive, and any editor who encourages his repor- ters to deceive. The Press Council uses the euphemism 'subterfuge', a sure sign that it has an uneasy conscience about it. The word is defined as 'An artifice or device to which a person resorts in order to escape the force of an atgument, to avoid conde- mnation or censure, or to justify his con- duct; an evasion or shift'. But bank- tapping is much more than that. It is deliberate deception, impersonation, and lying, and especially lying on the tele- phone.
As things are, far too many reporters lie on the phone in order to get people to talk to them at all, and go on lying to prolong the conversation. This practice is particu- larly common among gossip columnists. Having trapped their victim into a phone conversation, they then produce a menda, cious version of it. Thus: the question and answer. 'Mr Famous, are you in Cannes in pursuit of your ex-wife, Mrs Famous?' 'No', is printed as 'Prince Charles's polo- playing crony, Bongo Famous, told me, "I am not in Cannes in pursuit of my ex- wife".' Some Paul Slickeys even have the nerve to write: 'Bongo Famous rang me yesterday to say, "Believe me, Paul. I am not in Cannes in pursuit of my ex-wife Gloria Famous".' I often tell people who have been bothered by these pests that there is only one way of handling phone calls from gossip writers, who usually begin by posing as 'ordinary' journalists. You say, 'Are you a gossip columist?' and repeat the question until you get the usually reluctant answer 'Yes'. You then say, quite politely, 'I am sorry. I never talk to gossip columnists. Goodbye', and re- place the receiver.
The Press Council has now given its approval to bank-tapping and phone-lying, subject only to two qualifications. It must be in search of 'information which ought to be published in the public interest' and there must be 'no other reasonably practic- able way of obtaining or confirming it'. We can forget the second proviso, since idle and unresourceful reporters will always claim that lying and deceit are the only 'practicable' way of obtaining information which people do not want to provide, usually with good reason. As for the first qualification, who decides whether some- thing 'ought to be published in the public interest'? According to the Press Council's ruling, it is decided by the newspaper
'We follow the ancient ways kaftans, flared jeans . . .
which is doing the lying and deceiving.
In the case of Denis and Mark Thatcher, the decision that their private affairs were a matter of public interest was taken (rather reluctantly to begin with) by the Observer editor, Donald Trelford. Purely sensation- al or commercial considerations, such as selling more copies of the paper, never entered his head of course. As is well known, Trelford and his proprietor Tiny Rowland are invariably activated solely by their ardent desire to serve the public. Now I am not saying that the Observer's repor- ters lied and deceived in order to get material about Denis and Mark Thatcher. It would not surprise me if they did, since the paper's standards have fallen pretty sharply since the days when David Astor ran it. The deception was practised by the Sunday Times, which enviously jumped on the bandwagon the Observer had trundled out, then shamefacedly leapt off it. It was the Observer which first defined the smear- campaign as 'in the public interest', and it was the Observer which pursued this vicious and shameful personal vendetta week after week until eventually, having failed to prove a single one of its innuendoes and insinuations, it silently dropped the story, having exhausted its supply of mud. The Sunday Times, to be fair, only ran it for one week. It is the less culpable of the two newspapers, but together this precious pair have succeeded in dragging quality jour- nalism into the gutter. The Press Council had nothing to say about this campaign as such, so presumable approves of it. What the Press Council does not seem to realise, though the public knows it well enough, and visitors from abroad are painfully conscious of it, is that the British press, populars and qualities alike, with the notable exception of the Telegraph group, is at present going through one of its worst phases. The hounding of people who hap' pen to be in the news — and usually the decision to put them there is Fleet Street's alone — has reached new depths. Some' times it victimises purely private people. Sometimes it takes the form of a wholly illegitimate invasion of the private lives of public celebrities, such as sportsmen and women. (The behaviour of the British press during Wimbledon this year was particularly contemptible.) Sometimes it picks on the relatives of the famous. The vendetta against the Thatcher family was an instance of the third abuse and shows the British press at its worst, which, by American and Continental standards, is very bad indeed.
The Press Council has now failed de- cisively in its duty, and people who have had their lives pillaged and scorched by Fleet Street's goths and vandals must look ,
elsewhere for redress. The abdication 01 the Council, a feeble wrist-slapper at the best of times, means that Parliament mulls get down to enacting a Private Bill which will make bank-tapping and similar dirty tricks illegal and give those injured by Fleet Street's circulation mania a certain remedy in the courts.
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