Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS RESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Kevin Marsh Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 03.07.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 06.07.08 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN824/08VT1027 Duration: 26.55 Taking part in order of appearance: David Yelland Former Editor, The Sun Jean Seaton Professor of Media History, University of Westminster Martin Moore Director, Media Standards’ Trust Kamal Ahmed Former Executive Editor of News, The Observer Mike Jempson Director, MediaWise Trust Charlie Beckett Director of Polis; London School of Economics Author of Super Media: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World Professor Jay Rosen Professor of Journalism, New York University MARSH: Here’s a simple enough question: what’s the point of the press? What are our newspapers for? Some would say, it’s obvious. The press is the Fourth Estate, our watchdog on authority, part of what thinkers call ‘the public sphere’ - the open accessible space where we citizens go to find the facts and hear the arguments we need before committing deliberate acts of citizenship, like voting. And a working public sphere needs a press that’s free. But is that enough? Don’t we citizens also need a press that’s responsible to us? Editors and journalists who understand they’re citizens too and have a stake in the public going well? Lofty stuff. But here’s the reality. David Yelland edited Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun, from 1998 to 2003. YELLAND: There would have been a referendum on the single currency if The Sun had not resisted it so strongly. I’m convinced of that. So two weeks after I took over, we ran a front page with the headline ‘Is this the most dangerous man in Britain?’, which was wrongly perceived as being a move away from Tony Blair. What I wanted to do was to draw a line in the sand right at the beginning of my editorship and say we weren’t going to be moved on this issue. MARSH: What do you think gives a newspaper, or gave you as an editor, the right to make that decision that you were going to draw that line in the sand? YELLAND: When you’re made editor of The Sun these days, you’re quite young. I mean I was thirty-four. I wanted to make an impact. And that is an honest answer to that question. And more importantly than that, ninety percent of our readers were without a doubt behind us. MARSH: So how do you know what your public wants? YELLAND: Instinct is the answer to that. Editing a newspaper is the only mass market business which is still done by instinct. MARSH: One of the things that has been written about quite a lot was one of your early headlines, the gay mafia headline. Was that an example of your instinct going wrong, do you think? YELLAND: No, that is an example, to be frank, of a huge error on my part as editor. You know, I mean I haven’t talked much about this, but the reality is that there were other people on the paper below me that wanted to run that headline. They thought that Britain was run by a gay mafia, and I’d been there a few weeks and acquiesced and ran the story. As soon as it appeared, I realised instantaneously that it was a huge mistake and it went all against my own personal beliefs. We ran a leader which completely changed our position the next day, saying that The Sun wouldn’t out gays any more. I learnt a cardinal lesson: if we had to have a slightly duff news day, that was better than having to cause a riot every day. That was the thing I found most difficult about editing The Sun, is that I was paid to get up in the morning and say you know it is absolutely unacceptable that this is happening in the country or that is happening in the country. And then the next day, I’d have to get up and say by lunch time, you know it’s disgusting that we’re doing this. It’s unhealthy to be angry all the time. As soon as you start to look at both sides of an argument, you know that you’re in the wrong job. As soon as you reflect on things on the way home and ring in and change an editorial to say the opposite of what it was saying three hours ago, you know you’re in the wrong job. And that happened to me quite early on at The Sun. MARSH: So that’s what press freedom is all about: the freedom of an editor to choose his paper’s agenda on instinct and to make a career enhancing impact; the freedom to change his mind a hundred and eighty degrees the next day and pack it all in when he starts to see both sides of an argument. And the public purpose in all of that? SEATON: The press in Britain feels as if on the whole it would rather there was a scandal and involved somebody in charge’s blood. MARSH: Jean Seaton, Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster. What worries her most is that the way in which the press distorts an important debate can harm not just our civic health but even our physical well being. SEATON: For instance, one of the most extraordinary examples of that seems to be what’s happened to immunisation, which is one of those very interesting mathematical wagers in which I will get my children all immunised for a very small risk in order that the community will have a very, very small risk of having these diseases. And the press ran an extraordinary campaign because it looked sexy against doctors, against immunisation and how all your children were going to turn into sort of vegetables if you did get them immunised. The press has not stood up and said we’re sorry, we got this really wrong; we have left whole swathes of communities more vulnerable to infections - in a scandalous way actually. MARSH: Some journalists still believe there was nothing scandalous about the way they presented the MMR debate and their choice of focus on the high emotion on one side - the maverick doctor, babies in danger and anxious mums - at the expense of the flat, dull thud of reason, statistics and almost the entire medical establishment on the other. And there’s a reason. Legislation and a Royal Charter require broadcasters to be impartial, fair and balanced, but not the press. Newspapers are free from all but the most basic obligations to avoid contempt and defamation. And, remember, the MMR debate wasn’t an arm’s length one about what our legislators could or should do on our behalf. It was a debate about our own civic behaviours, about actions we could take ourselves to make not just our own children safer but also the children of people we’d never met. Not an isolated case either. Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust, a charity which aims to improve press standards, studied another one. It involved a report prepared for the Association of Chief Police Officers. MOORE: Prior to the report coming out, they gave sections of the report to media outlets - I think specifically to The Guardian. The Guardian reported it very positively, saying that the report demonstrated that there was not increased levels of crime as a result of higher immigration. It was picked up by other outlets, particularly by the BBC. That story ran completely counter to the agenda of various other media outlets who had not been given the leaked report, but who having been gazumped, if you like, then tried to wrench the agenda back to their own territory. And the following day, a number of papers, particularly The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, chose to present exactly the opposite story; that the report demonstrated that they were causing significant problems for the police. Now I pursued this because I was curious to know which of the stories was right. It turned out the report still hadn’t been released, therefore all we had to go on was the agenda of the different news organisations. And if you’re a reading public, how on earth are you supposed to make your mind up as to what the truth is if all you’re getting is newspapers pursuing their own different agendas? MARSH: How indeed? Well one answer is that we’re grown ups; we can choose which paper and which agenda to buy. Or none at all. That’s why Kamal Ahmed, who was Executive Editor of News at The Observer until October last year, argues that the papers can’t afford to stray too far from the facts or their readers will desert them. AHMED: Sunday journalism in particular went through a very aggressive patch where it became known as sort of Sorry on Sunday, which was about a story being in a Sunday paper and by Monday it wouldn’t be true. We weren’t convinced about how long that could last and I think all the papers actually had a rethink about what was going on with Sunday journalism, what it was saying and what it was doing and how much our stories would have longevity. It was about us actually rethinking where we were and I think the standards did actually go up. And I know that goes against the grain of what people believe, but I think actually from the business end, from my end, we did actually think about it. MARSH: They may have thought about it, and some papers may have done something about it - checking their facts, that is - but journalism with a public purpose isn’t just about getting the facts right. JEMPSON: Somebody once said to me, “Who is going to employ someone who’s won a prize on journalism ethics? Very few people in fact.” Ethics is what happens late on a Friday afternoon on journalism courses. MARSH: Mike Jempson, Director of the MediaWise Trust, an independent watchdog set up to help people who see themselves as victims of the press get some kind of redress. He also trains journalists and worries about one part of the press that’s fast losing any civic purpose: local newspapers. JEMPSON: Sometimes they are being produced in towns that are not the towns they’re actually representing, so they may be many miles from their audiences; but they’re not putting resources into watching what’s happening at the juvenile courts, in the family courts, what’s happening inside the town hall and in the health service and in education. And because it requires effort, time, resources, nobody’s doing it any more. People are increasingly frightened of or in some way alienated from journalists and the media. There’s a sense - and I’ve seen this particularly amongst young Muslims - they don’t think that the local paper is something that they can approach. They don’t think it’s theirs, it’s part of their lives. I sometimes wonder whether how many of the young journalists of now want to change the world, which is often the way a lot of us got into the business. MARSH: The picture you paint of local journalists becoming increasingly out of touch with the local communities and the local newspapers becoming increasingly out of touch with the local communities - to what extent is that true, do you think, of the national press? JEMPSON: I think you’ve only got to look at a local story that’s gone national to see the difference that it makes. For instance, the recent reports about suicides in Bridgend. The people who pick up on those stories at a national level have no sense of responsibility at all, it seems to me - so on the Bridgend suicides, for instance, we saw stories that hadn’t been properly researched have a currency, and I think that that doesn’t help anybody feel any responsibility to readers. MARSH: Whether locally or nationally, the financial squeeze produces something close to fear and a long way from public purpose. YELLAND: There is a tendency when your sales are going down to revert to type, to panic, to use extreme politics and aggressive headlines to try and grab back readers that you’ve lost. MARSH: David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, offering an amazing insight into how cynical some of the press can become. YELLAND: I’m a passionate believer that there is something very positive and great about Britain, but as a nation we have an Achilles heel and our Achilles heel is we have a tendency towards mass depression. And you can make money as a newspaper proprietor by pandering to that Achilles heel, and it does work; but the cost of it is to belittle the political process, to make it look as if anyone that goes into politics or anybody that tries to stand up and do something for altruistic reasons is somehow weird and odd and ought to be slammed down. And I’m afraid that has had a negative effect on politicians and on all of us. MARSH: Pessimism, negativity and “belittling the political process”. In the end, it was too much for David Yelland. He left The Sun for public relations, a career that tends to stress the positive. The Media Standards Trust’s Martin Moore doesn’t like the newspapers’ high octane tactics either, but he can see some merit in them. MOORE: There is a tone that the press takes. It tends to be sceptical, highly aggressive and somewhat hysterical. And to a certain extent one could argue that this is positive because it raises issues to high on the agenda very quickly, it brings them to people’s attention very fast. At the same time, it can alienate many people from the debate itself because they’re either scared to participate themselves or because they just don’t want to engage in something of such high tempo and such hysteria. MARSH: The result? The press is in a vicious feedback loop: the less we trust it, the fewer papers we buy. Circulation is down 11% on five years ago. The tighter the finances - and advertising is down 5% too over the past five years - the more the press reverts to an aggressive and negative type, as David Yelland told us. And so it loses more of our trust and we buy even fewer. But that’s not the only reason newspapers are edging closer and closer to self-inflicted public irrelevance. There’s another loop, the Westminster one. We, the public on the outside, our elected representatives, and political journalists like Kamal Ahmed on the inside. AHMED: We needed them and they needed us. I think what’s interesting is that when you are working in the lobby, as all political editors and political journalists do on the Westminster scene, is trying to think about the public as your audience rather than Westminster as your audience. MARSH: Do you think on the whole political journalists got that right in your era, thinking about the public? AHMED: Yes, I do. I think that there’s a lot of criticism about journalism, which I think is ill founded in that they live in this Westminster bubble, they’re obsessed about process and about issues that are only of importance within SW1. I think that was an unfair criticism. MARSH: Did you never worry that you were perhaps getting too close to No. 10? AHMED: No, I didn’t. I mean it was an important part of my job as Political Editor of The Observer to have close contact with No. 10, but also we were highly critical and the stories I wrote and stories others wrote were highly critical of the No. 10 machine. This idea that we would sit there and wait to be sort of dealt with as puppets, I think is unfair. MARSH: Puppets probably is unfair, but the impression remains. We citizens feel the real business of politics is being hidden from us. But that’s changing because of the Internet, according to Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics and author of a new book, ‘Super Media: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World’. BECKETT: We’ve got a fantastically competitive media, which has learned how to attract the attention of readers, but what’s clear is they’re now losing that attention. They have to find ways to re-engage with a kind of relevance for people’s lives and the way that they’re going to consume news. MARSH: But what do you think it is that’s made the press lose that contact with people’s lives, lose that contact if you like with their agenda; allowing the agenda to become, as many people say quite openly, oh it’s just the press’s agenda? BECKETT: It was a very top down process where a bunch of guys would go off and find out what they wanted to talk about, print these newspapers and put it out to the readers. And occasionally they’d get some letters back, but generally there was very little interaction. You went by what sold. There wasn’t really any communication between the people making the stuff and the people consuming it. And that’s got to change because they’re not consuming it. We’ve got to find out what they want and we’ve got to start delivering it with them as well as for them. And that’s the important change and that’s the point of the new public journalism, the more networked journalism; is that in a sense you’re sharing the responsibility because you’re trying to ask the public what interests them and, therefore, you’re actually having a discourse if you like, which is more about the way they live their lives rather than just how a bunch of journalists think they might live their lives. MARSH: Twenty years ago, the American press found itself in an earlier crisis of public trust. The trigger was the 1988 presidential election campaign between George Bush Senior and Michael Dukakis. ACTUALITY: 1988 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN DUKAKIS: (MUSIC) My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, tonight with the wind on our backs, with friends at our sides and with courage in our hearts, the race for the finish line begins. (APPLAUSE) MALE SPEAKER: Michael Dukakis from Massachusetts. (DRUM ROLL) MARSH: Despite the initial razzmatazz, this campaign descended into such dismal negativity that it shocked even veteran journalists and the press reduced it to a horse race on turf chosen by the candidates’ camps. At the same time, journalists began to notice the local press had become hollowed out, divorced from the communities it served, and losing money. One response was a movement called ‘public journalism’. It advocated reconnecting press and citizens. It demanded the press take responsibility for what it did to the quality of the public debate and that it help solve problems and not make them seem insoluble. ‘Making the public go well’ was one mantra. Professor Jay Rosen of New York University now writes a blog called PressThink. At the time, he was public journalism’s guru, thinking through many of its ideas. ROSEN: One of the most common and easy to grasp was the idea of developing a citizen’s agenda for elections coverage where instead of covering the campaign the way the professional reporters assess it, you make a conscious effort to go out among the community and find out what are the things that citizens really want this campaign to be about, what do they want the candidates to discuss, and actually try to synthesise a citizen’s agenda not only for your own coverage but in what you want to ask the candidates and the kind of discussion you want to engage. So just that shift there was one way of doing public journalism. MARSH: And was there a general consensus that that kind of approach lifted the quality of the public discourse? ROSEN: No, there was no consensus about anything. From the beginning people began to denounce that public journalism existed or dismissed it, so it never became I think accepted that this was a better way to do it. And today the press is actually back where it was with no citizen’s agenda to guide it and very much a horse race narrative to sustain it. MARSH: So how does the public journalism movement look now, now that we have the Internet? ROSEN: Well it was an early warning. It tried to say to the overly professionalized press that you had drifted from your base. The disconnect between what you do and what ordinary citizens do and democratic politics was a problem because when the Internet came along people could start addressing the disconnect between what they wanted and what the press was themselves and they didn’t need enlightened journalists any more to reach across the divide. And that is what restarted this whole conversation. MARSH: Now, of course, the Internet enables us citizens to answer back, articulate our agendas and network, and partnerships between press and public become a real possibility also here in the UK. Kamal Ahmed again. AHMED: When we did our campaign called Irrepressible, which was about Internet freedom, particularly in China, we did things where we linked in with Amnesty and we made it about not just saying here’s the problem, let’s shout about it, but what can we do about it; and we got in touch with the UN; we became part of a UN conference in Greece about Internet freedom; we worked with Google on some of the work they did; Yahoo who had been heavily criticised for what happened in China. On our Irrepressible website, which we launched with Amnesty, we had fifty thousand people joined into the debate. We had a live event and webcast with Amnesty in their headquarters in Shoreditch which had loads of Americans involved. It was a year long campaign. I think we’re catching up still on this type of thing, but there has to be much more engagement with where the public is and offering solutions. MARSH: Could you have seen, as Head of News, a state of affairs such that your newspaper became involved in campaigns which were not of that kind - so for instance in looking at problems within health or within education or problems within transport, and in the same kind of way convening the parties and trying to bring a solution about? Would that have been a proper role for your newspaper, do you think? AHMED: I think it would have been. But I think you have to be careful that journalists don’t start sort of viewing themselves as policymakers. That’s not our role. We don’t obviously have any democratic mandate. Papers don’t run countries and I think newspapers that have a sort of attitude that they should be have got to be careful about that. But of course they have an influence on the debate, so I think there is a balance to be struck. But I think that there can be much more, but it’s for politicians and parliament to decide, not for newspapers. MARSH: The public journalism movement doesn’t want papers to run countries, but it does want the public to work with professional journalists in order to find solutions to issues which affect all of us as citizens. So it’s not surprising that Jay Rosen in New York thinks that talk of “balance” is a bit too top down, a bit too cautious. ROSEN: It seems to me that this tribe of professional news producers - which by the way I admire and support, I educate people to join it, so I am very much part of it but from a distance - they in order to go on to have a tribe have to migrate across the digital sea. And when you do that, when you have to pull up your roots and pull up your institutions and rebuild them on the other side, it’s very important for you to ask yourself what’s essential about these institutions because in rebuilding them you may find that they’re a lot lighter than you thought. MARSH: Is the public purpose of journalism though one of those components that is absolutely essential in that rebuilding? ROSEN: Totally. And the reason why this is a moment of great excitement and opportunity in journalism is that the public can participate in that public purpose of the press. And that’s what the public journalism movement was trying to recognise but within a stable professional model of the press, which has since then come undone. MARSH: And here’s one of the ways it’s come undone. The way in which the web can make endless recycling feel like news. Jean Seaton of Westminster University. SEATON: Everybody’s sitting at home and saying what on earth do you mean there’s less news. You know it seethes and writhes on the net, it bubbles and fetteredly grows. This is actually unfortunately not true. People selling you news on the net is on a huge increase. But a recent study looked at net news over a week, another study looked at four thousand items over a day. It was all reducable. It’s cut and pasted with opinions added to four sources: the BBC, Agence Presse Francais, AP in America and Reuters. That’s to say that the entire world of user generated news is nevertheless koshered and intelligenced through a few organisations. And if you go into the Google newsroom, there is nobody who is a journalist. If you go into the Google newsroom, which I’ve just been to, they are bundling news but they have no interest in news and not one of them has ever been to Chad. The Google newsroom is not a news intelligence organisation. It’s a news bundling and tying organisation. Be scared. MARSH: It’s a legitimate thing to be scared about. But Charlie Beckett from the London School of Economics tries to be reassuring. Networks can save, not undo the press. BECKETT: Well the whole point of the network model is that you do not surrender the journalistic judgement, the journalistic values and the journalistic nous that enables you to filter out information, to edit and prioritise stories and to package information in a way that can be consumed. What you’re asking those people to do though is to assume a whole new swathe of skills which enable them to allow the public to take part in that process. And so you’re adding something rather than taking something away. This is different to the idea of citizen journalism where you completely surrender the process to somebody else. This is about sharing the process and allowing the public to be part of the production, and I think that means that in fact you’re going back to core values of journalism. MARSH: Of course just because we citizens can share in the process doesn’t mean we’ll inevitably improve it or make it more responsible. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is that the networked model passes the freedom of our press back to us citizens, so that our public debates are no longer pre-decided for us by capricious and wilful editors. The Media Standard Trust’s Martin Moore. MOORE: Part of the role of news organisations I think should shift enormously. I don’t think news organisation have taken this on at all yet. Their role should be as much about collecting information, verifying that information and then providing tools for the public to assess that information, to investigate it, to compare it. I don’t think not only news organisations, I don’t think journalists think this is their role at all. I think they would reject it entirely. At the same time, I think if they don’t accept it to some extent then they will become increasingly niche and also uneconomic because I think that people will want to feel empowered, to check things for themselves, to compare the results of their local schools, to find out what their local health trust actually did spend its money on. And I think only by empowering them to do that will journalism reinvent itself. MARSH: Reinvention, migrating the tribe, re-skilling to share the news business with former readers. Whatever you call it and whichever way you slice it, the press has a job on its hands and the finances of news mean time isn’t on its side. But it might just be that the public journalism movement in pre-web America got it more right than they earned credit for. Maybe, in the end, it will be the public that saves the press for the public.