Sunday Observer Online
   

Home

Sunday, 17 July 2011

Untitled-1

observer
 ONLINE


OTHER PUBLICATIONS


OTHER LINKS

Marriage Proposals
Classified
Government Gazette

A chance to escape Murdoch’s embrace

In 2009 I attended the wedding of News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks. The ceremony took place by a lake, at a country estate. I stood next to TV presenter Piers Morgan, while Paul Dacre, Daily Mail editor, was a few yards away. Rupert Murdoch was closer to the action. David Cameron hung back up the slope. Gordon Brown, then prime minister, arrived late, with all eyes turning to him as he walked down to the lake.

At the reception I had a brief conversation with Cameron. I said I hoped he would not win the upcoming election, but that if he did, and if he wanted to act to improve political debate and standards in the press, I would support him. For some time the journalist in me had known that the relationship between politics and the media was not serving the public. But it was my first-hand experience of this developing culture of abuse and negativity that convinced me Britain’s press and 24-hour news were making it more difficult for elected leaders to govern.

“It’s got worse, hasn’t it?” he said. I replied that he would be a much stronger prime minister were he to take office not feeling he owed anything to the big media groups. At that point Murdoch joined us, and we changed the subject. Perhaps we should not have done so. That we did, however, illustrated something of the dishonesty at the heart of what are essentially political and commercial relationships.

British Premier gets tough on unethical media
Executives who sanctioned phone hacking and other illegal activities at the News of the World and other newspapers will be barred from running any media organisation in Britain, David Cameron has announced.
In an attempt to regain the initiative on the phone-hacking scandal amid Tory criticisms of his performance over the past week, the prime minister said Lord Justice Leveson would take charge of a two-pronged inquiry into the “disgraceful” affair.
Cameron, who faced criticism for having dinner in Oxfordshire with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch over the Christmas period, also said he would consult the cabinet secretary on amending the ministerial code to ensure greater transparency.
The prime minister, whose aides were playing down the prospect of a judge-led inquiry as recently as last week, said that Leveson would lead a “robust” inquiry set up under the 2005 Inquiries Act. Cameron, who agreed the broad terms of the inquiry with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg on Tuesday night, said it would be able to compel proprietors, politicians from across the spectrum and police officers to give evidence under oath.
“The inquiry will have the power to summon witnesses including newspaper reporters, management, proprietors, policemen and politicians of all parties to give evidence under oath and in public,” he said.
Cameron, who spoke just under two hours before News Corp announced it would abandon its bid to take full control of BSkyB, said the inquiry would have two strands: first, a full investigation into wrongdoing in the press and police, including the failure of the first police investigation into allegations of hacking. This part of the inquiry will not begin its work until the criminal investigation has been completed. Cameron said this would examine “the extent of unlawful or improper conduct at the News of the World and other newspapers and the way in which management failures may have allowed this to happen. This part of the inquiry will also look into the original police investigation and the issue of corrupt payments to police officers. And it will consider the implications for the relationship between newspapers and the police.”.
The second strand would be a review of the regulation of the press. Cameron said self-regulation had failed under the Press Complaints Commission, and that this should be replaced by independent regulation rather than statutory regulation.
The prime minister said this strand of the inquiry would examine “the culture, practices and ethics of the press; their relationship with the police; the failure of the current system of regulation; the contacts made, and discussions had, between national newspapers and politicians; why previous warnings about press misconduct were not heeded; and the issue of cross-media ownership.”

It is not easy to do what Ed Miliband, Labour leader, did last week, making himself an enemy of some of the media’s most powerful forces. He was right that Labour got too close to News International. But he was also right that, given the media bias against us, he knew why we tried to level the playing field.

System of regulation

In my own defence, and as my diaries show, I argued for some years with Tony Blair that we needed to act on the culture of our media. At one point he ticked me off, asking that I not make my views so obvious in front of Murdoch, his son James and Les Hinton, then chief executive of News International.

Ultimately, Blair thought the press had become a problem but that given all our other priorities, people would not understand our taking them on. He also thought it would look like revenge for the fact they had turned against us. And there were political considerations too: trying to govern, and win elections, is hard enough without the press being against you.

I accept that, for all of us, at times media support was something we courted at the expense of positions of principle on media issues. But that trap has now been sprung.

The latest revelations have forced the police, News International and the government to act. The police will now be more vigorous. News International will continue with their kamikaze crisis management, which one day will be studied as a textbook case of how not to do it. But the most important developments are the prime minister’s dual inquiries into press practices and a new system of regulation.

These mean we now have a once in a generation opportunity for a new settlement between politics, the media and the public. Nobody can argue that we have the press we deserve. Pressured by technological change, a dominant strain of Britain’s media has gone into a spiral of decline, in which this scandal is only the most dramatic development.

Cameron did not look comfortable announcing the reviews. He has personal relationships at stake and, given he hired Andy Coulson as his communications director, his judgement is too. Already the backlash from parts of the press has begun as they seek to maintain that anything but toothless self-regulation is an assault on a free press. But Cameron must stand back from all of that, and ask himself: “What is the right thing to do?” He did some of it last week.

The judicial inquiry should be far-reaching. The News of the World is far from alone in the use of dubious and illegal practices, as widely ignored reports from the Information Commissioner have shown. Parts of Britain’s media remind me of the trade unions before Margaret Thatcher. They feel untouchable. As I say above, Labour could and should have done more to deal with ‘the feral beast’. But just as the MPs’ expenses scandal emerged from the failure of Thatcher’s government to tackle MPs’ salaries, so the system by which she showered honours on editors and owners - a practice to which we put an end, with a rule that no serving editor could be honoured - means she too has something to answer for.

Whatever the past, it is Cameron who must lead the country to a better place. Miliband has shown himself capable of playing a good and principled part. And so should the public. Ultimately political debate will only improve if the public want it to, if they channel the anger at recent events into an assessment of what kind of papers they read, whether they really want to live on a diet of celebrity, trivia, negativity and abuse. To coin a phrase, we’re all in this together.

The author was Downing Street Director of Communications under Tony Blair and a former journalist.

EMAIL |   PRINTABLE VIEW | FEEDBACK

LANKAPUVATH - National News Agency of Sri Lanka
Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL)
www.army.lk
www.news.lk
www.defence.lk
Donate Now | defence.lk
www.apiwenuwenapi.co.uk
 

| News | Editorial | Finance | Features | Political | Security | Sports | Spectrum | Montage | Impact | World | Obituaries | Junior | Magazine |

 
 

Produced by Lake House Copyright © 2011 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.

Comments and suggestions to : Web Editor