The Phonehacking Scandal and the Future of Journalism

Cardiff.
The final session here at Future of Journalism is a roundtable on the News of the World scandal; as a panel session, it will be hard to blog, but I’ll try my best. Bob Franklin starts us off by highlighting the wide reach of the scandal, and notes that while journalism overall has been tarred with the abuses committed by News International, there also has been some excellent journalistic coverage of the scandal.

The first panellist is Labour Party MP Chris Bryant, shadow minister for political and constitutional reform. He says that it feels as if public debate in the UK has been changed massively by the scandal; it feels like being released from prison, he says. In fact, in his Welsh constituency, the only way to get digital TV is to subscribe to (the partly Murdoch-owned) BSkyB; and Murdoch has been using his newspapers’s political influence to protect BSkyB as a cash cow.

Chris’s own phone was hacked, and he knows that this has enabled News papers to find a great number of his contacts, who could then be contacted for any potential dirt they may have. The same happened in the Milly Dowler case, of course, and here Glenn Mulcaire even delete messages, which is ‘playing god with the family’s emotions’, Chris says.

The suggestion that nobody knew about this at News is preposterous, Chris says, and people should follow the advice politicians are always given by the media when they’re caught up in a scandal: “’fess up and move on”. Not confessing to the phonehacking (which carries a two-year sentence) and then being found to have obstructed police investigations by lying only adds to the eventual sentence.

We’ve learnt through the scandal that News have very poor lawyers, that the Met Police is not as thorough as once thought, and that no one man should own a large percentage of the media space in any one country. Murdoch’s media reach in the U.K. is enormous, and Murdoch media listened to the phone messages of the then-Labour government’s Culture, Media, and Sport minister Tessa Jowell: “this is corruption, short and plain.”

Ivor Gaber follows on from this. He notes that there has been a staggering amount of meetings between Rupert Murdoch’s and David Cameron’s staff. While there have been major media barons in the past, Murdoch may be one of the most complex we have yet seen; he owns a broad range of sometimes contradictory media organisations, from Fox News to Sky News, and is a corporate raider as much as a right-wing extremist, a politics junkie as well as someone trying to build a family empire.

Murdoch’s modus operandi is interesting: he identifies with outsiders coming into power, who also become dependent on him; he himself is an outsider to the business, in many ways. He supported Gough Whitlam at some point, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair – both outsiders in their political systems –, and worked with the latter two prime ministers to dismantle media oversight in the U.K. His policy on U.K. involvement in the EU probably contradicts his empire’s business interests; so does his championing of Rebekah Brooks and his own sun, James.

The scandal shows that the U.K. needs better media ownership and press regulation – and it’s important not to let this moment pass.

Robert McChesney is next, and supports the view that a media monopoly is the enemy of a free press; and especially one run by Murdoch. Media policy must be taken out of the shadows, everywhere in the world, and the corruption which so often accompanies must be eradicated; it is antithetical to a free and democratic press. Media policy must be a pristine area of government, and the problems with it must be solved.

In the U.S., Murdoch looks somewhat different from the U.K. He doesn’t have a big print media footprint throughout the country, and is not involved in so directly buying and selling politicians; there, Fox News is his main vehicle for dominating political journalism (and sets the agenda very effectively). The accusation of being partisan, especially of being a liberal partisan, is now the worst accusation which may be directed at a journalist, and such ‘insults’ is what Fox News trades in. Other media organisations are spending half their time responding to such accusations now.

Additionally, Fox News provides content for “the 15% ultra-right-wing lunatics” which exist in the U.S.; it has been instrumental in creating that base, in fact. This also affects the mainstream, of course: liberal Republicans are now at the fringes of their own party. Partisan programming is lucrative, too: it requires little expense for actual journalism, and this metamorphosis from news reporting to political punditry has spread out more widely from Fox News itself.

Murdoch may or may not believe in such politics personally, but he is an opportunist, and supports ventures that are successful. However, when challenged on some of the extreme partisan politics espoused by his media outlets, he does tend to support them – so he is far from apolitical.

Bettina Peters begins by saying that “it’s nice to see the mighty fallen” – there’s a streak of Schadenfreude through this panel, it has to be said. In particular, she notes the positioning of Murdoch as a great media baron in the past, even as a defender of press freedom; this has now become impossible.

However, for all of this, will media ownership concentration actually change? Bettina is pessimistic: after weakening their cross-ownership laws, few countries have ever made them stricter again; any proposal for stricter ownership laws in the U.K. are likely to be shot down with the suggestion that media companies may simply move elsewhere in Europe, and that EU regulations are necessary. This is something that the European Parliament has pursued for a long time, but there does not seem to be the political will at the European Commission level.

Media self-regulation has been similarly problematic; the Press Complaints Commission in the U.K. has been a toothless tiger. But now that the PCC will be replaced by a different body, there is an opportunity to develop stronger and more powerful structures, built on models which have been found to work elsewhere in the world – for example co-regulatory models as in Denmark or Sweden, and based on a broader mandate than just dealing with complaints as in India: a proactive rather than reactive body which can act independently.

Finally, Lynette Sheridan Burns brings in the Australian perspective: here, Murdoch owns “an obscene majority” of the national media. Lynette has worked for NewsCorp herself, and found the corporation to embody a thoroughly swaggering and macho culture. NewsCorp was always permeated by the spectre of Murdoch, and he was seen to directly interfere in his newspapers; if today that is no longer the case as such, perhaps he is now represented by various editors channelling his views and attempting even to outdo him.

Dodgy practices have long been part of this, but the abuses committed by the U.K. News papers are exceptionally shocking. “It was a good day if the fire you lit in the morning was still burning at night.” The picture of Rupert Murdoch presented at the U.K. parliamentary inquiry clashed markedly with this image, and it is difficult to say how much of it was an act.

The Australian response, of course, was that “it couldn’t, and didn’t happen here”, but Australian NewsCorp papers also drew on illegally obtained stories, and their coverage of the scandal was light on facts and big on comment; in fact, there was a notable streak of blaming the victims and complainants of being elitist. Australian NewsCorp papers have also been criticised for their biased coverage of Australian politics, of course, and there are calls for an inquiry there, too.

But what will happen in the future? Will News soon be in the hands of James or Elizabeth Murdoch, who care less about newspapers? Will The Australian, Murdoch’s most politically partisan newspaper in Australia, which is subsidised by Murdoch’s other interests in return for the political influence it can wield, cease to exist once Murdoch Sr. moves on? The selling-off of the rival Packer empire in Australia, soon after Kerry Packer’s death, may provide pointers here. This may also be the beginning of the end of major metropolitan newspapers in Australia, though; if Murdoch’s papers in Australia go, who would risk the investment to try to replace them?

What, then, will fill the newsgap? Local papers in Australia are strong, but hardly a replacement for the more serious, mainstream papers in the country; audiences may turn to tabloid television instead. One thing seems sure: there will be substantial changes in the near future.