Phone Hacking and the Future of Newspapers

Well. I feel like I probably should have written something about this whole phone hacking business a lot sooner, but I had kind of been waiting for it to settle down for a second first to allow for some perspective and clear facts. But with new allegations surfacing and executives resigning and being arrested on a daily basis (including Rebekah Brooks as of about three hours ago), we seem to be a long way away at the moment.

So far, then. I think 'appalled by hacking into phones of families of dead/missing people' goes without saying, so I'm not going to dwell on that. But there's been a lot of moralising about phone hacking/blagging full stop, and that's been a bit of a joke. While of course there are people who care about it as purely a privacy and/or legal issue, the vast majority of outraged people are outraged because of who the victims were. People were interested, but not especially angry, when they thought the News of the World had been hacking celebrities' voicemails. Much of the ill-sentiment back in January seemed to be aimed at Andy Coulson, then David Cameron's director of communications, and at least part of that was more about politics than anything. I mean, the general feeling just seemed to be that the people responsible had either gone to jail or lost their jobs, the victims were going to be getting compensation to the tune of £100,000, and NOTW apologised. Fine.

The interesting thing about the past couple of weeks is that the new allegations have brought the scandal to a whole other level. The old allegations didn't seem to threaten the BSkyB deal in the least, and the idea that the NOTW would be shut down was beyond imagination. The practices aren't new, but, for the most part, the victims are, and that's part of the difference (the other part being that it appears those old practices were far more widespread than initially believed). And it's not necessarily that there are so many victims, but the stories that were sought. No one can condone illegal activities used to get 'juicy' stories of grieving family members.

But there seems to be a grey area where these same activities don't seem to be so reprehensible if the stories are a bit more in the public interest. The tip of that is the somewhat 'meh' reaction to celebrities being hacked - the idea that the stories generated would just be bits of entertainment gossip, nothing too harmful, and certainly no dead children involved. Going deeper, there don't seem to be that many people fixated on Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband's director of communications, in quite the same was as they were/are on Andy Coulson. That's not to say there's no interest - there is, both among those with a political agenda and those who simply say fair is fair, if Miliband's going to criticise Cameron over Coulson then he should have to explain Baldwin. And it was brought up in the House of Commons by Jeremy Hunt. But that allegation has so far not exactly scandalised the public in the way the NOTW allegations have.

And why not? Well, for one thing, Lord Ashcroft doesn't exactly elicit the same kind of sympathy as Milly Dowler's family does. For another, people don't seem to be especially bothered by the idea of looking into political donations and tax revenues for someone who's been accused of illegality on both counts. I somehow doubt we'd hear the same kind of moralising on phone hacking and blagging if those practices turned up a story that was actually in the public interest. For example, though the information for the MPs expenses scandal was probably illegally obtained, the public (and indeed politicians) were not particularly bothered by the ethics of that fact. So it's worth everyone examining whether they actually think certain practices are wrong, or if they only think they're unethical when they're carried out against certain kinds of people.

So what happens now? The full process of a police investigation, subsequent prosecutions (if any) and parliamentary and public inquiries is likely to take the better part of two years. And what will the UK media landscape look like at that point? Will there be tighter regulation? What will the relationship between politicians and press and police and press look like? What will the Sunday tabloid market look like? Will tabloid readers still expect the same kind of stories and information? Will anything really fundamentally change?

One idea that's been floating around (apologies for that picture of Ed Miliband - what were they thinking?), though it's too early to tell whether it'll amount to anything, is the possibility of changing media ownership laws. This isn't specifically about Rupert Murdoch (or, at any rate, it shouldn't be). Concentration of media ownership should always be a concern in terms of hurting freedom of the press by limiting the diversity of information available and giving too much power to one person or company.

One problem with more stringent regulations, though, is that newspapers are increasingly not profitable. For example: in 2010, News International-owned The Times reported pre-tax losses of £45m, and in 2009 News Corp. announced that its newspaper revenues were down 97%. But News Corp. can afford to continue running their papers at a loss (while making cuts and introducing paywalls to try to offset some of those losses) because their other operations (TV, specifically) are so profitable.

So if we want to regulate and limit media ownership, how picky can be about what prospective owners already own? When the NOTW was abruptly closed down, there was speculation that Murdoch was ridding himself of the paper in order to quash some concerns about media plurality around the BSkyB deal (which had not yet unravelled). Assuming newspapers continue to lose money (and the loss of advertising revenue and competition from online news mean that trend is almost certainly irreversible), if new regulations mean owners have to choose between profitable TV stations or tabloids and loss-making broadsheets, how long will those newspapers survive?

Plagiarism and media denial

So the Johann Hari saga lumbers on. Hari published his apology in the Independent and on his website on Wednesday, in which he denied plagiarism, but admitted that 'in some instances' he used practices that were wrong and which he wouldn't repeat:

Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. If (for example) a person doesn't speak very good English, or is simply unclear, it may be better to quote their slightly broken or garbled English than to quote their more precise written work, and let that speak for itself. It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I'm trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn't clear to the reader.

Personally, I found the apology to be a bit more of a justification than anything, but as Hari's rejection of plagiarism and churnalism was in tune with what I wrote on Tuesday, and as he apologised and admitted he was wrong, I was willing to let that be the end of it, at least until Hari publishes his next piece, which will presumably be thoroughly vetted first by his editors (which no longer include Simon Kelner), and then by his critics.

But by this time, some of those critics had had time to go back through more of Hari's work, and what emerged was not a picture of occasionally or 'in some instances' finding a more accurate quote for a badly expressed thought. Blogger Cheradenine Zakalwe got the ball rolling by comparing Hari's 2009 interview with Malalai Joya with her memoir Raising My Voice. Zakalwe's work was picked up by author Jeremy Duns, who pointed out that in addition to the 42 quotes lifted in whole or in part from Joya's book, there were also passages which appeared not as quotes from her but as Hari's own writing. The New Statesman's Guy Walters reported Dunn's findings and mentions similar problems with Hari's 2004 interview with Ann Leslie. Blogger Guido Fawkes posted that Hari was sacked from both Cambridge University's student newspaper in 1999 and as a writer for GQ for embellishing stories. The Council for the Orwell Prize announced that it was investigating the situation further.

A lot of the controversy has centred around whether what Hari did should actually be called plagiarism. On Tuesday, I wrote that it shouldn't. On Friday, I changed my mind. Not only is some of what Hari did actually textbook plagiarism - as in, taking words that Malalai Joya wrote and passing them off not even as quotes from her, but as his own writing - I believe that the sheer extent of Hari's so-called 'cleaning up' of quotes goes beyond the courtesy he and his defenders try to pretend he was doing the reader and the interviewee. Where quotes were taken from earlier interviews, I feel Hari was plagiarising not the words of the interviewee but the work of the interviewer, who had to ask the right questions and take the time to record/transcribe/parse through their interview to include the quote in their story. Hari didn't only pretend that the quote was said to him - he also pretended that he put in all of the work that's involved in getting that quote from the interviewee's mouth to the page.

What I've found most bizarre about this whole thing is the defences that have emerged for Hari in mainstream media, all of which seem to deliberately treat Hari's practice as barely worse than just removing ums and ahs from a transcript. The Independent's C J Schuler posted a blog on Tuesday calling the accusations against Hari 'extraordinarily naive'; Schuler, for some reason, maintained that Hari was likely a victim of authors who trot out the same anecdotes and thoughts over and over on book tours, often in the same words. Schuler seemed to have missed Hari's own admission earlier that day, which showed this was clearly not the case.

The Guardian's Mark Lawson wrote a seemingly well-intentioned piece yesterday, which suggested that journalists should use the controversy as an opportunity to reassess their own methods. However, Lawson's article ignores the developments in the story, falls back on Schuler's bit about media-savvy authors repeating themselves, and basically dismisses what Hari did as 'being too kind' to interviewees by giving them the opportunity to be quoted at their best. 'A small sin,' he says, 'in comparison to the numerous media interviews that choose to cruelly distort what was actually said in the interest of news value, malice or political purchase.' Ah yes, the old, 'sure this was wrong but what about this other thing which is also wrong and possibly more wrong!' Many of Hari's defenders pointed out journalistic shortcomings at the Daily Mail or the Sun in his defence; luckily for critics, a logical response to this kind of reasoning was at hand, and from Hari himself, no less.

Frankly baffling was former Guardian editor Peter Preston's piece in today's Observer, which says it's 'ethically ludicrous' for anonymous bloggers to be able to whip up a controversy over Hari's 'occasional habit...of using a cleaned-up, pre-written version of his subject's answers rather than a ... you know ... more um! ... rambling live response.' I refuse to believe that someone with Preston's experience is actually so obtuse as to not realise by this point that a) what Hari's accused of is (once again!) more than removing ums and ahs, b) that his critics are not at all anonymous (he refers to leftist blog DSG, which started the controversy, but conveniently ignores, oh, everyone since), and c) that this charge of ethical ludicrousness makes absolutely no sense at all. Even if Hari's detractors were anonymous, how would that mean that they have no ethical grounds to find fault with Hari?

Strange though these defences are, they actually all have one common theme: the journalists writing them don't seem to believe that we, the readers, really understand. If only we knew what it was like to interview someone. If only we were real journalists and not 'anonymous' bloggers and tweeters. Schuler actually writes that 'anyone who has ever actually conducted interviews or attended discussion will surely smell a rat', while Lawson and Preston use their columns to pour scorn on these riff-raff who use Twitter and blogs to expose wrongdoings.

Despite the fact that comments on earlier articles and debates on Twitter clearly showed that many, many people believed that there was far more to what Hari did than cleaning up quotes, these defences continue to pretend as if that's all it was. Lawson and Preston's articles both make clear what others have merely hinted at: they think we're idiots. We rabble don't understand what an article would look like if we didn't allow quotes to be cleaned up. An exact transcript would be a nightmare! You don't want that! Both ignore the fact that no one has asked for exact transcripts, only an accurate portrayal of an interview that actually took place and not a synopsis of an author's thoughts from elsewhere.

But the Guardian writers insist on telling us what we're angry about, and then telling us that we're wrong to be angry, rather than admitting that there's more to it. To me, this implies that the journalists believe that only they can really set the news agenda. Aside from Hari's actual writings, this story has come entirely from blogs and Twitter. And honestly, there seem to be a lot of mainstream journalists who have a problem with that. I don't believe that the news agenda should be set by 'Twit mobs', as they've been dubbed, which I think I set out pretty clearly on my earlier blog on the Ken Clarke fiasco. But when non-journalists discover a story, and that story is supported by real facts, denial by mainstream press just looks like fear at best and snobbery at worst.