Image: Kate Ter Haar
Stop Press (something authority would dearly like to do): The Guardian was slower off the mark than this piddling little site but will get an awful lot more readers. I'd challenge some of its conclusions though obviously not the central one: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/22/guardian-view-on-sun-journalists-acquittal-right-verdict
Only a heart of stone could fail to bleed for the Crown Prosecution Service team and the sense of despair that must have descended as files were packed away, briefcases closed and a gloomy weekend contemplated. Yet another jury had acquitted journalists of criminality over payments to public officials.
As verdict after verdict has gone against the CPS, it is perhaps unthinkable that its people had champagne on ice for post-trial celebrations somewhere near the Old Bailey on Friday. The Sun four - John Kay, Duncan Larcombe, Geoff Webster and Fergus Shanahan - doubtless made for an appropriate hostelry after the jury returned from a marathon retirement to clear them of all charges, and I do not blame them.
But was there a disconsolate little huddle over cups of tea back in the court canteen? Did police officers involved in the case pop by to exchange commiserations. Did a passing judge, conscious that not even summings up that sound (if reported accurately) like Crown closing speeches seem to persuade jurors to convict? Was there a sympathetic text message from Hacked Off?
It is possible to imagine the sort of words of solace that might have been traded. “Let’s not get too despondent, old chap. The whole thing may be a lottery but the numbers could fall our way more often if we keep at it long enough. There are other cases to come, a couple of retrials, too.”
That, in part, is the fantasy, The reality is that the wholesale pursuit of journalists, exploiting a climate of anti-press hysteria and political expediency, has turned into a campaign of persecution, backed by extraordinary public resources to attack what really are quite trivial matters. It is a national disgrace.
Let me say straight away that I have no problem with attempting to eradicate bad practices in the press. Any fair observer of all I have written at Salut! would acknowledge that I have never defended media excesses.
I will say again that no trade or profession – be it the law or plumbing, policing or acting, real estate or politics, would withstand the level of scrutiny applied by Leveson without producing evidence aplenty of dodgy conduct or worse.
And I differ from some in my insistence that TV and radio, which often adopt such pious tones when discussing newspapers, should be included in any discussion of media ethics, but that is a different issue.
Yes, I am grateful that I never worked, as a member of staff as opposed to supplying occasional freelance articles, for the tabloids. Things have been done in the name of journalism that make me shudder, but no more than I shudder when, say, hearing of outrageous - often unreported - behaviour of Hollywood publicists (or their clients) or the inexcusable gaffe of a senior judge when announcing a sentence that everyone - all the way from court shorthand writers to Holloway jail - mishears, uncorrected from the bench. In fact, a pointlessly vindictive 13-week term for a mother-of-two just before Christmas was meant to be 30 weeks, less pointless but more vindictive still when a suspended sentence would have been absolutely correct. She heard of it in a phone call days later from her partner.
Ah, you say if you're a supporter of Hacked Off, where's your sense of proportion? Don't publicists have right to stand their corner, is it really such a crime for an actor to adopt an objectionable attitude when straightforward but annoying questions are posed, can't a poor judge make an honest mistake?
And that is my point. A sense of proportion, and recognition that otherwise decent people make mistakes without actually becoming what the real world should regard as criminals, are what have been completely absent in this squalid witch-hunt against journalists.
Some juries have bravely recognised this, rising above the prevailing hostility to newspapers, shockingly over-the-top prosecutions assertions - who can forget the attempt in another failed trial to establish moral equivalence between "I was doing my job as circumstances and instruction then dictated" and the "Nuremberg defence"? - and at least an element of disdain from the bench for defence propositions.
Despite the huge risk of prejudice created by staging trials consecutively or in quick succession, those juries have done their duty according to natural justice.
Many journalists have accordingly been acquitted. Three juries, on my count, have been hopelessly split and two, on much the same sort of facts that have led to the acquittal of others, have returned convictions. The two people in those cases have a good right to feel deeply aggrieved at the utterly chaotic state of affairs. One other journalist pleaded guilty; there were special circumstances I do not need to go into here.
And all for what? To conduct vicious attacks on employees, overlooking that this was overwhelmingly a failure of corporate morality and going instead for foot soldiers who have in many (most?) cases been abandoned by their generals and chiefs of staff.
I would have no quarrel with a corporate prosecution. Contrary to the crass submissions made in a succession of trials now heard, there was no greed on the part of individual journalists who merely did what was common, established practice - in offices where in-house lawyers, whatever judges may say, carried an awful lot of weight and were generally assumed to be on top of all that was borderline - rather than refuse and be sacked. Or is the desire to keep one's job a matter of greed?
Never forget that a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken (now Lord) MacDonald, once said these activities - the paying of officials for stories - were common knowledge to the authorities.
We have, I believe, only Murdoch's word for it. But we also have, I believe, no contradiction from his lordship that, when briefly working as an adviser for News Corp, he told him “he knew that on Fleet Street there were payments made, and he decided not to go after it because it was all too petty – and too complicated".
Yet now we have his successors at the CPS pursuing trial after trial aimed not at the company or companies involved but at staff members, with the convenient advantage that those staff members have been betrayed in the most despicable way, along with their confidential sources for information the authorities wished to suppress, by Murdoch's odious management standards committee.
I think MacDonald got it about right. All too petty, certainly for the pursuit of individual hacks. And I believe the right response to the phone hacking scandal - and I admit it was a scandal - was strong ethical disapproval and generous civil redress. There has been, and continues to be, both.
Nothing I say is cast in stone. There are other respectable views. I tried to post a snapshot of mine to Hacked Off's site. I had previously offered a comment there, rebuking a supporter for his partisan rebuttal of defence arguments in a case still before a jury; contempt of court, examples of which we see regularly as these cases proceed, strikes me as being at least as serious as the offences that have landed journalists in the dock.
On each occasion, Hacked Off shunted my measured comments into the perpetual oblivion known as "awaiting moderation". No Hacked Off official or follower will be subject to that sort of inexplicable censorship here (update: perhaps a result of my prodding at Twitter, though probably not because of anything at Salut!, one comment has suddenly appeared, several days after it was sent in to deep moderation).
The press undoubtedly inhabited a house that cried out to be put in order. Journalists would generally welcome improved ethical standards, even if they may wish in vain for a law making it a criminal offence to lie to or deliberately mislead the press.
But I have seen little to suggest the CPS can be trusted to decide when it is and when it is not in the public interest for conveniently dredged-up law - Misconduct in Office - to be breached.
And I have a heathily greater regard for the jury system, without being remotely convinced that we are witnessing a fair or measured response from authority to its irritations with the mischief-making of journalists.
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