From the National Library of Australia
It is always an encouragement to receive praise for a posting at Salut! and I am grateful to all those (70 at the last count) who "liked" my assertive comments on the case of Anthony France, the former Sun crime reporter convicted of aiding and abetting a police officer to commit misconduct in public office.
But so many articles here attract little comment, save for a lonely riposte from the keyboard of Bill Taylor out west in Toronto, that it is also reassuring to have my arguments or conclusions challenged.
So I was pleased to see that Evan Harris, the associate director of Hacked Off, had taken the trouble to respond at length to what I had to say.
In the event, France was spared an immediate custodial sentence. I am indebted to Ian Evans for the link to the judge's sentencing remarks in full. Ian described these as "carefully crafted and balanced" and I agree, though I remain opposed to the conviction and would quarrel with some of the judge's conclusions.
But I felt it would be right to promote the Hacked Off response to a full article, with my comments added, and this I now do. Perhaps Evan Harris will agree Salut! is rather more willing than the Hacked Off site to publish critical comment promptly; his appeared here the moment it was written whereas Hacked Off blocked remarks of mine complaining that a supporter had posted a highly prejudicial comment on a defence point in a trial still in process.
This is what he (EH for short) wrote in reply to my article. My responses are italicised:
While this article makes some reasonable points (none of which are new and all of which were made by experienced defence counsel and will be made in mitigation) it is undermined for most readers by its unsubstantiated "ranty" bits.
- no apologies for being cross on behalf of my confreres and consoeurs. EH dismisses my "reasonable" points as not new but I must have missed court reports, at Hacked Off or elsewhere, dealing with some of those I make. Perhaps EH can enlighten us, for example, on what submissions were made or evidence given on the apparent state of mind of the CPS when, if Murdoch correctly quotes a former DPP, it knew of payments to officials but saw no sense in taking action.
I assume that the author did not sit through the trial. That is fair enough. But he has no excuse for inventing the position of others. Neither Lord Justice Leveson nor Hacked Off has ever called for journalists to be prosecuted (or not) for these alleged offences and Hacked Off has never called for anyone to be jailed. So saying twice that we have is just "making it up" to create someone to blame.
- nowhere did I state, twice or even once, that Leveson or the CPS had called for prosecutions or for journalists to be jailed. Certainly, Leveson was highly critical of payments, stressing their illegality as he saw it, and Hacked Off supporters have robustly defended the holding of trials. EH's own comments, echoing those previously made - see http://hackinginquiry.org/mediareleases/hacked-off-responds-to-acquittals-in-trial-of-sun-journalists/ [where comments of mine did appear after a lengthy delay] and almost anything by Brian Cathcart - again indicate approval that criminal proceedings are taking place. I detect from all that is written some satisfaction at the rare instances of conviction, including a tendency to dispute the rarity, just as I express delight at acquittals.
It is a fact that agreeing with an anti-terrorism police officer to pay him sizable sums of money for stories that have no public interest justification might be seen by a jury in whatever century to be a serious matter. In one of the trials that the author decries a journalists allegedly agreed to pay a police officer for identifying details of a rape victim.
- see last response and please, EH, acknowledge that even the sentencing judge conceded there was abundant public interest in some of the stories France wrote. As far as I am aware, France was not concerned with the leaking of information concerning a rape victim.
I agree that the real culprits are the senior staff who gave the orders, threw their junior staff and their sources to the wolves and have conveniently escaped prosecution.
- does this mean EH now shares my view that Murdoch with his management standards committee (and, it now seems, Trinity Mirror) acted despicably in handing over details of staff who had some role in the payment of officials and/or their confidential sources?
Finally, in the whole piece, there is no mention of those who suffered the consequence of misuse of their private information, by having false or private stories written about them in a national newspaper with no public interest justification. Yes they can sue in privacy if they know but they can never undo the damage. These are not victimless crimes. But some people are too blinkered to see the victims (which include public trust in both the police and journalists).
- while I cannot expect EH to have read all I have written on these issues, he would discover form navigating the site that I have consistently deplored hacking and expressed my disapproval, other than in exceptional circumstances, of payments of officials for stories. In fact, having spent my working career in news organisations that never (local newspapers, PA) or hardly ever (DT, in my time) paid, I am not really keen on the payment of anyone for stories.
Such activities, for the most part, strike me as essentially ethical matters for the individual employees concerned. But I have also said I would not oppose corporate criminal prosecution since whatever was done was done for the employers' benefit.
Yes, I also deplore the unmistakeable drift towards managed news, whether the management is by authority (well documented at the Press Gazette site) or, in a less significant example, the attempts routinely made on behalf of film stars and others to control interviews. The stars' publicists, maybe, have always done it; authority (eg police forces) feel emboldened by a politically convenient climate.
By no means all that Leveson proposed was bad, or liable to restrict press freedom, and not all Hacked Off arguments are unsound. Not all that is done by newspapers - or any other part of the media - is covered in virtue.
But Evan Harris has a lot to do before some of us will be convinced Hacked Off genuinely champions a "free press". As a start to persuading me I am wrong, he might include in any response links to Hacked Off statements or articles praising newspaper journalism (other than when it adopts pro-Hacked Off or pro-Leveson positions).
His view of the hated Daily Mail's work on exposing the killers of Stephen Lawrence would also be fascinating.
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