College of Journalism Feed

The class of '92 returns to Sarajevo

2012-04-05T10:30:29+00:00

The international press fraternity can be a fickle tribe.

Deep bonds are forged amid wars, revolutions and natural calamities.

But the journalists who cover these stories can sometimes behave like social climbers at a cocktail party, with one eye constantly scanning the room on the look out for someone more interesting to talk to, for the next assignment - the trip that will make or burnish a reputation.

It's easy to remain committed to a story while it's on the front pages. It's harder when that story starts sliding down the news agenda, when the attention of output editors back in London begins to wander elsewhere.

This week, though, scores of journalists from around the world who came together twenty years ago to cover the war in Bosnia are returning to Sarajevo, the city that spent 44 months under siege.

Residents of Sarajevo during siege (Mike Persson/AFP/Getty Images).

They'll gather once more at Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, which became home to many of them between 1992 and 1995.

Allan Little first travelled to the Balkans in 1991, in the lull following the Gulf War, as an ambitious young reporter for BBC Radio News.

BBC correspondent Allan Little in Sarajevo.

He was sent to cover the escalating ethnic violence between Croats and Serbs that broke out following Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia that June.

"I went for two weeks initially and I stayed for four years," he told me.

By the time the fighting spread from Croatia to Bosnia in the spring of 1992 and Serb forces lay siege to Sarajevo, Allan Little and other journalists like him were already deeply immersed in the labyrinthine complexities of Balkan politics.

It was the career break many had been waiting for.

"The Gulf War focused everyone's attention on the Middle East and the more senior correspondents tended to stay involved with that story because it was seen as the big geo-strategic battleground," Little recalls.

"The people who got on top of the Yugoslavia story early on and became the experts in it, with a few exceptions like Martin Bell, were relatively young and inexperienced - people like me.

Martin Bell with armoured car in Bosnia (James Mason).

"We tended to be in our late 20s and early 30s. We were all hungry and prepared to devote our lives to it completely.

"We took ownership of the story and it was the making of a generation of us."

Digital newsgathering was in its infancy during the Bosnian War. The first generation satellite phones and laptops - primitive and cumbersome by modern standards - began to be used during the conflict. Even so, the press corps in Sarajevo still relied mainly on a "bush telegraph" of local contacts for reliable intelligence.

"Typically there'd be a UN briefing at 9am and that was a good way to start the day," Little says.

"You'd get in the car and drive through the backstreets to avoid Sniper Alley up to the where the UN was based.

"You'd meet Bosnian journalists there who were coming from their neighbourhoods and would be in touch with local politicians. Some would have news from besieged enclaves like Srebrenica and GoraÅ¾de.

"Then you'd try to go off to where the war was."

Another development that came of age during the conflict was the introduction of safety equipment to protect journalists.

"We didn't do hostile environment courses in those days," Little says.

"We were literally running around the front lines with a tape recorder and a notebook.

"In Bosnia news organisations started to think about safety for the first time.

"We got our first armoured cars in Sarajevo towards the end of 1992 because it was so dangerous. BBC Television News bought a decommissioned RUC vehicle from Northern Ireland and the radio correspondents quickly got one as well."

For the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, Sarajevo was a "news asylum" - a nightmare that felt like it would never end.

Cameraman Robbie Wright set some of the most searing images of the period to music, choosing Seal's "Crazy" as the soundtrack for the madness and mayhem that engulfed the city - a pop video filmed in Hell.

Some journalists have chosen to stay away from this week's 20th anniversary gathering.

"I was there, but I am not going," says Tim Judah from the Economist.

"What I fear is that readers or viewers of the material that emerges from the event will be treated to the same rehashed stories and old footage of Bosnia from nostalgic correspondents who have no idea what the place is like now."

Allan Little admits he too had misgivings about joining the Class of '92 reunion.

"At first I didn't want to be involved in what appeared to be a celebration of war - I thought it was mawkish and inappropriate" he admits.

In the end, though, the same people who kept pulling him back obsessively to the Balkans two decades ago managed to change his mind.

"A couple of Bosnian friends rang me and said 'What's this? We hear you're not coming'," Little says.

"They said 'You were with us all that time - you must come. Have you forgotten us? We need to have you here.'

"It's like falling in love for the first time - it's something you can't do a second time in quite the same way.

"I think there's one big story in every journalist's life which changes you - and that's what Bosnia did to me."

Stuart Hughes is a BBC World Affairs producer

UN plan to protect journalists opens rifts between nations

2012-03-28T13:26:48+00:00

Two years ago, after some NGOs and media organisations complained about evasion and delay, the United Nations started to focus on the task of improving the safety of journalists. And last week, the first UN plan for effective safeguards against targeted killings and attacks on journalists was put to the test at a conference in Paris.

It was a setpiece occasion with delegates from 39 countries meeting as the Intergovernmental Council of the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC), sub-body of UNESCO. This was where the plan was first proposed and which was now supposed to give it a formal go-ahead.

But the two-day meeting turned into quite a diplomatic showdown, with India and Pakistan among the sternest voices raising objections.

Along with other non-governmental observers, I watched as the diplomatic exchanges developed into a heated and sometimes fierce debate.

By the end, the UN's Action Plan on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity was still alive, but deep rifts have opened between nations over an issue which some are determined to treat as a question of national sovereignty.

The wording of the IPDC's decision had to be watered down. So instead of stating, as in the draft text, that the Action Plan was "endorsed", the final text noted only that the IPDC had "commend[ed] the progress of the work" to prepare the Plan.

With that, UNESCO was obliged to acknowledge the vehemence of the resistance from a dozen countries, all wary of the prospect of sharper outside scrutiny and political or economic penalties when states fail to live up to their public commitments to protect the lives and rights of journalists.

The next step will be for UNESCO to draw up its own Work Plan which must be approved over the next year, together with wider aspects of the Action Plan,

A diplomat at last week's meeting said the lack of a clear endorsement and the negative attitude of some states meant that further delays and attempts to derail the plan might lie ahead.

Anthony Mills of the International Press Institute, who was invited to speak on behalf of media enterprises and editors around the world, told the meeting that journalists themselves had grown sceptical about the sincerity of many states' formal claims of commitment to press freedom and free speech.

The UN plan consists of several important elements, all of which will now need to be secured in the face of some degree of opposition:-

- Strengthening the authority and resources of the UN's various human rights operations, including the work of the Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression, Extrajudicial Killings and Violence Against Women.

- Enacting detailed country programmes in line with the UN's wider development goals, taking special account of states' record on journalists' safety.

- Encouraging moves to broaden the scope of UN Security Council resolution 1738 (condemning attacks against journalists in areas of conflict) to include the promotion of the safety of journalists in non-conflict situations as well.

- Creating "effective forms of intervention" involving all relevant UN agencies to curb violence against journalists and fight against impunity

India questioned the authority of UNESCO to lead the process and cast doubt on the terms of some of UNESCO's public statements condemning journalists' killings.

Pakistan objected that UNESCO's attempts to audit states' judicial responses and follow-ups after the deaths of journalists had failed to take account of the strains arising from its own fight against terrorism

And Mexico protested that it did not deserve criticism since most of the dozens of journalists' killings in the country over recent years were by criminal gangs and the government had done all in its power to prosecute them.

These three are among the countries where journalists are in the greatest danger of being attacks or killed and where the rates of impunity are especially high.

UNESCO's detailed records, published on its website, show that over recent years the number of countries where journalists are killed has increased, and the rate of impunity (lack of effective investigation leading to prosecution) has reached around 90 percent. The willingness of states to provide information about journalists' killings in response to requests by UNESCO has also dropped to a dismally low level.

During 2008 and 2009, the latest period for which UNESCO has published detailed figures, 123 journalists were killed in 27 countries. But of them, only nine governments replied to the Director-general of UNESCO with any facts about the judicial response.

The UK played a leading part in saving the UN Action Plan from attempts to torpedo it. Britain was backed, among others, by the Netherlands, Sweden, the US and Niger.

The world's biggest media organisations are widely seen as lagging behind leading NGOs and the UN itself in speaking up for the Plan, even though they are major employers of the local stringers, cameramen and fixers who are exposed to the greatest dangers.

Perhaps the time has come for media big and small to recognise they have not only a duty of care to those who work for them, but a role in helping to put in place a safer environment for reporters and those who exercise their right to freedom of expression everywhere.

And here's a last note: Austria has said that it will table a Resolution later this year in the UN Human Rights Council, calling on all states to take effective action to protect journalists from harm and end impunity. The initiative is aimed at giving political impetus, while UNESCO puts the institutional machinery in place to reverse the tide of physical assaults on journalists and other forms of censorship.

Those things deserve proper support from all those concerned. It is not someone else's business. The lives of journalists are at stake.

More on these issues:

- The CFOM website

- The IPDC Decision of 23 March

- The UN Draft Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity

- The UNESCO Director-General's Report to the IPDC

William Horsley is a former BBC correspondent and founder of the Centre for Freedom of the Media.

Journalist safety: getting away with murder?

2012-03-26T12:03:53+00:00

In the month since Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed in the Syrian city of Homs the question of how to protect journalists - and prosecute those who target them - has been taken up at a national and international level.

At a Westminster Hall debate last week, the Liberal Democrat MP Don Foster argued that "the continuing high level of media deaths cries out for more action by international institutions, such as the United Nations, to force governments to pay more attention to the safety crisis affecting journalists and media workers."

Mr Foster drew attention to UN Security Council Resolution 1738, adopted in 2006, which urges "all parties involved in situations of armed conflict to respect the professional independence and rights of journalists, media professionals and associated personnel as civilians."

In reality though, argued Mr Foster, UN agencies are often reluctant to confront governments that target journalists.

In Paris, UN member states, journalists' organisations and civil society groups debated a UNESCO report which says that in most cases those responsible for killing, abducting and intimidating journalists go unpunished.

The report says that journalists, many of them covering issues such as organised crime and corruption rather than conflict, often resort to self-censorship in an effort to protect themselves rather than risk losing their lives.

It puts forward a plan of action to protect media workers and address the issue of impunity, which it says perpetuates the cycle of violence.

Panellists at the opening session of the recent Polis conference on International Journalism at the London School of Economics also reflected on the growing dangers associated with their profession.

"The threat to journalists has been brought home to British news organisations by the deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik - but the overwhelming majority of those being killed are local reporters in unstable or repressive countries," the Defence Correspondent for The Times, Tom Coghlan, told me.

"The trend is clearly that more journalists are being killed with impunity - particularly in unstable countries like Mexico and Pakistan.

"Intimidating an independent media into silence only serves the interests of the malign and the repressive.

"The international community should do more to protect the status of journalists and make life more difficult for those who target them," Coghlan added.

But Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor at Channel 4 News, told me she didn't believe journalists should be given special protection just because they happen to carry a microphone or a notepad.

"The killing of journalists reflects wider issues in society, because all kinds of people, including health workers and civil society activists, tend to be killed," she said.

"Murder is wrong and murderous regimes, rebel groups and organised crime syndicates and drug cartels get away with it.

"Journalists become vulnerable when they investigate these people - but we are part of society not above it," Hilsum believes.

As politicians and diplomats discuss how best to bring those responsible for silencing media workers to justice, journalists are taking their own proactive steps to try to protect one another.

The American writer Sebastian Junger has set up a training organisation - RISC (above) - in memory of his friend Tim Hetherington (both pictured above), who died on assignment along with fellow photographer Chris Hondros in the Libyan city of Misrata last April.

RISC will offer 3-day courses in battlefield first aid to freelancers. It will hold its first workshop in New York next month, before expanding to London and Beirut.

A new book published by the International News Safety Institute, meanwhile, offers practical advice to women working in hostile environments.

Many of the suggestions contained in the book are specific to women, but others transcend gender.

As Tina Susman from the LA Times points out: "like our male colleagues, our main concerns are staying alive and keeping our limbs and brains intact."

Stuart Hughes is a BBC World Affairs producer.

In search of the real news

2012-03-26T10:56:28+00:00

This is a guest blog by the Rev. Art Lester, minister at Croydon Unitarian and Free Christian Church, and a former journalist.

Every morning I log onto Google News to see what's happening. I steal a quick glance at my wife Gilly's Guardian.

The other day I realised I was just looking for excitement, wanting to gloat at someone's misfortune or cringe in anxiety at what the Iranians were or were not doing. Maybe it has to do with endorphins or dopamine or something; I seem to need my morning fix.

News media have to fill their pages or air time with something. And to be fair, I have colluded in this when I worked as a journalist in my younger days. Nothing scares an editor like an empty page.

In my first newspaper job, the editor of the small weekly in a coastal town in the States told me to go over to a nearby shrimping dock and get the local news. A lot of old guys were sitting in the sun, some re-weaving nylon nets, others just talking.

Being young and optimistic, I went directly to a man and told him I was from the newspaper and wanted any news he might have. He just shook his head and I walked off. I tried it again with two or three more, all with the same result.

I drove back to the office and told the editor there wasn't any news.

"Get back over there and stay till you've got a story," he said, not smiling.

I went back and this time left my notepad in the car. I sat on a bench, watching a man in a stained undershirt repairing a huge yellow net using a wooden tool I had never seen before. He noticed me watching and I asked if I could come closer and see what he was doing.

I forgot about the news and began to learn about how to make a sheet bend knot. The man's name was Oscar and he started talking. About the port, about the problems people were having with osmosis on their new fibreglass shrimp boats and how the old wooden ones were better. How the new government quota system had caused two brothers to sell up and move to Rocky Mount. How the fire in the back of the cafÃ© meant he had to drive five miles to buy his Cuban sandwiches for lunch. Who had gotten married and who had run off with whom and who was carrying a shotgun in his boat in case he spotted the man who cuckolded him.

About the shark that had been caught in someone's net and when opened up had been found to contain a human hand in its stomach. Did anyone have a picture? Sure, just ask Jimbo Jacks at the chandler's shop.

I went back to the newsroom with more stories than I could use in three issues. And a grainy picture of an open shark's belly.

So what is real news, and where do you find it?

Every morning, the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba used to have read out to him what he called the "bogus news" - the ordinary run of media stories which might become history someday but probably won't.

Then he liked to hear the real news, about how people around him were doing. That sort of news is the basic stuff of community.

And there is always plenty of it around - if you just take the trouble to find it.

Art Lester's The Coffee Table Book of Doom was published last year.

The challenge of covering the NHS reforms

2012-03-05T11:59:12+00:00

This is a guest blog by Paul Corrigan, a specialist in health policy who was special adviser to two Labour secretaries of state for health, and then senior health policy adviser to prime minister Tony Blair. He was recently a speaker at a College of Journalism discussion on NHS reforms:

Most commentators now agree that the Government's biggest failure in relation to its NHS reforms has been its inability to provide a compelling narrative to explain why it is reforming the NHS and why its reforms are the solution to the problem.

For journalists whose job is to provide an explanation in 250 words of what these reforms are about, this creates an enormous problem. Journalists see it as their professional skill to simplify complex issues for the public.

This is just not possible with this reform programme because its complexity is compounded by the political journey the bill has been on: today's bill is the product of a series of political lurches and U-turns. The original white paper of July 2010 was styled as a revolutionary liberation of the NHS from central control. It aimed to move power out from the centre and into the doctors' consulting rooms. It felt - and was - very radical.

But, as the bill was published and started going through the Commons, the Government failed to establish a narrative as to its purpose and what it was going to achieve. There was growing opposition from inside the NHS, and by the beginning of April last year many people believed that the NHS was being privatised.

The lesson from this is that if a government fails to establish a narrative for a reform then the public thinks there must be a reason why it is not telling us. For this bill that was the privatisation of the NHS. As a result, the Government has had to spend time arguing what the reform is NOT about rather than what it is.

From last April the Government called for a 'pause' in the process and outsourced its policy making to a group of random people it called the Future Forum. Over two months this recommended quite a lot of centralisation that was then overlaid upon the bill's original decentralisation.

As the bill continues through Parliament, further amendments have been made by the Government (over 1,000), so that the bill now faces in several directions at once.

This is why it is not easy for journalists to explain what it is about.

The fact that the bill will have taken more than 15 months to go through Parliament has given the opportunity for the opposition to it to grow and to harden. By now nearly every major medical body has come out against the bill and their position is becoming ever more entrenched.

The big picture is the story of the nation's health is a positive one: more people are living longer. But negative stories are the consequence of that - because if you live longer you are very likely to get a number of long-term conditions with your heart, your lungs, rheumatism, blood pressure and depression. As a result, the demand for healthcare increases by about 4% a year. Over ten years that is an increase in demand for NHS services of at least 50%.

In any service this sort of imbalance between demand and supply would create a crisis. For the foreseeable future, the NHS will have to create significant increases in healthcare outcomes for the same amount of resource.

There are many ways in which this can be achieved, but most will involve moving care from its most expensive setting, the hospital, to its least expensive, the home.

That's why for the next couple of decades the story of improving outcomes will be set against that of constant and often painful change in the way services are delivered.

Unless the Government can establish a narrative about these necessary changes, there will be constant stories about cuts, with hundreds of political stories emerging across the country.

Each story will be different but nearly all will be part of this wider narrative about reshaping our health services to meet much greater demand.

In terms of the current reforms, there will inevitably be local and national stories about their implementation by GPs. In some places this will be a good news story and in others it will be a bad news story, where the local GPs don't want to do it. Many of the reforms are already being implemented, so these stories will start this summer.

Because of the depth of the current political story, we are in an odd period where every story will be linked with the political problems of the bill. This will continue for a while.

For journalists the challenge is to explain the complexity of the organisational changes in the NHS without the usual framework of a government narrative to place them in.

The easy option is to follow the cut and thrust of the political debate, but I would urge the media to supplement those stories with more ambitious coverage, to explain what's really happening in hospitals and GPs' surgeries.

Paul Corrigan writes about health matters on his blog.

The courage of Marie Colvin

2012-02-22T17:37:15+00:00

Fifteen months ago I stood in St Bride's Church with many other journalists for a service to commemorate all those in the news business who had lost their lives in conflict. The principal speaker was Marie Colvin.

There were several BBC names on the list of those we were gathered there to remember. It brought back intense and painful memories of the deaths and injuries we suffered during the time when I was world news editor in BBC Newsgathering.

Kaveh Golestan, our cameraman in Tehran, killed by a land mine in Iraq. Simon Cumbers, another cameraman, shot dead in Riyadh in the same assault that left correspondent Frank Gardner in a wheelchair. Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, a translator working for the BBC, killed by friendly fire in Iraq. Kate Peyton, our Johannesburg producer, shot dead in Mogadishu. I remembered too the long weeks and months of anxiety as we waited for correspondent Alan Johnston to be released in Gaza.

All of these incidents had a devastating and lasting effect on the foreign newsgathering team, who had lost friends as well as colleagues. And of course they were felt across the rest of the BBC as well. So we can well imagine the sense of despair and distress being felt today at The Sunday Times after the loss of Marie Colvin, one of the world's most experienced and respected war correspondents. Our thoughts are with them.

Most news organisations take it as a given that no story is worth the life of a reporter or any other member of a news team. But for Marie Colvin it was never as straightforward as that. In her speech at St Bride's in November 2010, she was typically unflinching in describing the increased risks taken by news teams in war zones, and in considering whether any amount of bearing witness could justify those risks.

She said: "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?... I faced that question when I was injured [in Sri Lanka in 2001]. In fact, one paper ran a headline saying: 'Has Marie Colvin gone too far this time?' My answer then, and now, was that it is worth it."

Why? Because she felt this sort of reporting could and did genuinely make a difference, and that it was essential to hold fast to that belief. As she put it: "The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen."

That faith is what took her on her fateful trip to Syria last week.

Some of our own reporters, such as Jeremy Bowen and Paul Wood, have been in Syria in recent weeks and we know from their courageous reporting how dangerous, volatile and unpredictable the situation is there. Jeremy's producer, Cara Swift, wrote about it on this website.ãã

Marie Colvin told Jeremy this week that what she found there made her sick and angry, and that the piece she wrote in Sunday's paper was the kind of thing she had come into journalism for. For all her years covering war, and for all the terrible sights she had seen, she had not lost her ability to react as a human being as well as a journalist. In her last Facebook post to a friend last night, she said she could not understand how the world could stand by and watch - even though "I should be hardened by now". The last line of the post read: "Will keep trying to get out the information."

For her, that was the first and the only objective, and for her, whatever the risks, they were worth it.

Jonathan Baker is head of the BBC College of Journalism.

My tabloid work wasn't journalism - just entertainment within pre-defined narratives

2012-02-06T13:46:23+00:00

Public figures may rightly have complained to the Leveson Inquiry about weeks of looking from inside their homes to see reporters camped along the driveway, but, as any coalface hack would care to add, it's even less fun huddled on the outside looking in. Even in the relative comfort of the newsroom, many are disillusioned with being forced to fit the squareness of fact into the round hole assigned by their editors.

Sitting before Lord Justice Leveson myself, I was struck by how, as much as giving evidence about my former employers at The Daily Star, I was also testifying against myself. The picture I was painting of my red top exploits, be it the ideologically driven distortions or tittle-tattle inventions, betrayed my behaviour as something other than journalistic. What is less clear is what that other is.

Look up 'journalist' in the dictionary and you will be told it's 'a person who writes for newspapers or magazines'. The definition of 'journalism' is no more illuminating: 'the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines'.

To escape this frustrating semantic loop, I turned to a definition offered by professor Brian Cathcart. He describes journalism as an activity that is "demonstrably valuable to society. It tells us what is new, important and interesting in public life, it holds authority to account, it promotes informed debate, it entertains and enlightens."

It struck me as an excellent, if sobering, definition. Very little of my work in tabloids fell within these parameters. Sometimes what I wrote was 'new', but more often than not it was cannibalised from other news sources. Even that appearing new was caged within pre-defined narratives and well-worn stereotypes.

On occasion my writing 'held authority to account', but it was often simply as a byproduct of one powerful institution flexing its muscles against another for self-interested ideological or commercial reasons.

Far from 'promoting informed debate' and 'enlightening' the reader, my writing tended to deliberately obfuscate the issues and skew the terms of reference, creating binary arguments and offering reductive solutions - leaving any semblance of balance until the very last, safe in the knowledge few ever make it that far.

Whether it dealt with what is 'important and interesting in public life' is more difficult, because of the subjectivity of the terms, but let it be said that, on the awe-inspiring day last spring when millions took to the streets of Egypt to demand freedom, The Daily Star front page read: "Jordan... the movie." This was not a reference to the Middle East.

So, if it wasn't journalism I was doing, what was it?

Jonathan Caplan QC, lead counsel for Associated Newspapers, inadvertently lifted the lid during his opening statement to the Leveson Inquiry. "Our aim," he said, "is to entertain - to engage the reader."

To entertain. Despite the fullness of Brian Cathcart's definition of journalism, my experience in tabloids is that entertainment usurps all other facets. Everything I wrote was designed to appeal to the emotional over the rational, the knee-jerk over the considered - assumptions reinforced rather than challenged and all presented in an easily digestible style that celebrated its own triviality.

Back to my dictionary, I came across another word, defined as "an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment". The word? Story-telling.

Journalism proper, driven by a truth-seeking impulse grounded in the real, is vastly more exhausting both financially and temporally than the type of story-telling that dominates the news market. The conditions of the modern newsroom mean that journalists are forced by circumstance to behave as story-tellers, abiding by the pre-defined narratives as part of an entertainment-seeking impulse.

As we enter a period of profound change in the print media - tabloid versus broadsheet, politician versus press, self-regulation versus state regulation - for me the real battle is between journalism and story-telling; or; more specifically; story-telling masquerading as journalism.

With story-telling, the consumer is encouraged to suspend belief, while with journalism they are encouraged to do the opposite - to trust. With this in mind we must give more scrutiny to what journalism actually is, and what we want it to be.

This is not about deriding celebrity gossip or tabloid fun, because it certainly has its place within the media ecosystem. To me this is about recognising the true nature of the activity being pursued.

I take no pleasure in removing my career from the sphere of the journalistic and assigning it to the realm of story-telling. But until a distinction between the two is recognised I fear the truth-seeking impulse of journalism proper will always be tainted by the excesses of its entertainment-driven cousin, and in doing so public trust will remain in the gutter.

If the public don't believe the journalism they read then a vital facet of that transaction is lost. All journalists become story-tellers by default, the implications of which are devastating.

Richard Peppiatt is a former reporter for The Daily Star, turned writer and media commentator.

This article is a shortened and edited version of a chapter in The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair, just published by Arima.

Journalists need a workable definition of 'the public interest'

2012-01-27T13:22:28+00:00

What exactly is journalism in the public interest? It's the most important question in journalism today. It's a question which lies at the heart of the Leveson Inquiry. It's a question which is hotly disputed, and to which there seem to be few easy answers. Yet, unless it can be answered convincingly, it is a question which threatens to destroy independent journalism in this country.

As Robert Jay, QC counsel to the Inquiry, outlined in his opening submission, many critics of the press believe that editors use the idea of the public interest to excuse the inexcusable:

"Put simply, the 'public interest' is very often deployed as some form of trump card, and it is too loosely defined. It ends up with the press delving into the affairs of those who are celebrities, and those who are not, in a way which unethically penetrates a domain which ought to remain private."

For a phrase that is so central to the debate, for one that is so often and widely used by the media as a justification for their purpose and their methods, the public interest is infuriatingly difficult to define with any precision.

It is maybe easier to start with what the public interest is not:

- The public interest is not the same as what the public are interested in; though of course you always hope that with enough imagination and creativity you can persuade the public to be interested in your newspaper or your report or programme. But there will be a lot of things that the public will be interested in that are not what we would call in the public interest. The public interest does not mean just satisfying the curiosity of the public.

- Nor can the public interest be justified as some kind of moral check on an individual's scandalous behaviour - something that has been suggested in the past by Paul Dacre.

- The last thing that the public interest is not is that it is not the same as the national interest or the interests of the state or the government or of any ruling elite. An independent media does not exist to further the interests of any party or political grouping. Politicians will often choose to blur this distinction and argue that, at times, the media are there to further their interests. And they will be wrong. Distinguishing between the public interest and the interests of the state is crucial for a democracy. It is an important part of the job of the media to call to account governments and those in power. (And of course when they do so is usually when the rows start!)

The BBC's Editorial Guidelines make a good stab at defining some of the sorts of journalism that would be in the public interest. They would include: exposing or detecting crime; exposing significantly anti-social behaviour; exposing corruption or injustice; disclosing significant incompetence or negligence; protecting people's health and safety; preventing people from being misled by some statement or action of an individual or organisation; and, finally, disclosing information that assists people to better comprehend or make decisions on matters of public importance.

The only problem with this approach (and other regulatory codes adopt similar wording) is that it only gives examples and doesn't start with a definition or a set of principles. It is helpful in clear-cut cases, less so in marginal ones, and even less so in the tangled present-day world of celebrity journalism.

So, while many in journalism have used the public interest to justify pretty much anything, those who, for a variety of motives, wish to see the media muzzled have argued for a very narrow definition.

It is time for those who care about the future of good journalism and its proper role in a civic society to take the lead. We need a much more developed definition of what journalism in the public interest actually means. It must provide an overarching rationale as well as being of practical use. While such a definition can never legislate for every circumstance, it must be sufficiently clear what is meant to be in and out of scope.

If we don't, the substantial risk is that others will do it for us, and they could be people who know little and care even less about the future of journalism and its proper role in a democracy.

Phil Harding is a journalist, broadcaster and media consultant, and a former controller of Editorial Policy at the BBC. This article is based on a chapter in The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair; to be published by Arima in February 2012.

The BBC must apply usual journalistic standards to race stories

2012-01-23T14:55:48+00:00

First, the pat on the back. When the BBC asks "Are we doing as well as we ought in terms of covering race and immigration?" it distinguishes itself as one of the few media organisations in this country that would bother to raise the question. Perhaps this arises as a consequence of its statutory remit. But if it didn't seek to police itself in this area would anyone else perform that function? Probably not.

So how is it doing? A mixed picture. There are very fine journalists within the Corporation -correspondents, both regional and national, who do a fantastic job covering the big stories on this patch. Mark Easton, the Home editor, has given himself the task of chronicling "the story of changing Britain". He is an excellent journalist and has an obvious feel for the subject. More power to him.

But the Corporation also suffers from the affliction that ails the rest of the media. The country is changing fast but the assumptions that underpin our journalism are not keeping pace. We operate from a default position that says our primary focus should be the majority communities.

Witness the exchange I had with a BBC interviewer the other day in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence verdict. Many say political correctness has gone too far, she said. We are getting a lot of emails from our ordinary listeners about that. Who are these "ordinary listeners?" I asked her. Does that include us?

The default position is not even all of the majority white communities. The dominating concern is 'middle England'. Anything else we choose to focus on at any particular time is an add-on extra.

And the consequence is that we don't invest the time in stories about race, immigration or society and its dynamics that we should. Too often we don't cover these stories with the care and sophistication applied to other subject areas.

One small example: Migrationwatch was given airtime on the Today programme the other day, having released a report which said youth unemployment might be linked to east European immigration. "We can't prove statistically that immigration has had some impact on youth unemployment," the group said. They called the report 'More Than a Coincidence.' So here's a question? Would something as woolly as that have made it onto the Today programme if the subject was the economy, or political polling or crime stats? Probably not.

Our coverage of what's happening in our country - the varying achievements of different communities, the inflows, the outflows and the impacts - deserves better than that. That's not a call for censorship. All sections of society and all views merit a hearing on the BBC. But when we report on matters of such societal importance it's vital that we do so with the professionalism and rigour so evident in other areas of our journalism. And it's important that we accept that all sections merit recognition and respect.

What does that mean in practice? It means taking the time to find people who can articulate points of view in a way that generates light and not just heat, and certainly not just cheap entertainment.

It means making connections with communities away from our default position. They too form part of the fabric. Why do we only notice them when there is a crisis?

It means looking again at our newsrooms. Are they best equipped to cover this story of changing Britain? How do they look in terms of race, religion and, yes, class.

Above all, it means applying the same standards to our evaluation of stories concerning race and immigration as we apply to everything else. If in doubt, take race out of the thought process for a moment. Consider how that story would be handled if the issue were de-racialised. What was the Stephen Lawrence case? Essentially a story about a blameless, aspirational teenager murdered without justification by a group of youths who then evaded justice and were able to cock a snook at wider society because the police didn't do their jobs. In the background was a family and two grieving parents fighting without pause to bring the culprits to justice, and campaigners who said this case bore the hallmarks of previous cases. The elements meet any journalistic test, even without the infusion of race.

What are we saying when we run stories about disproportionate stop and search? That sections of our society - taxpayers - are being unfairly targeted and perhaps criminalised by the very people we expect to protect them. Again, the elements, shorn of race, have journalistic value.

Changing the mindset represents a challenge for us all, but in this, as in so many things, the BBC has the greatest responsibility by dint of its role and place in our national life. If it can't blaze a trail, who will?

Hugh Muir writes the Hideously Diverse Britain column in The Guardian.

He recently took part in a College of Journalism event about the reporting of race.

His fellow panellist, Max Wind-Cowie, has also written a blog about his views on the reporting of race.

We need more nuanced reporting of race from the BBC

2012-01-23T11:46:28+00:00

There are few topics of conversation as certain to turn ugly and emotional as quickly as that of race. We have, in our society, a paucity of dialogue and vocabulary to describe feelings of identity, ethnicity and belonging. So we over-simplify a debate that is inherently complex and end up unnecessarily hurting one another's feelings.

The BBC, while not responsible for this absence of nuanced conversation, certainly isn't helping.

The temptation to pander to grievance is one that the BBC rightly resists for the most part in one direction while actively encouraging in the other.

Racialist politicians - by which I mean politicians who see race as a defining characteristic in terms of political and national interests - do not get an easy ride on the BBC (as evidenced by the delightful, squirming humiliation of Nick Griffin on Question Time).

But those who wish to misrepresent our society as a racist one are given free reign. So, while every utterance of the Nick Griffins of this world is scrutinised and challenged by interviewers, Bonnie Greer's ridiculous assertion on Question Time that "It's not safe to be a Muslim in Britain" was treated as an unremarkable statement of opinion rather than a dangerous and subversive warping of reality.

It's also the case that the back stories of guests from ethnic minority backgrounds invited on to Newsnight to discuss issues facing young black and ethnic minority people are disturbingly niche - ex-gangsters, hip hop artists and gang members focusing the discussion not on aspiration and achievement but on policing and counter-culture.

What does it say to young black men and women watching the BBC's output when they are routinely informed by those supposedly representing them that they share a justified grievance on the basis of the colour of their skin? And what message does it send to Muslims, both living here and in other countries, when the British national broadcaster allows the very security of British Muslims to be called into question?

These are dangerous and disingenuous portrayals of modern Britain - of the experience of ethnic and religious minorities here and of the attitudes and actions of government and public services. They must be challenged as robustly as racism rightly is.

So what to do? I would suggest two small measures that might improve the quality of the BBC's engagement with issues of race and identity, both concerned with the booking of your guests.

The first would be that, when seeking out voices of concern on immigration and integration, you reach for people who are able to articulate a discomfort with the pace of diversity on grounds that are neither bigoted nor rooted solely in questions of resource. When I run focus groups with working class people (of all ethnicities), a common argument is that mass immigration has made them uncomfortable as it has eroded the civil and community life of their neighbourhoods, their social fabric. This isn't a racist argument. But nor does it fit neatly into a safe little box marked 'economic concern'. These are voices you need more of.

Secondly, let's have a black person on Newsnight defending stop and search. Let's find a Muslim who is worried about the creeping use of Sharia. There are plenty of both and these voices must be heard on the BBC to remind both ethnic minority Brits and white Britons that diversity occurs within communities, not just between them.

Max Wind-Cowie is head of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos.

He recently took part in a College of Journalism event about the reporting of race.

His fellow panellist, High Muir, has also written a blog about his views on the reporting of race.

Keith Waterhouse's evidence to Leveson

2012-01-10T10:17:09+00:00

As the Leveson inquiry resumes its hearings, I'm sorry that the great columnist Keith Waterhouse did not live long enough to give evidence.

We can guess what he would have said about the excesses of the red tops, since he made his views pungently clear in his book Waterhouse on Newspaper Style (1989).

The book charts the birth and moral decline of the tabloids, through their use of language:

"Content and the language in which that content is written cannot be entirely divorced from one another," writes Waterhouse. "Either can drag the other up - or down."

Especially, he said, when it came to sex.

"Material is often selected simply because it is seen as suitable for the full tabloid treatment. Once the decision has been made to publish [this] type of stuff... a style has to be evolved to get the maximum out of the story without being arrested for it."

The book, an update of Waterhouse's classic Daily Mirror Style (1981), might give Lord Leveson a few insights.

The way Waterhouse (left, in 1993) tells it, the rot started harmlessly enough with a smirking addiction to puns and facetiousness.

"Ladies' underwear, lavatories and private parts," he said, "have a chortling fascination for schoolboys, end-of-pier comedians - and popular newspapers.

"Show a tabloid sub a story about someone being locked in a lavatory and he will show you a headline containing the word FLUSHED and a rewrite containing the word inconvenienced."

This was surely not what was in the mind of editor Hugh Cudlipp when The Daily Mirror was pioneering a brash new form of journalism in the 1930s - a kind of revolution, Waterhouse called it.

"When reporters stopped calling policemen upholders of the law and started calling them cops, it was not only Fleet Street's musty terminology they were beginning to question... it was the end of automatic forelock-tugging," said Waterhouse.

The Mirror's Cassandra columnist Bill Connor was billed as "the terror of the twerps". When he died Waterhouse was given his slot, but eventually took his column to The Daily Mail.

Waterhouse quotes Mirror editor Sylvester Bolam (1948-53) on sensationalism:

"We believe in the sensational presentation of news and views... as a necessary and valuable public service in these days of mass readership and democratic responsibility. Sensationalism does not mean distorting the truth. It means vivid and dramatic presentation of events."

Somehow that ambition morphed into invention of quotes, contrived story construction and general sloppiness. Waterhouse attacks it all, in 60 sharp, snappily headlined chapters.

All this sounds tame compared to the dark practices Lord Leveson is investigating. But there are a few passages that take on a new significance in the light of the phone-hacking scandal, and give us a clue to what Waterhouse might have told Leveson. Take this, in the chapter on Sex Romps:

"There would be utterly no point in discussing how this kind of stuff could be better written. It could only be improved by not being written at all. No-one is forced to write it, any more than anyone is forced to read it."

"Those who care about journalism can only hope, as one routinely sordid set of revelations follows another, that it will be subject to the law of diminishing returns."

Apparently not.

Simon Pipe is a former senior broadcast journalist at BBC Oxford, now studying for a masters degree at Coventry University. His brief tabloid career included working on the Sunday Sport - but only for a day.

2011, the year journalism changed. But into what?

2011-12-21T10:24:23+00:00

Below is an adapted extract of a chapter by Kevin Marsh from the book The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism at the Crossroads, to be published in February.

In 2011, journalism changed forever.

We don't know yet what it's changed into. But we know what it's going to change from.

The reasons? Leveson. The implosion of the Press Complaints Commission - a ridiculous, two-decade long experiment in the lunatics running not just the asylum but the lives of all of us who are not inmates. And the gut wrenching revelations of the truth we all kinda already knew: that the British tabloid press was nothing more than a faintly legitimised bunch of hypocritical thugs who'd mastered a business model that turns hate into money.

Leveson has become subtitled 'the phone hacking inquiry'. It's very much more than that. Phone-hacking is just one small part of something that's become very, very sick in our culture and our society.

The business model of the tabloid press had become so dependent on trashing the reputations of 'ordinary people', as well as celebrities, politicians, people in public life, that it is now nothing other than a machine to convert harassment, intrusion, misery, sneering and mockery into cash.

Anger and vindictiveness are its default settings. Papers sell on the depths of their inhumanity. Columnists are judged by the frequency and inventiveness of the offence they cause.

By the end of just one week of these accounts to the Leveson inquiry it was clear the game was up. Almost no-one was prepared to defend the way the tabloids use their immense power. And while it may still be far from clear how the world will change for them, change it will.

Few tabloid editors, even, are prepared to take the stand to defend what they do. And listening to one that did, the Daily Mail's Paul Dacre, you can understand why.

True, Dacre was prepared to break cover and deserves some credit for that. But there the credit ends. And although he was speaking to the Leveson inquiry before that long queue of 'just ordinary people' gave their accounts, he misjudged the public mood catastrophically.

Claiming what he and fellow editors did - and, presumably, how they did it - was in the public interest. Asserting his and his fellow editors' absolute and unqualified freedom of expression. Standing on their right to expose corruption and hold power to account.

This is hypocrisy of the most snivelling sort. Worse, it pollutes the arguments we need to protect the best in journalism by trying to justify the worst.

Yes, it's vital that we protect our freedom of expression. Yes, it's vital that no-one can be silenced when they call power to account or root out corruption, or ruthlessly examine and embarrass powerful institutions. Yes, it's vital that we insist power is exercised transparently and that we can hold it to account.

And it's vital that we protect the right of the press to do all of these. But the truth is that's not what the tabloids do.

The fact is, the tabloid press is now the last unaccountable power in the land.

The tabloids aren't out to defend freedom of expression. They're out only to turn their arbitrary moral hypocrisies into cash.

For every MPs' expenses exclusive - not a tabloid exclusive incidentally - there are thousands of 'ordinary people' harassed, vilified, libelled.

For every court battle that lifts injunctions to exposes evil corporations - not something the tabloids have ever indulged in - there are dozens to assert the tabloids' right to report that yet another dog has bitten yet another man. Or rather, another premiership footballer has been caught with his shorts off.

Defending the tabloids' right to do what they want to who they want how they want is nothing to do with protecting free speech. Or protecting the press.

In the long queue of 'just ordinary people' and celebrities who gave Leveson their accounts of tabloid harassment there was one that struck me especially forcefully. It was Sienna Miller's.

She told how up to 15 men would stalk her every day. How they would spit on her to get a reaction. How they would chase her, alone, down dark streets at midnight.

The men weren't just your ordinary, common-or-garden stalkers, perverts and muggers. They'd been given licence by their editors to leave decency behind and 'legitimised' by Miller's celebrity and the cameras they carried.

Miller was just 21 years old. The same age my daughter is now. That gave her account, for me, a painful resonance and piquancy.

Leveson will have got it right if his solution makes the press truly accountable to us, the public.

If the tabloid press has to take more care than it does now that it's honest and fair and has more than a passing relationship with the truth. If it can tell the difference between challenging power and trashing the lives of the victims of crime. If we, the public, can put wrongs right quickly and fairly.

And if young women, whether a celebrity like Miller or 'just ordinary people' like the rest of us, are no longer terrorised by thuggish yobs, turning that terror into cash for the power that is the tabloid press.

Leveson has generated a cottage industry devoted to the new media ethics. One that I'm associated with, a group that grew out of the 'Hacked Off' campaign, is working on a comprehensive submission to Leveson to try to re-balance the relative power of the media and those it touches.

Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today and executive editor of the BBC College of Journalism, is currently completing a book on New Labour, the BBC and the Hutton inquiry called Stumbling on Truth. It'll be published by Biteback in September 2012.

Twitter: out on a wire

2011-11-25T14:41:16+00:00

It's not very often that a news organisation reprimands its staff for being too eager to break a story.

But recently Associated Press did exactly that.

When AP journalists were arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, they immediately put the word out via Twitter. The use of a social media platform to report breaking news prompted an AP manager to issue a sternly worded email directive.

"We've had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off," the email reportedly said.

"We have had staff tweet - before the material was on the wire."

That AP should worry about news filtering out through Twitter rather than its own official channels is hardly surprising. The company makes its money by charging newsrooms to access its breaking news service.

Clearly, if that news is being transmitted via other channels - free of charge - then why bother subscribing at all?

One of AP's managing editors, Lou Ferrara, admitted as much. As well as citing safety concerns, Ferrara explained: "We put news on our products first. That's what our customers expect."

In years gone by the rowdy clatter of the teletype machine in the corner of the newsroom alerted journalists to the fact that a story was breaking. The 'gatekeepers' of news were a small number of major wire services including AP, Reuters, AFP and the Press Association in the UK.

Now, though, social media platforms are increasingly replacing the wires as the 'go to' source of breaking news. On my newsroom desktop I'm more likely to be keeping one eye on my Twitter timeline using HootSuite than monitoring the wires.

Of course the information flooding in on Twitter is often fragmentary, contradictory, or just plain wrong. Only a very foolhardy journalist would broadcast or publish information gleaned from Twitter without making secondary checks or seeking out corroborating evidence.

But an ever-increasing number of major news stories - from the crash landing of a US Airways plane in the Hudson River to the death of Osama bin Laden - emerged first through social media.

If nothing else, social media can often act as an 'early warning radar', hinting at a possible developing news story long before the traditional wire services begin filing more carefully considered reports.

Despite AP's concerns, other news agencies are welcoming, or at the very least accepting, the arrival of the new kid on the breaking news block.

Anthony de Rosa, social media editor at Reuters, admits that "to bury our head in the sand and act like Twitter (and who knows what else comes into existence next month or five years from now?) isn't increasingly becoming the source of what informs people in real-time is ridiculous."

De Rosa understands that the game has changed irrevocably. Anyone with a smartphone can now take on - and often beat - the biggest news organisations.

"Our direct competitors and two guys in a basement somewhere are already developing tools to be the next-generation newsroom," he says.

"If we're not busy doing the same thing, we're dead."

No wonder AP is worried.

Stuart Hughes is a BBC World Affairs producer.

The British press in crisis, and in denial

2011-11-17T13:29:39+00:00

What do you call a group of newspaper editors in collective denial? Try the Society of Editors. I have just spent two days at its annual conference in Runnymede. The theme: Magna Carta II - A Modern Media Charter. Simple, portentous and probably misguided.

In a parallel universe, 15 miles away off the Strand, in the High Court, Lord Justice Leveson was starting his judicial inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal and the ethics of the British press.

In Runnymede: keep calm, just some tacking needed. On the Strand: Lord Leveson is told that 28 (yes, twenty eight) News of the World journalists may have commissioned phone hacking (a claim since questioned by a News International barrister at the inquiry).

However you cut it, public trust in the British press, never high, has been dented by 'Hackgate' and especially the Milly Dowler hacking revelation. People expect journalists to act like sewer rats. This just confirmed it.

Rupert Murdoch closed the 'News of the Screws', but did that cut out all of the cancer affecting British print journalism? Can it reform itself and rebuild trust while shedding sales like autumn leaves and with advertising revenue gravitating to the internet?

Worse, is the system of self-regulation through the Press Complaints Commission working? The runes are not good for that: the PCC reported in 2009 that 'Hackgate' was not really much of a problem.

Nick Davies and The Guardian disagreed and good investigative journalism finally won out in spades.

The PCC may be good as a complaints catcher but with investigation and regulation it's simply not much cop. Its paymasters - the newspapers and their editors - call the tune and sit on most of the committees. Editors judge editors. Lay members are there as a fig-leaf, but, despite that, they turned out in numbers - retired chief constables, trade unionists - in Runnymede to defend 'their' PCC.

The Tory Lords of the PCC Manor, Lord Hunt, the incoming chair, and Lord Black, his boss - the chair of the Press Board of Finance (Presbof), the finance and governing body and a former PCC director himself (it's a small world in PCC-land) - made a fist of defending the status quo and arguing for a refined 'PCC 2'.

The audience wanted to believe them. Those who regulated other industries and professions, such as Chris Graham, the Information Commissioner and former director-general of the Advertising Standards Authority, and Matthew Nicklin of the Bar Standards Board had some valuable lessons for getting the PCC to grow some teeth as a watchdog. Regulation means sanctions which bite.

Meanwhile, in the other universe, on the Strand, Lord Justice Leveson was hearing of the phone-hacking 'cottage industry'.

Leveson Part One will take a year of almost full-time hearings. When the Society of Editors meets again this time next year, the train of tighter press regulation that is relentlessly coming down the tracks may have run them over.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry University and formerly a BBC, ITV and Channel 4 producer.

The debate about privacy law... what privacy law?

2011-11-15T16:29:16+00:00

Four bloggers sat in front of a committee of MPs, peers and bishops to debate privacy legislation. There was tension in the air: George Eustice MP suggested that in the media hierarchy, bloggers are lowest in the "pecking order of credibility", below broadcasters and newspapers. "But not as low as politicians," muttered Paul Staines, who as Guido Fawkes in his blog, gets up to 100,000 readers on a good day.

Lord Gold characterised the bloggers as wanting to be seen as "going out on their white chargers to defend the public good", but pointed out that nobody had elected them. (Nor he: a lawyer, he was made a peer earlier this year.)

The bloggers saw themselves as victims of anomalies in the law: at risk of being bankrupted if they were successfully sued but unable to know what they shouldn't be publishing. As David Allen Green, a legal blogger, explained, they can find themselves breaking a super-injunction because they aren't given notice of the terms, unlike newspapers - which is "not a sustainable situation".

There were some basic misunderstandings between the committee and their witnesses. Paul Staines innocently said he was "just not aware of a right to privacy" under the law. Later, he complained that "privacy is just a euphemism for censorship". The committee referred him to the Human Rights Act, but David Allen Green backed Staines on the absence of a privacy law, saying that there is only "a tort of the misuse of private information".

The bloggers were equally unimpressed by "judges making law from the bench" as with the prospect of changes that would result in something more formal. Richard Wilson, author of The Sceptic's Guide to Life, saw a blogger's defiance of a judge's ruling as part of an honourable tradition of civil disobedience when the law is wrong - citing mass trespasses which established the right to roam.

Jamie East, founder of the celebrity gossip site Holy Moly, said he'd had 30 to 40 threats as a result of what he'd published: although he'd never been sued, he had agreed to make donations to charity and not to discuss certain subjects again.

He was clearly averse to having anything to do with lawyers if he could help it: "As soon as you put 'without prejudice' at the top of a letter, you're heading down a slippery slope towards remortgaging your house."

By the end of the session, a more constructive atmosphere prevailed: Lord Gold had accepted that social media has "opened a new frontier"; Richard Wilson had suggested a small claims court for libel to help sort out the "regulatory mess"; and even Jamie East had admitted that dealing with the law at the moment is "a bit like herding cats".

Being bloggers, by today some had already posted reports of the session. Richard Wilson was guardedly positive: "I've no idea what the Committee will have made of our testimony. It is, at least, encouraging that these issues are starting to be debated properly."

Paul Staines posted the YouTube video of the hearing on his site. Among the 79 comments - which one might expect to be sympathetic - was the predictable "some of the committee would not look out of place in the 1890s." But Staines was also criticised cuttingly:

"Privacy is just a euphemism for censorship... Yeah brother power to people yeah. 6th former answer to a question. I suggest you all watch Guidos performance in full... totally embarrassing, most of the questioners all looked up to heaven, while trying not to titter every time Guido opened his mouth."

It's a rough old world, blogging.

PS. If you fancy being on a committee like this, you could respond to an ad that popped up in Guido Fawkes' blog above the video of the session: