The Power of Information

There is a moment in The Lord of Flies, when Simon is mistaken for the beast and attacked by the other boys: “There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.”

William Golding’s classic 1954 novel reflects what he saw in human nature about the ease with which society can turn in on itself and descend into barbarity and savagery.

There are few industries that possess savageness of the media when one of the group appears to be vulnerable and doubly so when it is one of the big ‘beasts’ – primarily the BBC or News International.

The BBC is the unifying force among all newspapers, unifying in that all of them relish a scandal involving Auntie.  But the real prize for newspapers and journalists, left bruised from numerous battles, is News International.

And so we see it again this morning with the Guardian’s story about the alleged prevalence of phone tapping and voicemail hacking of thousands of public figures.

The airwaves and comment pages have been awash with journalists, former editors and other luminaries calling for investigations and public inquiries into the News of the World journalists and editors.

But what is the News of the World is accused of? The Guardian alleges the paper used private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. According to the paper, cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

What’s more is that it claims News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of the use of criminal methods to get stories.

However what’s most interesting about the current outcry is the way information was obtained and its content.

Journalism is a trade in information.  Journalists do everything they can to get it from both the willing and unwilling, either through interviewing skill or surreptitious methods.

I once interviewed Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, for a programme I was making for the BBC on the future of the media.  He was firm in his belief that in whatever form they exist, the principle job of newspapers is to hold public figures to account.

Some methods, such as undercover stings and secret recordings can be hugely controversial – what someone actually said tends to be lost in the outcry over how the information was obtained – and disapproval is rife when it comes to paparazzi pictures of celebrities on holiday or in compromising situations.  However the response is profoundly different to the current case at hand.

One wonders if the selling of celebrities addresses, room numbers and telephone numbers – a standard operating procedure – should in fact be treated in the same way as journalists hacking into electronic personal information.

Or what might the reaction have been if the result of hacking an email address would have been the full details of all MPs expenses, instead of it being passed in paper form to an intermediary, who then sold it onto the Daily Telegraph.

Among the most famous Guardian stories was the leaking of secret details relating to the arrival of American Cruise missiles in Britain, by Sarah Tisdall, in the early 1980s.  The civil servant was ultimately jailed for her role in the affair – but for the Guardian, morality was on her side.

Would the Guardian’s executives have felt the same if one of their journalists had uncovered the story as a result of listening to a voicemail message on a civil servant or minister’s mobile phone.  The answer is probably.

The Court of Public Opinion has always been the place newspapers and journalists have retreated to in the face of opposition to their practices – the right of privacy vs. the public interest.  And it will be forever so.