Are the British tabloids really so invasive?
BENJAMIN Pell made a second career out of digging through the contents of people’s rubbish bags and selling it to the British press. The office cleaner, or “Benji the Binman” as he was known to his clients on Fleet Street, regularly passed journalists the discarded papers of lawyers, celebrities and business executives. Benji’s low-tech operations in the late 1990s fed stories on a high-profile libel case and even Elton John’s flower bill.
British tabloids have a long and colourful history of finding new ways to get the story. From rooting through bins to hacking into email accounts, journalists at the so-called “redtops” have long revelled in their roguish tactics.
Now, though, one tabloid has gone too far. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation said on Thursday it will close its Sunday scandal sheet News of the World after tomorrow’s edition, as a result of an escalating phone hacking scandal.
Allegations that tabloid journalists from the paper hacked into the mobile voicemails of ordinary people — including a schoolgirl who was later found murdered, and victims and families of the 2005 terrorist attack in London and dead British soldiers — have outraged Britons and spurred calls for public inquiries into tabloid behaviour, tougher regulation and limits on Murdoch’s ownership of media outlets.
The revelations, initially carried by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, are part of a long-running hacking scandal which initially emerged when the royal family realised their phones were being hacked. Until now it has focused on the News of the World’s pursuit of celebrities and royals.
As Britain descends into one of its regular bouts of self examination, it’s worth asking whether the country’s tabloids are really so much worse than those elsewhere. How do they stack up against rivals across the Atlantic, where the New York Post, another Murdoch property, faces a lawsuit over its claims that the maid at the centre of an attempted rape case against Dominic Strauss-Kahn was a prostitute. And what about the rest of Europe?
Steven Barnett, professor of communications at Westminster University, is in no doubt that Britain’s tabloids go further than any others.
“Time and time again, particularly in the last three or four years when I travel for work, I’m asked ‘what is it about our tabloid press?’” he told Reuters. “Why are they so outrageous and why is nothing done about it? I think the rest of the world looks on in astonishment frankly.”
So what is it that drives Britain’s tabloids in a race to the bottom? And what holds back the press in other countries?
In Britain, the short answer is that the tabloids push harder because they can. Or rather, in a ferociously competitive environment, they must — because if they don’t do it, somebody else will.
Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for the Guardian and author of Flat Earth News, a book exposing Fleet Street excesses, has been a principal investigator of British tabloid scandals. Davies describes a “regime of fear” in British tabloid newsrooms in which journalists are terrified of getting fired unless they constantly produce exclusives. In that environment, ethics are often cast aside.
Tactics include Pell-style “bin-diving”, “blagging” — pretending to be someone else to gain access to private information about an individual — paying the police for tip-offs, and hiring private investigators to do the above or tail targets.
Some of those methods have been around for decades. But with the advent of computers, voicemail and mobile phones, Fleet Street has become ever more sophisticated.
Some of Britain’s broadsheets are not totally averse to those methods, though Davies said that to his knowledge, The Guardian, The Financial Times and Britain’s Independent newspaper shun the use of illegal or unethical tactics and the employment of private detectives. “Everybody else did it,” he told Reuters.
It doesn’t help that the press watchdog is so weak. In Britain, the press is self-regulated by a body called the Press Complaints Commission, which can require a paper to publish its rulings on complaints against newspapers but little else. Even its gentlest critics call it toothless; one British parliamentarian this week described it as a “fishnet condom”.
Given British tabloids’ reputation, why the outrage over this case? It’s one thing to target non-celebrities, many in Britain have noted this week, and another to go after the victims of crime and terrorism.
“Private Eye has long used the derogatory term ‘hacks’ to describe British journalists,” said Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, a satirical bi-weekly magazine that has made media excesses a staple of its columns and is also a vigorous critic of Murdoch’s companies. “We had no idea that under Rupert Murdoch’s malign influence, so many of them would take the term literally,” he told Reuters in an email.
Other democracies “every bit as strong and robust as ours” thrive without the “nauseating tabloid coverage and routine intrusion into ordinary people’s private lives”, said Westminster University’s Barnett. “In terms of the tactics that they use and the way they routinely invade people’s privacy without any regard for the impact on those individuals, I think the Italians and others would still regard the British press as even below theirs. As do Americans.”
The United States has its share of tabloids full of punning headlines and lurid tales. But in general their journalists say they don’t go as far as their British counterparts.
One of the big differences between the two countries, according to Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, boils down to economics. In the United States, newspapers generate about 75 to 80 percent of their revenue from advertisers while newspapers in Britain depend more on newsstand sales.
Some scandals, such as president Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, are broken by serious magazines and rely not on hacking but on more traditional reporting methods. Michael Isikoff, the reporter for Newsweek Magazine who originally uncovered the story, says the concept of hacking didn’t even exist at that time.
“I adhered to the standard rules of journalistic practice,” Isikoff, who has since left Newsweek, told Reuters.
In Europe, stronger laws limit the tactics of the tabloids.
In France, strict privacy laws bar newspapers and magazines from printing intrusive photographs of public figures in private moments. Frederic Gerschel, a senior journalist at the daily Le Parisien, previously worked at the glossy, celebrity-filled weekly Paris Match and says he has never heard of papers hiring private detectives or intercepting telephone calls.
“Journalists don’t use the same methods as British tabloids. We don’t allow just anything — there is a general respect,” he said.
French media work to a rule that reporting stops at the bedroom door — unless an issue with a public official’s private life affects how they perform their duties.
That tradition of restraint earned the French media criticism recently when stories emerged that Strauss-Kahn, the French head of the IMF, had faced previous allegations of harassment. As doubts about the credibility of his accuser grow, Gershel feels the French approach has been vindicated.
“When I see how the US media embellished the Strauss-Kahn story, I think that in the end we did things right in France,” Gershel said.
But there is a twist. French papers’ restraint may also be due to their frequent connections to broader business interests. Le Figaro, France’s top circulation daily, is owned by the Dassault Group, which owns companies like Dassault Aviation and whose CEO Serge Dassault is a Senator for the ruling UMP party.
Germany’s Bild, read by about 12 million people each day and famous for its pictures of nude women on page one, regularly pays non-journalist sources for candid celebrity pictures and “can certainly give the Sun a run for their money”, according to Amanda Ball, senior lecturer in media law at Nottingham Trent University’s Center for Broadcasting and Journalism.
But Germany also has stringent privacy laws, and even its tabloids are cautious about reporting on the private lives of political leaders and celebrities.
More than a decade ago, when the married state premier of Lower-Saxony and future Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was having an affair with a female Bild journalist not a single word about the poorly kept secret was ever published.
In Italy, a country whose biggest private broadcaster Mediaset is owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, it’s the serious newspapers — Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa — which have published information gained by wire-taps.
In the past year, Italians have been treated to an almost daily diet of steamy transcripts of phone conversations among young women attending parties thrown by Berlusconi, who is on trial for paying for sex with an under-aged woman, charges he denies.
Italy’s government has been trying to pass a bill curbing the use of wiretaps by investigators and the publication of leaked phone conversations by newspapers. Critics say it is an effort to muzzle the press and will help criminals. Wire-taps played a major role in an investigation which last May led to a jail sentence for former Bank of Italy chief Antonio Fazio, over a 2005 takeover battle for Antonveneta, the Italian bank.
Britain’s phone tapping scandal has already hit Murdoch’s News of the World.
Exactly how far public outrage will change the broader tabloid press, though, is hard to tell.
At the newsstand outside King’s Cross railway station in London on Wednesday evening, vendor Thomas Treadwell is not so sure. The phone-hacking scandal was definitely helping sell more copies of rival newspapers, but the Sun and the Times are his best sellers and haven’t been noticeably affected, he said, shrugging as he loaded drinks into a fridge.
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