Dunce's cap on, I stand in the corner. I am ashamed. I am the Worst Journalist in Britain. It is, as they say, official.
The Guardian's Roy Greenslade, school prefect to the British press, was gleeful when he rang to tell me about the Press Complaints Commission's adjudication on an article of mine in the Evening Standard. "No journalist," said Greenslade, "has ever been found in breach of three clauses of the code of conduct in one article. It's a record." The judgement (there are about 60 a year) was among the most severe he'd seen in ten years of the PCC's life.
This, briefly, was the sin: in March this year, I got permission to sit for a week in a class of eight-year-olds in a north London primary school. I did it by lying. I said I was thinking about becoming a teacher. Did I feel happy about that? No. But it seemed necessary. A sad truth about Britain's paranoid public services today is that, for a journalist, subterfuge works where straight questioning doesn't.
In diary form, I wrote up what I'd seen and what the teachers, keen that I be under no illusions, had told me: a story of good people, overworked and under-paid, trying to keep an enterprise afloat in a cruel sea of neglect. Teachers were scarce, classes too large, security inadequate, and, most disturbing of all, the statutory support systems had seized up. The failure of social services to do their job helping with a high number of obviously troubled children was, one teacher said, "disgusting" (20 per cent of the pupils at the school are asylum-seekers, though they seemed less disturbed than some of the children raised in Kilburn). None of these problems are new, but seeing them close up was fascinating. I wrote a piece I was rather proud of. Anyone reading it, I reckoned, would conclude that the school was doing a pretty effective job despite the failings of the local authority, Brent, and by extension the government.
The piece ran at unusual length in the Standard. It was rather sensationally billed, but that's the price a reporter has to pay. Colleagues-many of them, like me, London parents-liked it. A couple of teacher friends sent approving e-mails. And then the parents' letters came in. My piece was "racist." It was a "prejudiced assault on the state education system" (this from a professor of child health), a "disgusting fraud practised on children who are taught to trust adults."
I offered to debate all this with the parents who wrote to me and the children, once their e-mails started to arrive. But then came the complaint to the PCC and an end to communication.
This was the charge sheet: inaccuracies (Clause 1); interviewing children without permission (Clause 6); obtaining information by misrepresentation (Clause 11); and identifying a child victim of sexual assault (Clause 12). In July, the PCC announced (by leaking its judgement to the Daily Telegraph) that it had upheld the school's complaint. On Clause 1, although they admitted they had no evidence, it was "highly likely" I had been inaccurate.
Breaching Clause 12 was, of course, the most serious offence. Although I changed names, nationalities and even genders of the children, there was one awful error that neither I nor the lawyers spotted at the time. The school rightly said it could have led to one child, mentioned as a suspected victim of sexual abuse, being identified. Luckily it hasn't, but that makes little difference.
Mea culpa. I'm very sorry. As Max Hastings, the Standard editor, said-"it was a cock-up, a seriously misconceived exercise." I agree. Misconceived, certainly. Malicious-and this is important to me, at least-it was not. Obviously we should have apologised over the identification error immediately.
A friend once told me how he had been arrested at a summer pop festival. He was aggrieved. "100,000 people off their boxes on Ecstasy and I get done for rolling a spliff in a tent!"
I feel like that friend now that Lord Wakeham has smacked my wrist. (The PCC has no other sanction-no fine, no compensation, nothing but the duty to the paper to print the adjudication. And complainants must waive their right to sue.) I've had a long career in reporting on the Independent and the Evening Standard: mildly distinguished, certainly honest, I'd say. And all those years, people who call themselves journalists have been doing grotesquely dishonest things in order to sell newspapers. Recently, I wrote for the Standard the story of how two senior reporters on the Sun and Mirror had gone to Spain and made up, from scratch, an interview with the mother of a murder suspect, in which they quoted her as saying she disowned her son, whom she knew was guilty. They never even met the woman, who couldn't have talked to them if she'd wanted to-being 83, deaf and suffering from Alzheimer's. I asked the head of news at both papers to condemn this. They would not.
In the same tranche of adjudications came the PCC's bizarre rejection of a complaint against the Sun for its removal of Ronnie Biggs from Brazil to Britain. Recently it rejected Anna Ford's complaint that the Daily Mail invaded her privacy in publishing snatched photos of her in a bikini. One PCC observer suggested to me that the reason the commission came down so heavily on the Standard was because it really needed to show its muscle at a time when the critics' knives are raised against it. "This was a gift to them, an easy one. You know, 'it's kids, innit.' Plus Max Hastings is on the Code Committee, so that looks good too."
Also on the Code Committee is a bunch of other editors, including John Witherow of the Sunday Times and Neil Wallis of the Sunday People. Witherow is the man who has presided over the most remarkable drop in standards of any British broadsheet, Wallis the boss of a classic failing red-top which makes money by tiptoeing around the PCC's regulations. Wallis is very public in the PCC: he likes to debate on television and in universities on its behalf. At one of these occasions in the LSE, I asked him whether he didn't feel uncomfortable defending self-regulation while he was still refusing to apologise for his campaign early this year to have Thompson and Venables, the boys who killed James Bulger, kept in jail indefinitely. A court had declared that the social services documents printed by Wallis to support his case were crude fakes. Wallis had no answer. The matter was still under investigation. The People still has not apologised.
Neil Wallis was one of the editors who sat in judgement on my case. (I shouldn't know this. The PCC keeps such matters secret, as it does the minutes of its meetings.) I asked Wallis after the judgement on my school piece if he felt it appropriate that he'd sat on the deliberations-wasn't there a conflict of interest? This after all, was a case concerning newspapers' treatment of minors, an issue over which his paper is currently under attack. He referred me, with apologies, to Guy Black, the PCC's director.
So I asked Black why Wallis sat on my adjudication and he seemed surprised that I should question the integrity of his editors. None had ever ruled themselves out because of any conflict, nor did he think they should. And he became irritated when I suggested that he was assuming in his judges-a proportion of whom habitually sanction dishonesty in order to make their living-a saintliness that the Lord Chancellor doesn't ascribe to real judges.
This is just the sort of thing that makes many journalists roll their eyes. But then most journalists I know, the ones whose reasons for working in newspapers go beyond merely helping them sell more copies, don't think about the PCC that much. Why should they? If asked, most of them will deliver the usual line-the PCC is like any industry's self-regulatory machine: secretive, self-serving, it cosies up to the Royals and the red-tops, to the very interests it should be most wary of. In the ten years of its existence, the PCC's sole significant achievement has been the staving off of legislation on privacy.
Oddly enough, I've seen the PCC at its best. It dealt with my case fairly and efficiently (though I'm dubious about the members of the jury), and there's no arguing with its conclusion, however harsh. But this leaves a bad taste. I've been justly punished, but by an authority for which I have no respect, clipped round the ear by a copper who's on the take. It stings.
The PCC is a joke of an organisation and so are its sanctions. It is not only journalists who have no faith in it: the public seem to have followed suit. Since January 1991 the PCC has dealt with some 25,000 complaints. Over the last five years, the PCC has seen a drop in the number it has received-at 2,225 last year there were about 25 per cent less than in 1996. Relentlessly self-congratulatory organisation that it is, the commission likes to paint these statistics as a sign of success: bad reporting down by a quarter over five years, thanks to the PCC.
The opposite is more likely to be true. In the first five years of its existence the PCC saw complaints rise annually. In the second five, they dropped. It seems sensible to conclude that in the early years people were catching on to the fact of the PCC's existence. In the years since, they've caught on to how useless it is. Mike Jempson of the media ethics organisation, PressWise, says: "I think people realise that the PCC is about protecting the publishers, not the people."
But we who pride ourselves on being good journalists should stop sniggering at the PCC, and instead try to get it to work: get Aunt Sally made into a proper policeman. We need it. We're all aware that because of the decline of standards our job is getting much harder. My only excuse for the school piece is that, such is the reputation of journalists in this country now, deception is increasingly necessary to get good, un-spun information. Why would anyone bother telling you something for nothing? Everyone in this media-savvy country knows what journalists can do. I wonder when we'll reach the point where everyone in Britain knows someone who has been "monstered," as tabloid hacks put it-done over, fitted-up, abused and misrepresented by the British press. Then, I suppose, the game will be up.
As I sit here in disgrace, I wonder how the headteacher and the chair of the board of governors of the school feel, now they've got the adjudication they wanted. They put many hours into their complaint. I know, I read every page of it. They may well have had to spend money on lawyers. Was it worth it? Yes, perhaps, if this adjudication prevents another intrusion like mine. But will it stop the News of the World sending a teen reporter into a school to find out if Princess Bea, say, is smoking dope? (No. If I'd found a criminal act in the school, the intrusion would have been justified.) So what if the News of the World went on a fishing trip-the exercise the PCC condemned in my case-went looking for dope-smoking, but found under-age sex in the dormitories? I think the PCC would wave that one past, too.
I hope the school feels the time was well spent. I rather wish the Standard had been made to write them a large cheque to say sorry. The school could use the money. Similarly, I'd like to see those papers that make money from flouting the PCC's rules fined on a scale that reflects the commercial gain from their articles. Third party complaints must be allowed. Visibly, the PCC now must try something new to restore people's faith in print journalism. It has become tedious hearing Lord Wakeham endlessly listing the PCC's successes-the hard fact is that public confidence in the press is at its lowest ever: any journalist who gets out of the office knows that, and so do opinion pollsters. A March MORI survey on the subject showed that we journalists are now less trusted than politicians. The PCC has failed utterly in its ten years to do the job the industry needs: without teeth it will never do it. But most important, it is time for honest journalists, not just editors, to get involved in trying to sort out the industry. Otherwise, it won't be worth working for. n
