Nothing convinces like personal experience. To have a view of the British media as prone to constructing worlds of half truths, fantasies, defamations and rumour (Prospect, October 2002) is one thing; to have these worlds constructed about oneself is quite another.
Two different worlds were spun about me last month. They came substantially from the political editors of the weekly journals of right and left: the Spectator and the New Statesman. Both wrote commentary in which I played a substantial part, and made confident, categorical announcements which were false, and damaging to professional reputations. Both men know me and how to reach me, but neither attempted to.
The first story is about the weekly I edit, the FT Magazine. The launch issue of 26th April had as its cover story a profile of Tony Blair. The photographer Rankin Waddell was contracted to take photographs of the prime minister. After a good deal of asking, Alastair Campbell agreed to find a slot - in the event, five minutes - for posed photographs to be taken.
The next day, the Mail on Sunday published two pages on the photographs. The main report, by its political editor Simon Walters, said that Blair "called in (the) ultra-hip photographer"; that he "chose" the FT Magazine for the photographs; that he "had a say in the poses, angles and lighting" and that the pictures were "carefully timed." The level of accuracy was underscored by the name given to Rankin Waddell: he became Ian Rankin, the name of a Scots novelist.
Beside the story, a commentary by Spectator political editor Peter Oborne said that "none of the interviews or photographs came about by chance. All have been choreographed." Both the report and the commentary were clear: the FT Magazine had obeyed an instruction of Downing Street to use a photographer picked by Downing Street to make Blair look beatific.
The FT's policy with such reports is to ignore them. However, after the story had taken off under its own steam in other media, and was repackaged in a different form by the Mail on Sunday the following weekend, Campbell wrote me a testy letter asking why the FT didn't refute stories which were false. I rejected his irritation as wrongly targeted, but thought his point right, and wrote a five paragraph letter to the Mail setting out the correct order of events. I looked for it the following Sunday and didn't find it. I called the MoS managing editor, John Wellington, to ask why it hadn't appeared. He left a message to say that it had, in the letters in brief column. And there, on a second look, it was, in two sentences, second from the end.
I talked to Wellington when he returned from a trip, and said the story was false in its allegations, and that two sentences was an inadequate response. He claimed that the story merely said that Downing Street had favoured the FT. I asked if he had checked his reporter's sources, or if he thought he had any. He said he was sure Walters had talked to someone, but that he couldn't remember. Throughout the conversation, irritable on my side, Wellington adopted the patient, weary air of one who is dealing, not for the first time, with an unreasonable complainant.
I also called Oborne. The last occasion we had met, we had both attended a discussion on the media hosted by the British Academy. He had said there that I was "mad" for holding that the media were damagingly hostile to and mendacious about people in public life: he said that his job as a journalist was to find out the truth and publish it. In his columns, his most constant trope is to denounce his subjects for lying.
I said when I called him that in view of his high regard for the truth, did he believe the MoS story and commentary to be true. He said he knew it was. The FT had been used by Downing Street. I asked him if he stood by the allegation that I had been ordered by Downing Street to hire a specific photographer. He said that had been written by Walters, and he had nothing to do with it. I said he had underpinned it by his commentary and asked why he had not called me to check the story. He repeated that he knew it to be correct. Oborne's style was confident, impatient of questioning and diversionary - he kept turning the question to other issues, including my own journalism.
In the second story, around the same time, the New Statesman published a cover story on the "British neo-conservatives," written by John Kampfner, its political editor. The article linked five journalists - Melanie Phillips, Michael Gove and Danny Finkelstein from the right and David Aaronovitch and me from the left, together with the policy thinker Stephen Pollard, as the British equivalents of the well-known US movement. Kampfner wrote that we shared a number of views-we are, he wrote, "ardent Atlanticists; they believe in the fundamental goodness of the US, regard US support for dictatorships in Latin America... as regrettable but incidental... share a strong sense of patriotism and admiration for the nation state... feel a visceral suspicion of multilateral institutions such as the UN and something between disappointment and animosity towards individual countries in continental Europe..." and so on.
Neither Aaronovitch nor I believe most of what Kampfner said we did, although both of us believed the US and Britain were right to invade Iraq. Neither of us were called. I checked with Gove, Phillips, Finkelstein and Pollard, and they were not called either. I had known Kampfner when we were both correspondents in Moscow: on one occasion, when he had intervened to try to ensure the safety of a friend of his when we were both in the besieged city of Sukhumi, I admired his courage.
I wrote him a bitter e-mail listing his distortions-though losing heart before the end, because of the uselessness of the exercise. (Aaronovitch also wrote a more detailed list, which he showed me.) Kampfner's e-mailed reply addressed none of my points and merely asserted that he had been fair. The compromises I and others had made to support the war, he wrote, "required an attack on multilateralism, on the positions of the UN, much of the EU and obviously France/Germany/Russia... in effect the adoption, however uncomfortably, of a Rumsfeld world view." It's a contention difficult to believe as one seriously held by a prominent political commentator, as against a prominent witch hunter. (You believe that Iraq should be invaded. So does Donald Rumsfeld. You thus must believe all the same things Rumsfeld believes. Confess!) He said he was too busy to reply to the specific points made by Aaronovitch and me, but would do so when he was less busy.
Another major media narrative was running at the same time as these more minor ones. The New York Times had discovered a series of major breaches of its journalistic standards, had revealed them but, feeling they were unable to regain confidence, the executive and managing editors had both resigned. The main culprit, reporter Jayson Blair, had among other things made up quotes and presented as facts things which were untrue, having not spoken to those involved. Most British papers saw the affair as absurdly overblown, or indulged in some schadenfreude at the NY Times' expense.
Walters, Kampfner and Oborne interpret political events for, at times, millions of people. The last two appear routinely on radio and television, and write widely for other papers. Yet in their replies to my questions, they seemed surprised, even indignant, about being challenged. They were evasive and unconcerned to find out whether they had indeed misrepresented the facts or sullied reputations. In their responses to me, both Kampfner and Oborne sought to offset my challenges by flattery, by saying how much they admired me.
Journalists have every right to criticise other journalists, indeed, it would be healthy if there were more of it. But to defame and publish false information about them (or anyone) is not good polemics, but bad reporting and bad faith. If this is what leading commentators, writing for the weeklies of the right and left, do to fellow journalists they claim to admire, what will they not do to public figures they choose to dislike? And what do the papers for which they write-all of whose editors express strong disapproval of politicians who "spin"-do to ensure a minimal observation of reporting norms?
These writers exist in and further a culture which privileges excitement over accuracy, defamation over an effort to get at some part of the truth and politicised prejudgement over an attempt at sketching reality. It is our media culture; I know it well, and as I write this I remember my own errors and easy defamations. Nearly all of us have collaborated in our own sullying, or at least carelessness, which merely increases the urgency with which we should begin an account of ourselves.
