One view is that stories about celebrities are so unimportant (yes, they are) that it doesn’t matter if journalists lie about them and make stuff up.

It matters.

Every lie and piece of fictional ‘news’ published by the Shag Rags does further damage to the credibility of the press as a whole, and thus its value as a purveyor of news and truth. That’s serious at a time when conditions are so harsh for the printed media. It has become more important than ever that those papers who wish to be seen as ongoing providers of reliable, in-depth investigative journalism maintain the highest standards. Only that way can they maintain their worth in comparison with online news services.

Of course it’s only one section of the press who regularly abuse the truth and their readers’ trust, but as long as the whole industry insists on identifying itself as one type of medium, the less reckless press will suffer.

Most tellingly, the Redtops are seen to consider the PCC as a very minor irritant, who don’t even have the power to penalise miscreants. A reporter from the People - an ambitious, pushy little woman – dismissed the sanctions that can be imposed by the PCC as utterly trivial and not worth worrying about. “All it means is a little apology somewhere in the paper. You get a slap on the wrist; you get recorded on the PCC, but there’s no money [fine to pay].” Self-regulation is starkly revealed as the sick joke most observers consider it. The new chairman, Baroness Buscombe has barely uttered a squeak in the aftermath of The Screws admission of guilt over grossly illegal hacking of Gordon Taylor’s phone. The PCC is a toothless, gutless busted flush – a sham to which editors like Paul Dacre pretend to offer obeisance in a bid to keep a proper, independent regulator off their backs. [See my earlier blog on PCC]

There is also a strong case now, in the public interest, for newspaper employees to be officially qualified and rated as reliable purveyors of news – in the same way that only qualified nursing homes, or law firms or accountants can go about their business. No one would seriously challenge the concept that only qualified professionals should be allowed to dispense law, medicine or tax advice.

At present, any compulsive liar can enter the realms of journalism and be welcomed with open arms if an editor thinks their stories – however they are acquired – will sell newspapers. Take for example, the News of the World management, who have allowed Mazher Mahmood, their Investigations Editor not only to make up stories but to set them up and cast them,in such a way, time and place that the police can be called to make arrests (which have frequently led to costly, abortive prosecutions ) after the critical moment on a Saturday evening when it’s too late for their ‘scoop’ to be discovered and spoiled by their rivals.

Perhaps only those papers consistently meeting the required standards should be allowed the luxury of self-regulation. While the feral beasts of the tabloid press should be subjected to all the restraint, regulation and chastisement they deserve.

Ian Kerr operates an organisation innocuously called the Consulting Agency which trades in personal, sometimes very long term personal information about British construction workers – particularly any items that might indicate a tendency to combat malpractice and injustice to members of the workforce.

Two days ago in Macclesfield Magistrates’ Court Kerr pleaded guilty to colluding with construction companies to contravene the clear requirements of the DPA 1998, ignoring the privacy rights of thousands of individuals. Holding people’s personal details without their knowledge is deemed a serious breach of the Act. The case now goes up to the Crown Court.

What is less heartening is the government’s attitude to strengthening a law which is becoming increasingly important as larger quantities of data are collected and digitally stored – especially at a time when we are seeing terabytes of information being illicitly extracted from the parliamentary Fees Office and broadcast to the world. Although you, along with every hack in the land, may argue that in this case, there is a profound public interest, I’m not so sure, for reasons I gave in a post on May 19th http://www.peterburden.net/archives/142

Leaving that aspect aside, though, I have also pointed out more than once that last year the government tried to beef up the penalties for crimes against the DPA by inserting a clause into a Criminal Justice Bill. They wanted contraventions to become punishable by a prison sentence, rather than, as currently, by just a fine, which would anyway nearly always be paid by the offender’s employer.  But just before the final reading, they were heavily lobbied by Paul Dacre of the Mail and Murdoch’s people at News International – of whom they are jabberingly terrified – kowtowed and dropped it.

This was soon after the papers had shrugged off a deeply alarming report on the ICO’s investigation into the ‘Dark Arts’ of the British Press, in which the Information Commissioner clearly identified relentless and large scale illegal use of private investigators phone tapping, buying information from the police, raiding government agency databases and passing the information back to journalists. The evidence was incontrovertible, there was a stack of prosecutions waiting to happen, but the ICO simply did not have the resources to follow up what would have been highly contested prosecutions. It was almost farcical, and the hacks must have been laughing their heads of behind their hands, as they promised not to do it any more, and within a few months were all at it again.

Last week they had the Mail’s Paul Dacre and this week, Peter Hill from the Express, in fine displays of obfuscation, filibustering, disingenuousness and downright lying. (Did Dacre really not know that his paper was the first, cruelly, to reveal the whereabouts of much traumatised Elisabeth Fritzl? I don’t think so. Do you?)

Little Colin is not as muscular and perhaps a tad more troubled by his Catholic conscience than the hard-hearted Mail and Express men. Lucky for him, Tom Crone, leading in-house lawyer to the Wapping hackery is coming along to Westminster, too, to hold his hand, and no doubt, jump in to stifle him if he feels a sudden rush of truth coming on, or to protect him if things get too tough.

We can only hope that the committee do get tough – tougher than they were on Muckraker Dacre.

The trouble is – the doughtiest of MPs quail at the prospect of upsetting the Murdochs.

Otherwise, they might have asked to question Mr Stuart Kuttner, the Screws fixer-in-chief and eminence grease who’s been burying bodies in Wapping for 20 years. He knows where they all are – and how they got there.

But Mr Kuttner doesn’t do interviews.

It was disappointing to see that besides the chairman, John Whittingdale, only five of the ten members turned up. I hope there were good reasons for their absence; after all, Dacre is now surely the most influential – and most feared – newspaper editor in the country and it seems likely they would have wanted to put their questions at first hand. I truly hope they didn’t stay away because they didn’t want to upset him. For Dacre has a history of intimidating Members of Parliament – even Prime Ministers, as he did (and subsequently boasted about it) last year when he persuaded the government to remove Clause 76 from the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which would have made offences against Section 5 the Data Protection Act 1998 punishable by imprisonment – thereby protecting those of his journalists who make a habit of doing that sort of thing.

But not one member of the committee chose to examine his reasons for this, while they allowed him to weigh in furiously against the media lawyers who specialise in defending the reputations of people his paper has maligned. He has, he says, not time for the Human Rights Act which he claims, quite wrongly, is the domain of unsophisticated foreign judges who don’t understand the quality of British justice -  the Act, after all, was based on the European Convention of Human Rights which was drafted by British lawyers.

John Whittingdale, as chairman, efficiently keeps these sessions moving along and relevant, but he is a polite a man. The only member of the committee with real hands-on experience of newspapers is Paul Farrelly (Lab) who spent 10 years in journalism at Reuters and on the city pages of the Independent and the Observer.

He has been incisive and the most contributive inquisitor on the inquiry, and he pressed Dacre harder than his colleagues did. But he too, failed to question Dacre’s motives in having Clause 76 sidelined.

More importantly, when Dacre, naturally, pressed and pressed again his case for the retention of press self-regulation by the toothless, gutless, discredited Press Complaints Commission, of which he is a member, no members pressed him on how successful complainants would ever get real justice – for the PCC has no powers either to impose serious, painful penalties on miscreants, or to award compensation to victims. Of course these victims have to go to law, and if editors like Dacre don’t like paying lawyers bills highly inflated (too much, it must be admitted ) as a result of Conditional Fee Arrangements, they could simply take more trouble in getting their facts right, like grown-up papers generally do.

All Dacre’s sanctimonious huffing about the moral stance and family values of his papers were shown time and again to be pure weasel. With a disgraceful display of dishonesty (over which the committee barely challenged him) he claimed he had no idea his paper had been the first to reveal the whereabouts of that hugely unfortunate woman, Elizabeth Fritzl, who had gone to live at a secret address so that she could recover after the years of revolting and unimaginably traumatic abuse she’d suffered. This was an outrageous display of hypocrisy with which no Inquiry should have allowed him to get away.

It would be greatly in the public interest if members of our legislature who have set themselves up to inquire into the runaway abuses committed by the rubbish press were to forget their own fears of adverse tabloid treatment and tackle the chief culprits like Dacre with real rigour.

His observation suggests either culpable disingenuousness or an astonishingly weak grasp on reality. The lawyers, who make a handsome living by acting for plaintiffs against the press, are more likely to be deeply grateful to the PCC for sending so much business their way. If the PCC did their job better and had lobbied (against the wishes of men like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre) for more powers and, vitally, more autonomy from the papers they were established to restrain, they’d be in a much stronger position to deliver satisfaction to complainants. It is a direct result of their lacklustre performance, even within their current constitutional constraints, that so many victims of the press have had to turn to litigation. For one obvious thing, the PCC doesn’t have the power to award compensation, and it can’t impose any kind of meaningful penalty on proven miscreant editors.

Meyer went on to describe Max Mosley’s recently expressed view that press self-regulation was like putting the mafia in charge of the police station as “probably ventriloquised by Carter Ruck”, when minimal enquiry would have told him the Carter Ruck did not act for Mosley. And he also tried to rubbish Mosley’s views on the grounds that “it would be a desperate man to measure the quality of the PCC’s service by something Max Mosley said.”

I don’t believe that not having had had my private sex life (relatively conventional as it is) exposed by the News of the World, makes my criticism of the PCC’s extensive inadequacies any more valid than Max Mosley’s. However, for those who’d like to see them, they are expressed in my earlier blog post.

Like every Shag-Rag editor, Dudman agreed with Paul Dacre’s claim yesterday that Mr Justice Eady was introducing a privacy law “through the back door.”

He contended that if these papers didn’t give their readers the vicarious smut they craved that somehow the standards of our national press would decline. Any claim that papers like the Sun, or the Screws or the Mail uphold any kind of journalistic standards is laughable. Fortunately, in this country we do have a high-quality press which millions of British readers enjoy, in the Times, the Indie, the Telegraph and the Guardian, each with their own slant.

(These papers know perfectly well that the Public Interest defence will always protect them from prosecution in serious investigations, but they also like to be seen joining in the tabloid hue & cry over privacy law, even if they aren’t engaged in celeb-baiting themselves. However, it seems that they feel they must show solidarity with their disreputable comrades – God knows why.)

This morning, Graham Dudman was reluctant to concede that appeals against High Court judgements are possible, suggesting, as Paul Dacre had done, that Mr Justice Eady was the sole arbiter of law relating to privacy. If Parliament weren’t so windy about upsetting Murdoch and Dacre, they’d have dealt with the perceived anomalies over Privacy judgements several years ago.

Carry on Spouting…

Incredibly, Dudman repeated Dacre’s bizarre claim that if tabloids couldn’t carry on spouting lurid and often fictional accounts of celebrities’ personal habits, the death knell would sound over the Great British Press.

Give me the chance, and I’ll happily dance on the graves of the Screws and the Sun in my heaviest hob-nailed boots.