April 2024

Many of our Democracy Café debates often come back to the role of the media in shaping ideas, informing or concealing information from its readers, bias and generally influencing what we know and believe of the world around us.  The important titles are courted by government politicians and during Tony Blair’s time as prime minister for example, Rupert Murdoch slipped in and out of the back door of 10 Downing Street 28 times.  No notes or minutes of these meetings have been released. 

The settlement by Hugh Grant of his phone hacking case is therefore of wider importance than just what was published about him and the means of getting the information by journalists.  

The Daily Mail has enormous influence and again, Paul Dacre when editor was regularly courted, not to say fawned over, in the hope of favourable coverage.  They do not just report the news but seek to control the narrative and to shape policy.  Since the owners are for the most part foreign based, we have a disturbing situation where a handful of foreign oligarchs exert huge influence over policy.  We might imagine that the public votes in a government to carry out our wishes but the reality is that this small handful of men set the tone and decide what we read and what we should know about. 

Hugh Grant was one of a large number of celebrities, sports people and royalty, who were subject to a wide range of tactics to get private information, who they were seeing, their medical problems and other matters in their private lives. Tactics included breaking into their homes, tapping their phones, blagging their medical records and bank accounts, and buying information from police officers.  Most of this activity was illegal but since the police themselves were compromised, no action was ever taken.  

As an aside, you might wonder how a person’s medical records can be obtained without their consent.  One way was to employ a recently struck-off doctor say, who knew the language and jargon, who could phone a surgery to pretend to be an A&E surgeon and was treating X and therefore needed to know their medical history.  

An important aspect of this is the scale of it.  One individual was paying the Metropolitan Police around £150,000 pa for information.  There have been 1,600 claims so far against NGN, publishers of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World.  A staggering £1bn has been paid to settle claims.  For reasons that are not at all clear, the Murdochs are desperate to prevent this ever coming to court.  Some may think that if all this surveillance and hacking had been to track down drug dealers, arms traders and people traffickers then the end might justify the means.  It wasn’t.  The people targeted were pop stars, actors, sportsmen and politicians.  

Hugh Grant had to agree to end his action because of the legal process where a payment is made into court to settle the matter and if the judge awards damages less than this then the person complaining – even though they have won their case – will be responsible for both side’s costs. 

This activity of paying off those whose lives were penetrated in this way simply to sell more papers is hugely significant for our legal process and our democracy.  Here we have a group of individuals who committed crimes over more than a decade, and who corrupted the police and the political process, who are allowed, in effect, to buy their way out of any kind of reckoning.  “Justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done” a famous judge opined.  What we have is a flagrant avoidance of justice, simply a series of large payoffs to keep it all under wraps.   

Yet there is very little outrage from politicians about this.  Imagine if a professional burglar went around Salisbury stealing from people’s homes.  When caught, he was able – from the fruits of his criminal activities – to pay into court a sum likely to equal the fine he might receive from the magistrates.  The CPS drops the case because they decide on the balance of probabilities that, even if they win the case and get a prosecution, they will end up paying both side’s costs.  There will be a non-disclosure agreement so the burglar walks away to do the same thing again and again.  People would be outraged if this were to happen (it cannot of course because a burglar cannot avail himself of this procedure).  

The Fourth Estate as it’s sometimes known, is a key part of our political process.  It works by finding out what is happening and informing its readers accordingly by reportage and commentary.  If however, they become a power in their own right, able to control the narrative, and, by engaging in a variety of illegal activities, to find out the private details of anyone they wish, this becomes damaging to our society.  Who is there to report on them? If the politicians themselves are frightened to discuss this and to propose actions to control it, then this becomes a serious problem for all of us.  Effectively, voting in someone at a general election ostensibly to represent our interests becomes a nonsense: they dare not if it risks offending the beliefs or prejudices of our media proprietors. 

An example is the prison system.  The system is in crisis.  Rotten and infested gaols; people locked up for 23 hours a day; overcrowding; rampant drug abuse and almost non-existent rehabilitation are just some of the problems.  Yet attempts by ministers to reform the system hampered – no, not hampered, stopped – by a handful of editors who believe that prisons are holiday camps, full of hardened criminals and murderers and vigorously attack any proposals to bring the system into the twentieth century let alone the twenty first.  So instead of a reasoned debate on our prison system and how we might learn from the Dutch for example who are closing and selling off many of theirs, we have paralysis (indeed, how many of their readers even know of the Dutch experience?).  Prison reform is a debate we do not have.  It is unlikely to appear in the general election debates both parties being obsessed with ‘law and order’ and terrified (of the media?) describing them as ‘soft on crime’.  

Some have a cosy belief in the BBC but this organisation has been systematically attacked, its funding cut and right wing board members appointed to control its reporting.  Although there are some brave journalists, it has been seriously and deliberately weakened.  Members of the various Tufton Street organisations for example, appear regularly on our screens, in radio interviews and as panellists on political shows. One such organisation, the so-called ‘Institute’ of Economic Affairs, is a front organisation for mostly American right wing organisations yet never is one of their people asked ‘who funds you?’ They are allowed to pose as some kind of respectable ‘institute’ without the BBC interviewers ever asking this fundamental question (who funds them is never revealed).

It may seem a long way from Hugh Grant to prisons.   But they both reflect in their different ways, how a handful of overseas media barons can manipulate the law to their own benefit, control the political process and who used a variety of illegal activities to set about any politician who dared to threaten their hegemony.  The claim now is that times have changed.  They no longer use illegal means to blag, burgle, bribe or steal to get their stories they say.  Then why spend north of £1bn to prevent it ever coming to court?  

In all fairness to the tabloids, it has to be noted that these publications are read by millions and are piled up in supermarkets and on newsstands. The public has known of these intrusions but continues to buy and read the results. The proprietors might fairly say ‘we are providing what the public wants to read’. If the public is not repelled by what we do, why should we be concerned?

What we read and what we see on our screens, substantially shapes what we know of the world.  In Israel for example, the average Israeli knows very little of the destruction in Gaza.  In Russia, few Russians know of the enormous death toll of their men on the front line in Ukraine.  Perhaps in the UK we should be a little more concerned about how we, and our famed legal process, are so easily manipulated by a handful of overseas individuals? Shouldn’t we be a lot more concerned about the integrity and honesty of the media world and their owners?

Peter Curbishley