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British Talks on Press Regulation Break Down

March 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Cameron’s abrupt move placed new strains on his relationship with the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner with his Conservative Party, and raised the possibility that they may end up voting with the Labour opposition against Mr. Cameron’s proposal for a royal charter to underpin a new self-regulatory body.

Last November, after months of hearings, a long-awaited report on the behavior of British newspapers embroiled in the phone hacking scandal, written by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, recommended that press regulation should be backed by parliamentary statute, curbing Britain’s 300-year-old tradition of broad press freedom.

The Leveson inquiry was established after the hacking scandal came to a head in July 2011. At that time, Mr. Murdoch ordered the closure of The News of the World, a flagship Sunday tabloid, after disclosures of widespread hacking, including the cellphone of Milly Dowler, a kidnapped schoolgirl who was later found murdered.

The crisis led to civil suits, criminal investigations, a parliamentary inquiry and the Leveson hearings — scrutiny that coursed through British public life, exposing previously hidden relationships between the press, the police and politicians.

The affair has cost Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Six more journalists who previously worked for The News of the World were arrested in February on suspicion of hacking into cellphone messages, adding to a tally of more than 100 reporters, editors, investigators, executives and public officials implicated in wrongdoing by police units investigating accusations of criminal activity.

The scandal spread on Thursday to the rival Mirror Group, when the police said that four Mirror journalists had been arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to intercept telephone communications.” The journalists were not identified by name. Scotland Yard said they included three men aged 40, 46 and 49 and a 47-year-old woman who were arrested in south London.

When the Leveson inquiry published its report calling for statutory underpinning to a new press watchdog, Mr. Cameron opposed the idea while Labour supported it.

Instead, Mr. Cameron proposed that a new self-regulatory agency with the power to fine newspapers and take other measures to support victims of press intrusion into their privacy should be supported by a Royal Charter, a device used to give authority to and define the rights of major institutions like the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Bank of England.

Mr. Cameron plans to call a vote on his proposal in Parliament on Monday, but Liberal Democrat officials said it was unclear how the junior coalition partner would vote. The Press Association news agency quoted Liberal Democrat officials as saying Mr. Cameron called off the talks with their leader, Nick Clegg, and the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband “unilaterally.”

“We were very surprised and disappointed,” an unidentified Liberal Democrat official was quoted as saying. “We thought we were making real progress and inching toward a deal, but the Prime Minister has unilaterally decided to pull the plug on cross-party talks.”

At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Cameron said his proposal would create “the toughest regulation of the press that this country has ever seen.”

Newspapers, he said, would refuse to accept regulation by parliamentary statute — an idea supported by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and privacy campaigners.

“There’s no point in producing a system that the press won’t take part in,” Mr. Cameron said. “As prime minister, I wouldn’t be fulfilling my duty if I came up with something knowing that it wouldn’t work.”

Referring to Sir Brian, the author of last November’s report, Mr. Cameron said: “The route I have set out is the fastest possible way to deliver the strong self-regulation body that Leveson proposed that can put in place million-pound fines, prominent apologies and get justice for victims in this country.”

“The deal is there to be done, it is the fastest way to get proper justice for victims,” Mr. Cameron said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/europe/british-talks-on-press-regulation-break-down.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Cameron Urges Editors to Act Quickly on Regulation

December 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

After the meeting at 10 Downing Street, a Twitter post in Mr. Cameron’s name said he had told the editors, representing most of Britain’s main national newspapers, that “they need to set up an independent regulator urgently,” with the implication that the government might otherwise have to bow to demands for a law to put teeth into a new system of accountability.

The meeting between the prime minister and the editors came five days after a long-running inquiry into phone hacking and other potentially criminal activities by British newspapers published a 2,000-page report that gave as its principal recommendation the creation of an independent, self-regulatory body backed by law to replace the largely discredited Press Complaints Commission.

The report, by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, set off an acrimonious dispute between those who are deeply wary of the implications for press freedom in Britain if Parliament passes a new law, and others who argue that the newspapers — particularly the country’s rambunctious mass-circulation tabloids — have demonstrated that parliamentary action is the only way to ensure compliance with the new, independent regulatory measure that both sides in the dispute say is needed.

The dispute poses a potentially serious political challenge for Mr. Cameron, on top of a host of others confronting his coalition government at the midway point in its five-year term. Although most of the country’s newspapers and many influential commentators have applauded him for resisting the Leveson report’s call for a new system backed by statute, a powerful groundswell in public opinion has been stirred by a lobby group led by some of the best-known victims of tabloid intrusion, who have said that the tabloids have been “drinking in the ‘last chance saloon’ ” for too long and need the threat of a new law to curb their excesses.

Mr. Cameron indicated after the Downing Street meeting that he had admonished the newspaper editors not to delay in embracing a tough new system of accountability along the lines of Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals. “They’ve got to do it in a way that absolutely meets the requirements of Lord Justice Leveson’s report,” he told BBC television. “That means million-pound fines, proper investigation of complaints, prominent apologies and a tough independent regulatory system.”

“And they know, because I told them, the clock is ticking for this to be sorted out,” he said.

His warning reinforced one that Maria Miller, the culture secretary in the Cameron government, gave on Monday in the House of Commons, when she said that if the newspaper industry failed to agree on a stricter system or sought to introduce a “puppet show with the same people pulling the same strings,” changes in the system “would include legislation.”

Mr. Cameron, whose parliamentary majority depends on the fragile support of his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, faces something of a political tightrope walk if efforts to find a compromise in the dispute fall short. Both the opposition Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are in favor of legislation to underpin a new system, and they have found a deep resonance in a British public that has been outraged by 18 months of revelations about the widespread phone hacking and other forms of alleged newsroom wrongdoing, including computer hacking, perjury and the bribery of police officers and other public officials.

Without a deal with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, Mr. Cameron could find his Conservatives — who are split over the need for a new law — facing defeat in the House of Commons if the issue comes to a vote. Cross-party talks aimed at resolving the dispute have produced an agreement that both sides will draft a parliamentary bill that would give the force of law to a new regulatory system. But Labour and the Liberal Democrats say they are confident they can come up with a formula that does not threaten press freedom, while the Conservatives have said they are ready to draft a new bill solely to demonstrate that it would be unworkable.

Moves for a new regulatory system are running parallel to a police investigation into the tabloid scandal. More than 90 people have been arrested and questioned, and a small but growing group of them have been charged with criminal offenses. One of them, Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain, resigned last year after investigators revealed that the Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid had hacked the cellphone of a murdered 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, while she was missing but not yet confirmed as dead. Another, Andy Coulson, also a former News of the World editor, went on to serve as Mr. Cameron’s communications director until he, too, was forced to resign by the scandal.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/world/europe/prime-minister-david-cameron-urges-editors-to-act-quickly-on-regulation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

British Inquiry Is Told Hacking Is Worthy Tool

November 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

After Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had finished his jaw-droppingly brazen remarks at a judicial inquiry on Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to, short of pistol-whipping sources for information.

Nor were the practices he described limited to a select few, Mr. McMullan said in an afternoon of testimony at the Leveson Inquiry, which is investigating media ethics in Britain the wake of the summer’s phone hacking scandal. On the contrary, he said, The News of the World’s underlings were encouraged by their circulation-obsessed bosses to use any means necessary to get material.

“We did all these things for our editors, for Rebekah Brooks and for Andy Coulson,” Mr. McMullan said, referring to two former News of the World editors who, he said, “should have had the strength of conviction to say, ‘Yes, sometimes you have to stray into black or gray illegal areas.’ ”

He added: “They should have been the heroes of journalism, but they aren’t. They are the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.”

Mr. Coulson, who resigned from his job as chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron in January, and Mrs. Brooks, who resigned in July from her job as chief executive of News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch empire, have both been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking, or illegally intercepting voice mail messages. Mrs. Brooks, whom Mr. McMullan called “the archcriminal,” is also suspected of making illegal payments to the police.

Both have repeatedly denied the allegations, and neither has yet been charged.

Nothing that Mr. McMullan said was particularly surprising; anyone following the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News International and its parent, the News Corporation, over the summer is now more than familiar with outrageous tales of tabloid malfeasance. What was startling was that Mr. McMullan, who left his job in 2001, eagerly confessed to so much and on such a scale — no one else has done it quite this way — and that he maintained that none of it was wrong.

Most people from the tabloid world have reacted to the revelations in the manner of Renault when discussing gambling in “Casablanca,” saying they are “shocked, shocked.” But Mr. McMullan veered so far in the other direction that at times he sounded like a satirist’s rendition of an amoral tabloid hack.

Underhanded reporting techniques are not shocking at all, he said, particularly in light of how often he and his colleagues risked their lives in search of the truth.

As examples of the dangers of his job, he described having cocaine-laced marijuana forced on him by knife-wielding drug dealers in a sting operation; being attacked by a crowd of murderous asylum seekers; and, in his “Brad the teenage rent boy” guise, sprinting through a convent dressed only in underpants to escape the pedophile priest he had successfully entrapped.

“Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth,” Mr. McMullan said, asking whether “we really want to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.”

No, he said, we do not.

“For a brief period of about 20 years, we have actually lived in a free society where we can hack back,” he said.

Journalists in Britain have traditionally justified shady practices by arguing that they are in “the public interest.” Asked by an inquiry lawyer how he would define that, Mr. McMullan said that the public interest is what the public is interested in.

“I think the public is clever enough to decide the ethics of what it wants in its own newspapers,” he said. Referring to articles about Charlotte Church, a singer who told the inquiry this week of her distress at her family’s treatment by the tabloids, he said, “If they don’t like what you have written about Charlotte Church’s father having a three-in-a-bed with cocaine, then they won’t read it.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/world/europe/british-hacking-scandal-widens-to-government-secrets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

British Inquiry Into Press Tactics Turns the Tables on Tabloids

November 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But this time, for the tabloids, it is a story with a bitter twist. For what is happening in a courtroom at the Royal Courts of Justice has amounted to a turning of the tables, through the medium of a government-appointed inquiry into the “culture, ethics and practices” of British newspapers, that has turned into a legal soap opera in which the villains have emerged as the tabloids themselves.

The high court judge leading the inquiry, Sir Brian Leveson, has called the sessions that began this week, relayed live on the inquiry’s Web site, a “right of reply” for victims of tabloid excesses. He has refused requests by the newspapers’ lawyers for the right to cross-examine the witnesses, and issued a formal warning to the mass-circulation papers not to strike back against those testifying with new articles that invade their privacy or damage their reputations.

One of those taking advantage of the platform was Sienna Miller, 29, a New York-born actress who lives much of the year in London and found herself a target of intense tabloid scrutiny when she was dating the actor Jude Law. One of the inquiry’s most arresting moments came on Thursday when she described her experiences with London’s “relentless” paparazzi, and described being spat at, verbally abused and subjected to dangerous car chases while trying to elude them.

“I felt like I was living in some sort of video game,” Ms. Miller said. “For a number of years, I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily.”

“I would often find myself — I was 21 — at midnight running down a dark street, alone, with 10 big men chasing me, and the fact that they had cameras in their hands meant that was legal,” she added. “But if you take away the cameras, what have you got? You’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman, and obviously that’s very intimidating.”

The stories tumbling from the witness stand have been dismal enough to cause at least a minor shock wave in a country that had adjusted over the years with a collective shrug of resignation — mixed, for many readers, with a guilty pleasure — over tabloid newspapering and its relentless pursuit of scoops. Now it is commonplace, at the hearings and beyond, to describe the tabloids as a mafia, and to demand steps to bring them back within the scope of the law.

Beyond the wolf-pack excesses of paparazzi, beyond the phone hacking that has been news here for months, witnesses have told of practices that they described as bullying and intimidation, and of what one witness, Max Mosley, the former head of Formula One racing, referred to as “blackmail.” The film star Hugh Grant said that successive British governments had been intimidated into allowing the excesses to go uncurbed for decades.

The tales have been similar, whether they came from Ms. Miller and Mr. Grant, from J. K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, or Mr. Mosley. Perhaps more shocking have been the accounts of victims of crimes like Bob and Sally Dowler, the parents of a murdered 13-year-old girl whose cellphone was hacked into by a private investigator working for the now defunct tabloid The News of the World, and Gerry and Kate McCann, whose 3-year-old daughter, Madeleine, was abducted, and never seen again, while they were on vacation in Portugal’s Algarve region in 2007.

The accusations are the culmination of the phone hacking scandal that has enveloped Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire through the wrongdoing of The News of the World, which had been Britain’s best-selling Sunday paper. The Murdochs shut down the paper in July amid disclosures about its use of phone hacking and other potentially criminal techniques, including allegations of bribing police officers, to invade the personal lives of nearly 6,000 people.

At the inquiry’s hearings, the scandal has broadened to include all of what are known in Britain as the “red tops,” mass-circulation tabloids known for lurid headlines. A common theme of the witnesses has been the menacing tactics they say tabloid reporters have used. Mr. Grant said his London apartment was broken into after he was arrested with a prostitute in Los Angeles in 1995. Ms. Rowling said a tabloid reporter somehow placed a note seeking information for an article in her 5-year-old daughter’s schoolbag; she said years of stakeouts outside her homes, car chases and intimate revelations about her private life had left her feeling violated and paranoid.

“The attitude seems to be absolutely cavalier,” she said. “You’re famous, you’re asking for it.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=39964031b21a6b06999b74d771101ae5

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