The truth about Hacked Off's media coup

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9963263/The-truth-about-Hacked-Offs-media-coup.html


The truth about Hacked Off's media coup
Andrew Gilligan uncovers the intriguing connections between Leveson and Left-wing ideology

By Andrew Gilligan

10:00PM GMT 30 Mar 2013

Several weeks after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, one cynical journalist paid tribute to her parents’ “great skill” in managing the press.

“To an extraordinary extent, this story has been managed by its central characters,” he said. “Alastair Campbell may be nowhere about but this is, if not spin, then highly sophisticated news management.” A short time later, this same journalist penned a nuanced defence of the media’s right to get things wrong.

“The idea that people must always get their facts right, like almost everything that is labelled common sense, is incomplete and unsatisfactory,” he argued. “Life is more complicated than that . . . there are grey areas.”

In a fast-moving business, readers and lawyers “have to understand that you can’t hang around until every detail is perfect.”

In the few years since he wrote those words, life for Brian Cathcart has become a lot more black-and-white. In his new role as director of the Hacked Off campaign for a controlled press, he now claims that “most British national newspapers ruthlessly chose to exercise their great power for evil”.

www.mcannfiles.com has an interesting article from The Telegraph, dated March 30, 2013.

The first paragraph reads, "Several weeks after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, one cynical journalist paid tribute to her parents' "great skill" in managing the press."

Since I don't know how to copy the rest, I'll leave it to someone more talented to add the rest of the article.

Thank you in advance, Happy Easter to all.

This is article but seems to be two threads on this, see Annabels posting - perhaps mods could merge.

The truth about Hacked Off's media coup
Andrew Gilligan uncovers the intriguing connections between Leveson and Left-wing ideology
By Andrew Gilligan
10:00PM GMT 30 Mar 2013
Several weeks after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, one cynical journalist paid tribute to her parents’ “great skill” in managing the press.

“To an extraordinary extent, this story has been managed by its central characters,” he said. “Alastair Campbell may be nowhere about but this is, if not spin, then highly sophisticated news management.” A short time later, this same journalist penned a nuanced defence of the media’s right to get things wrong.

“The idea that people must always get their facts right, like almost everything that is labelled common sense, is incomplete and unsatisfactory,” he argued. “Life is more complicated than that . . . there are grey areas.”

In a fast-moving business, readers and lawyers “have to understand that you can’t hang around until every detail is perfect.”

In the few years since he wrote those words, life for Brian Cathcart has become a lot more black-and-white. In his new role as director of the Hacked Off campaign for a controlled press, he now claims that “most British national newspapers ruthlessly chose to exercise their great power for evil”.

Press inaccuracy has become a disease curable only by a state-backed regulator, and the McCann case is Exhibit A in what Hacked Off calls the “atrocities” perpetrated by the press.

“A whole industry has been roundly condemned by an official public inquiry,” Cathcart proclaims.

Lord Justice Leveson in fact said that he was “able to state with confidence that the majority of press practice is good, if not very good... Broadly speaking, stories are accurate, informative, well-written and respectful of the rights and interests of others.” Cathcart may not approve of tabloid journalists, but he certainly knows how to behave like one.

Who are Hacked Off? And how did Brian Cathcart and a small group of even more obscure allies come from nowhere to write perhaps the most important constitutional change yet of the 21st century?

The royal charter which has just ended 300 years of an unregulated press was, as they boast, “drafted with the help of Hacked Off”. The even more controversial “statutory underpinning,” with its coercive damages and fines, was, as they boast, “a measure suggested by Hacked Off’s chairman”.

The bragging is, if anything, underplayed: Lord Justice Leveson all but cut and pasted their suggestions into his report and the Government has adopted them with relatively few changes.

Hacked Off did it by using all the red-top tricks they claim to hate – broad-brush condemnations, simplistic arguments, distorted facts, behind-the-scenes political deal making, celebrity stardust and the emotive deployment of victims.

Their key skill was in presenting the crimes of some newspapers as the responsibility of all, and defining the issue as what Gerry McCann, on the Hacked Off website, called “a binary choice: the newspaper barons or the people they abused in search of profit. It is as simple as that.”

It is of course nothing like as simple as that.

But though Hacked Off acts in the name of victims of the press, victims are not its central concern. Unknown to most of the people it lobbies, Hacked Off is a campaign not just to tame the press, but to claim the country for the authoritarian Left. It does want to stop newspapers victimising individuals. But it also wants to force the press to serve defined social and political objectives – at the expense, if necessary, of the right to free expression.

As its key intellectual inspiration, Prof James Curran of Goldsmiths College, put it: “The problem is that the press was the principal cheerleader of the deregulatory politics that landed us in the economic mess we’re in.

“Our concerns should be confined not only to individual abuses, but to media moguls who distort the national conversation.”

Curran was speaking at a meeting on May 17 last year, one of several jointly organised by Hacked Off and a fascinating body he co-founded, the Co-ordinating Committee for Media Reform.

CCMR, which has received virtually no publicity in the mainstream media, is closely intertwined with Hacked Off, sharing key personnel.

Prof Natalie Fenton, another Goldsmiths academic and a key member of CCMR, is a director of Hacked Off. She co-chaired the meeting with Cathcart and is seen on the platform at most of Hacked Off’s events.

Writing on the “New Left Project” website, Fenton attacked the “excessively liberalised press” and the “naive pluralism” of “assuming that the more news we have, the more democratic our societies are”.

Curran, whose major book on the media is described as “the Bible” by Brian Cathcart, dismisses any regulatory model based simply on the “social worker mediation of individual grievances” – a sign, perhaps, of where victims really lie in his priorities.

He attacks what he calls the “First Amendment fundamentalism” of British newspapers, saying they should have “an obligation to serve the public good” and that discussion of media reform “should not be limited only to defending freedom of expression”. Another Hacked Off supporter, Prof Chris Frost, says: “The right to free expression… cannot be absolute… the key is to allow as much freedom as is concomitant with the rights of others balanced by the public interest.”

Frost wants newspapers to be forced to reflect “a fair selection of the day’s events”; a regulator, in other words, would decide what stories they covered.

At the May 17 event, numerous Left-wing speakers outlined their view of how the “public good” or the “public interest” as defined by a press regulator, should override freedom of expression.

Jacqui Davis, from Keep our NHS Public, said the media should be obliged to “stand up for the NHS”. Jacqui Hunt, from Equality Now, called for the regulator to ban Page 3, impose compulsory training for male journalists and require all reports on domestic violence to be “sensitive”.

Other groups described as “partner organisations” by Hacked Off’s website include the newly-established Youth Media Agency, which complained that the media’s “discriminatory” coverage of the August 2011 riots “singled out children and young people as the rioters” (72 per cent of those arrested were under 25) and Trans Media Watch, which condemns newspapers for “stigmatising” transsexuals. Alleged examples of discrimination, which Trans Media Watch wants to ban, included a reference to the Bois de Boulogne, a park in Paris, as “containing transsexual prostitutes”.

Another Hacked Off “partner” is Engage, an “anti-discrimination” group including Islamist sympathisers and whose staff have justified the killing of British soldiers. Engage was exposed by The Sunday Telegraph, in what it would no doubt protest to a regulator was “discriminatory” reporting.

Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent and a supporter of the rival Free Speech Network, funded by newspaper publishers, says: “It is not the job of the press to 'support’ or 'oppose’ the NHS, but to scrutinise it.

“Hacked Off criticise the press for not representing a variety of viewpoints, but that is precisely what they despise about it. Leveson has been persuaded to embrace unquestioningly a profoundly ideological description of the relationship between the British press and democracy, previously held only by a small group of Left-of-centre academics.”

Hacked Off’s staff does contain at least two token Conservatives – its spokesman, David Hass, is a former adviser to the then justice secretary, Ken Clarke, and its head of campaigns, Ella Mason, was a Tory aide at the 2010 election.

But a briefing memo, written by Mason and leaked to a newspaper last week, makes clear the campaign despises those Tories it has successfully used, saying: “These are likely to be people you intuitively distrust, dislike and despair of. If they are what we need to win, however, we must understand their value and not confuse their values with our intentions.”

Most of the organisation’s staff and those credited on its website are firmly of the Left. John Dickinson-Lilley, its parliamentary affairs officer, is a former Labour adviser. Julianne Marriott, who handles government relations, is a member of the Labour Party and director of Don’t Judge My Family, a campaign against the marriage tax allowance.

Hacked Off’s public contact person, Francine Hoenderkamp, is news editor of the “UK Feminista” website, “organiser of the Orgasmotron live music night” and the coordinator of the Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaign.

Jessica Riches, its web coordinator, is a former star of the campus Occupy movement. Cathcart himself is a fervent enthusiast for a united Europe who has described sterling as “nothing to be proud of”.

Two powerful lobbying companies with close links to the Labour Party have also supported Hacked Off. They are Sovereign Strategy, a controversial firm run by Labour’s former leader in the European Parliament and repeatedly exposed for alleged unethical dealings by the press, and BBM, run by two of Tony Blair’s former campaign staff.

Hacked Off sits at the centre of a network of broadly Left-liberal groups who have been campaigning for many years for media regulation but whose efforts were given a massive boost by the hacking scandal.

It grew out of the Media Standards Trust, which as early as 2009, long before the scandal broke, declared the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) unfit for purpose – claiming, without much evidence, that its “ineffectiveness” had reduced trust in the media.

In fact, MORI, which has polled on the question every year since 1999, finds that trust in journalists has risen slightly over that time. The Media Standards Trust’s director, Martin Moore, is also a director of Hacked Off.

The Media Standards Trust also launched Full Fact, a purportedly independent fact-checking website into the press and frequent complainant to the PCC, several of whose factchecks contain subtle Left-wing bias and whose complaints to the PCC are almost entirely against Right-wing newspapers.

Full Fact’s chief executive, Will Moy, is also a director of Hacked Off.

In 2010 Full Fact was refused charitable status by the Charity Commission on the grounds, according to Moy, that it did not meet “rigorous standards of objectivity and independence”.

Full Fact’s directors at the time of the Leveson Inquiry were two Labour peers, a Liberal Democrat peer and a former journalist tightly allied to Mr Blair, John Lloyd.

Lloyd, director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, is the author of a book saying media cynicism about politics “undermines democracy” and calling for “intervention” to force news organisations to do more to support public institutions. The book cited the BBC’s story about Mr Blair’s “sexed-up” Iraq dossier as the key example of media wrongdoing.

In late 2011 Lloyd, the Media Standards Trust and Hacked Off convened the “Media Regulation Round Table,” the group which drew up what has now become the royal charter. Two key representatives from the newspaper industry also attended.

One of them, Bob Satchwell, director of the Society of Editors, now says: “I was perhaps naive in going there, thinking that something as grand as the Reuters Institute would have an open mind.

“We were the lone voices pushing for First Amendment purism, but it quickly became obvious that the views of Hugh Tomlinson [chair of Hacked Off] and Martin Moore were gaining all the weight.

“Hugh had his great scheme already half in place, and I said I was not prepared to go along with it.”

Hacked Off still, however, cited Satchwell’s presence to Lord Justice Leveson as proof that a “diverse and independent group” including the newspaper industry had been involved, though it was careful not to explicitly claim that Satchwell supported the plan. Impressed, Leveson cut and pasted substantial elements of the round table’s proposal into his report.

Hacked Off’s ultimate triumph was, of course, when its representatives sat round the table to pass its words into law. As its website exulted, “the time for whining is over”.

Since then, however, amid a massive backlash against its plan, even Hacked Off itself seems to recognise that it has overreached. “Did we win?” the website now asks.

As the truth – about Hacked Off, and about its “deal” – emerges, we must hope that the answer is no. For all the routine

disclaimers that no one wants political interference with the press, it is clear that is precisely what Hacked Off does want.

This was a sort of coup, by people even more unaccountable and unrepresentative than the average newspaper owner.

Great article. Thanks!

bit of an eye opener.