Newspaper readers – vote with your feet

Guest blog: Jane Winter, human rights campaigner, whose confidential emails were hacked  at the behest of journalists, believes that readers could have a much greater role to play.

Ever since I became a victim of hacking I have been asking myself why people buy many of our newspapers. They contain very little news and what they do print is often opinionated, exaggerated or inaccurate – sometimes all three.

It would seem that the great British newspaper-reading public is mostly interested in sex, scandal, disasters and celebrity, preferably in some sort of combination. As a journalist’s daughter and a human rights campaigner, I believe strongly in the freedom of the press.  So I have no doubt that the Jimmy Savile story (sex), MPs’ expenses (scandal), earthquakes (disaster), and a new Colin Firth film (celebrity), are all things the press should tell us about. The public are interested in these matters.

The first three cases also engage “the public interest”, which is not the same thing. The abuse of power, whether sexual or financial, is something the public has the right to know about, and has an interest in stamping out.  Equally, we should be told about humanitarian disasters, because we may have friends or relatives who are directly affected by it or because we may want to help.  There is also the policy question of whether the UK is providing enough humanitarian aid.

It is difficult to claim that a new film by a celebrity engages the public interest in that way, but it is both useful and entertaining to be told about books, films, sport and music. I’m not a killjoy: it’s good that news can be fun too.

So far so good.  Newspaper can and should call the powerful to account, expose wrong-doing, let us know that our help is needed, and provide us with helpful, even entertaining, information.

The problem, for me, arises in the transaction between the newspaper and the reader.

The press have only one reason for publishing newspapers, and that is to sell them.  The temptation for those who produce newspapers is to pack them with what they think the public is most likely to read, and as recent years have vividly shown, that driving motivation can create a lot of casualties.

Journalists and editors can cut corners with the truth and accuracy to make their story appear better and more exciting. They can jump to the wrong conclusions in the effort to tell a better angle than their rivals. They can encourage untrue and unfair speculation.  And they can invade people’s privacy without any justification, often with shattering consequences for individuals.

Just because someone snaps Prince Harry in the altogether on their mobile does not give anyone the right to publish the photograph

The question I would pose to people who read papers that espouse these kind of news values, is: what is your side of the bargain?  What do you get out of being misinformed or encouraged to leap to potentially wrong conclusions?

Another problematic area, in which those who read such papers must bear some responsibility, is the cult of celebrity.  A myth widely promulgated by some papers, and apparently accepted by many readers, is that, by courting publicity, celebrities are issuing an open-ended invitation to invade not only their privacy but that of their families, friends and associates.

Just because someone snaps Prince Harry in the altogether on their mobile does not give anyone the right to publish the photograph.  There is no public interest in the harmless private antics of a young man, even if he is a prince. Are readers really saying they have a right to see the photograph?  How would you feel if he wasn’t a prince, but was your son?

Harry’s example is relatively innocuous, but as the testimony of some celebrities to the Leveson Inquiry showed, the invasion of the privacy of those who have become famous through the exercise of their talents to entertain us can have life-changing and long-term effects both for them and for their families. Look what happened to Sienna Miller and Charlotte Church, young women who found themselves under constant, hostile siege from reporters.

There is another side to fame, which is notoriety.  Some people deserve notoriety, bringing it upon themselves by their wrongdoing, but many people acquire it through no fault of their own.  Take the case of Christopher Jefferies, not merely wrongly accused of the murder of his tenant Joanna Yeates, but subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification.  Imagine the feelings of the McCanns, who desperately needed publicity when their daughter Madeleine disappeared one evening while the family were on holiday in Portugal, only to find themselves accused of the murder of their own child by the very papers to whom they had turned for help.

I believe that one of the reasons that the efforts of press barons to sell us their newspapers have become so desperate is that they are in the midst of writing a very long suicide note, partly brought upon themselves by their illegal activities, but mainly caused by the rise of other media.  Most news can now be tweeted by a bystander long before a journalist can write a story, a newspaper can be published, or a television company broadcast it, and some tweeters have more followers than newspapers have readers.

So why do I care about what the press barons are publishing?  The answer is because their perverted values are creeping into other forms of media.  Programmes like “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!” and “Big Brother” not only promote the cult of celebrity but encourage voyeurism, and very often sexism.  London Transport has recently acknowledged that the use of smart phones to sexually harass female passengers by taking compromising pictures and then circulating or posting them is an increasing problem, and the cacophony of abuse on Twitter of women who supported the depiction of Jane Austen on the £10 note, suggests to me that the “page 3” mentality has gone viral.

Is there a solution to the problem of newspapers that rush to judgement on people, bend or fake the facts and ruthlessly intrude on private lives? Well one answer is better regulation, as Lord Justice Leveson recommended. But I think there is another, and in this case it is down to the readers.

Let’s buy newspapers that we trust not to behave appallingly, and let’s stop buying the other ones. 

We need to be more critical of the news we read. Given the long record of fabrications and abuses, we need to ask ourselves when we buy papers and when we read them whether we believe what they are reporting, whether we think a story is fair, and whether we think that story might have been acquired by bullying or intrusion. And if we think the answer is not one we like then we should consider switching to another paper.

If we are told that the clothes from a particular shop are made by exploiting children, or that a supermarket chain sells meat from animals that are treated cruelly, many of us will not shop in that shop or in those supermarkets. Let’s do the same. Let’s buy newspapers that we trust not to behave appallingly, and let’s stop buying the other ones.

If that sounds naive to you, think about this. Ever since The Sun told lies about the victims of the Hillsborough disaster most of the people of Liverpool have boycotted the paper.

Sections of the press are out of control and have been for years, and are using their immense power to attempt to thwart any meaningful change to the way they are regulated. There is a huge imbalance of power between them and the public they supposedly serve.

We are that public, and we have a role to play. We should not play the game of simply buying the paper with the most lurid headline, and reading the stories that are put before us without thinking about what lies behind them.

As citizens in a democracy we should take a long, hard look at what we really want from our news media, and we should vote with our feet and our pockets.

Tomorrow: “…Despite the public outcry surrounding the phone hacking scandal, the closure of The News of The World and the odium and revulsion poured on the company over the Milly Dowler affair, most of them still didn’t really get it…”  A guest blog by writer, journalist and broadcaster Tom Rowland.

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