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The Sun has eroded British justice, fairness and freedom: now it is feeling the effects
Julian Petley
DATELINE: 14/2/12
Front-paging dawn raids, trumpeting censorship, smearing suspects and biasing the jury... The UK's top-selling daily has terrifying influence over Britain's police force, legal system, politicians, and press. But now the world it has helped to create may be turning against it.
So, Trevor Kavanagh is complaining that Sun journalists have been treated like members of an organised crime gang, having been ¡®needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked. Presumably, then it was a photographer from a different Sun who was conveniently on hand when around 30 officers raided the home of Harry Redknapp at 6 am on 29 November 2007, as reported by the Guardian last week.Anyway, whilst it's nice to welcome Kavanagh to the ranks of those who have long criticised the inappropriate use of this deliberately intimidating, not to say terrifying, tactic on the part of the police, it would be very interesting to know on how many other such occasions journalists and photographers from the Sun have been taken along in tow. It would also be good to hear whether he thinks the ensuing gung-ho reporting of police derring-do in the paper has actually helped to legitimise, not to say encourage, these macho shows of strength which are now such a regular feature of law enforcement.
It's also good to know that Kavanagh believes that people should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty. As he points out it is important that we do not jump to conclusions. Nobody has been charged with any offence, still less tried or convicted. But again, he presumably works for a different Sun from that which, at the start of the trial of Winston Silcott in January 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, a trial in which identification was a substantial issue, printed a front page picture of Silcott, taken by a police photographer, under the headline Face of Man in Riot PC Murder Charge. As Silcott's solicitor Andrew Hall said: 'There could have been no clearer way of telling the jury that whatever the evidence, Silcott was the man they had to convict' (quoted in David Rose, A Climate of Fear, Bloomsbury 1992: 134). And a different Sun again from that which greeted Chris Mullin's heroic efforts on behalf of the wrongly convicted Birmingham Six with the headline 'Loony MP Backs Bomb Gang' and the sentiment that 'if the Sun had its way, we would have been tempted to string 'em up years ago'. Indeed, as Mullin himself has noted in Error of Judgement (Poolbeg Press1997: 405), the paper's coverage of the Six since their release all too clearly demonstrates that it has never come to terms with their innocence, and the same is equally true of its coverage of Winston Silcott after his conviction was quashed.
Kavanagh also complains that Britain has dropped to 28th in the International Freedom of Speech league table. However, as Des Freedman has discussed, perhaps one of the reasons why sections of the British media, and especially the broadcast media, are not as free as one would like is that every time they exercise their freedom in a way of which Murdoch and his henchmen disapprove, the Sun calls for them to be gagged or even dismembered. Here, out of literally dozens of possible ones, are just three examples of this process at work.
On 31 January 1987, the offices of BBC Scotland were raided by Special Branch, and all material relating to Duncan Campbell's Secret Society series seized. The Sun's reaction to this Stasi-like behaviour was not to criticise this shocking exercise of state power against the media but to run an editorial on 3 February headed 'Who Cares?' in which it opined that 'the Beeb have only themselves to blame. Again and again - and notably over the Falklands and the IRA - they have shown they cannot be trusted to defend the national interest. It was monumentally irresponsible to employ a left-wing journalist whose sole purpose in life seems to be to undermine our security services'.
On 28 April 1988, Thames Television showed 'Death on the Rock', a documentary about the killing in Gibraltar of three IRA members by the British security services, which had the temerity to question the official view of events. The programme and its makers became the targets of a truly vicious campaign of abuse and disinformation by the Murdoch press, in which The Sunday Times played the leading role, taking the government's side against the broadcasters. But the Sun also joined the attack, and on 29 April, under the headline 'Blood on Screen - Thames' Cheap Telly Scoop is Just IRA Propaganda', it lambasted the Independent Broadcasting Authority for not banning the programme, bellowing that 'under the quivering geriatric chairmanship of ex-Dandy editor Lord Thomson, it does not merely lack teeth. It has not a fibre of strength or guts in its entire being'. The paper went on to smear one of the programme's chief witnesses, Carmen Proetta, as 'The Tart of Gib', a calumny for which it was to pay dearly in the libel courts.
On 25 November 1993, in the wake of the trial of the two boys who killed James Bulger, the Sun published an article which purported to show the 'chilling links between James murder and tape rented by killer's dad'. The film was the horror flick Child's Play 3, but the alleged 'links' depended for their validity entirely on a description of the film's plot by the Sun which quite simply distorted it out of all recognition. Nothing daunted, however, the following day's front page headline read; 'For the Sake of ALL Our Kids...Burn Your Video Nasty'. The result of all this hysterical clamour (in which, it must be admitted, the Sun was joined by other papers), was that in 1994 the Video Recordings Act 1984, which had been helped onto the statute book in the first place by lurid stories about 'video nasties' in papers such as the Sun, was tightened up still further, giving the UK the strictest video censorship in the EU outside of the Republic of Ireland.
Newspapers routinely calling for the censorship of other media is a paradoxical and extremely distasteful sight, and it is one which casts a good deal of doubt on the sincerity of their demands before Leveson that press freedom must be protected above all else. Press freedom is but one aspect of media freedom in general, and if newspapers cannot see the stark contradiction in calling for their own freedom to be defended whilst bawling for the censorship of other media, then the clock really has struck thirteen.
Kavanagh worries that we may be heading for 'a Press that has been bullied by politicians into delivering what they, not the readers, think fit', but the real problem is that in papers like the Sun we have a press which, using its considerable political muscle, wants to bully liberal newspapers and other media of which it disapproves into not delivering what the Sun doesn't think fit.With thanks to Open Democracy at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/
Julian Petley is chair of the CPBF
14 February 2012.
Last modified: Tuesday, February 14, 2012
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Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
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MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
Journalism Ethics
Sun in crisis
Evidence to the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions from CPBF Chair Julian Petley
A Chance for Change
Phone hacking: Leveson inquiry into press ethics starts
The People in libel payout over Dale Farm slavery slur
News of the World hired investigators to spy on hacking victims' lawyers
Phone hacking: NoW warned about 'culture of illegal information access'
Milly Dowler police investigation may have been targeted
Wall Street Journal circulation scam claims senior Murdoch executive
Journalist wins legal battle after refusing to reveal sources
Phone hacking: News International faces more than 60 claims
Journalistic bad practice: more "icebergs" on the way
Phone hacking update
Phone hacking: News of the World reporter's letter reveals cover-up
The Sun and Hillsborough
News of the World accused of hacking Milly Dowler's phone
News of the World prints phone-hacking apology
Police ask BBC for cuts protest footage
Phone hacking: now judge tells police to stop protecting names
News of the World executive suspended over alleged phone hacking
Censored? Media silence over latest Coulson claims
Nick Clegg's rise could lock Murdoch and the media elite out of UK politics
The return of buggingate
Leaking in the public interest
Judge puts reporting ban on Alfie Patten 'dad at 13' story
Privacy and the Press
Painful lessons (but 60,000 smackers won't even make NoW wince)
The future of spin: Conservatives would perpetuate New Labour control freakery
Enoch Powell: how the 'Rivers of Blood Speech' was spun in advance
What lies behind the front page apology
