If Ofcom says it’s all OK – is it all OK?
The Daily Telegraph ended up in hot water over its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax scandal, now Global Radio stands accused. Ofcom says the group has done nothing wrong, but should we be worried about the dividing lines between editorial and commercial?
When executives at what is now News UK claimed that phone hacking at the News of the World was the work of a rogue reporter or two you just knew in your bones it couldn’t be true.
Producing a newspaper is such a collaborative and hierarchical enterprise that it was next to impossible that individual “rogues” could have been responsible without anyone knowing.
No questions asked about strings of sensational insider scoops and how much was paid? Really?
Factual knowledge was not required for this insight. You simply just knew illegality was much more widespread and serious than that.
Then again it was not difficult to predict that when Trinity Mirror looked for evidence of phone-hacking at the Daily Mirror and found none, they weren’t looking hard enough or with sufficient energy.
All you needed was a very basic level of understanding about just how cut-throat competitive the tabloid newspaper market is to simply know that we hadn’t got to the bottom of the matter.
In this world if a new wheeze to get your hands on sensational exclusive stories without paying a fortune is developed, it is certain to be copied instantly and used until the police turn up.
At the very least there is always coming-and-going between journalistic staff on the tabloids and sharing of knowledge, quite apart from the poaching of editors and senior executives.
It is equally likely that although phone-hacking is now a historic matter – we hope – we still do not have the complete story of who knew what, when.
Even now the likelihood is that there is more to come out.
There are some parallels with the phone-hacking scandal and what may turn out to be an emerging scandal of the increasing influence of commercial departments over editorial in the media.
One of course is illegal and the other is not and those accused of allowing previously sacrosanct barriers to slip – first the Daily Telegraph and now Global Radio have denied any impropriety citing editorial reasons for creating suspicion.
The Daily Telegraph has never properly explained its coverage of the tax activities of HSBC – or rather the lack of coverage and material that somehow disappeared from websites.
The detailed indictment of former Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne stands unanswered and remains as a warning of how quickly a reputation built up over 160 years can be so quickly tarnished.
Treat your readers as mugs, and your editorial integrity as flexible, at your peril.
A one off phenomenon? A rogue incident that has been denied, or at least explained away?
Perhaps it was, but other newspapers in a gossipy industry talk privately of suspicions involving the Daily Telegraph.
Newspaper proprietors can, however, do more or less what they like, and frequently do, as was seen in the comically biased coverage of the 2015 general election campaign.
The latest outbreak of suspicion involving Global Radio and its radio brands Heart, Smooth, Xfm and Gold networks is if anything more serious, because commercial radio in the UK is part of a regulated system.
And once again at the heart of the matter is the controversial bank, HSBC, which may be heading off to Hong Kong to enjoy lighter regulation.
The facts in the Global Radio case seem clear. It advised its stations to drop the story about how the bank’s Swiss subsidiary helped customers to dodge taxes at around 8.45am on 9 February, the day the story broke.
Coverage of the story was resumed several days later – a pattern that followed quite closely what happened at the Daily Telegraph.
The radio group cited “editorial reasons” for the decision.
There are only a limited number of possibly legitimate editorial reasons for such a surprising intervention. One is to worry about the legal implications of the story and the fact that it might not be true.
This is a weak editorial reason because everyone in the media, including the BBC was going big on the story and it is a routine matter to cover any controversial item in terms of allegations, in ways that could not possibly be legally dangerous.
Another – remote – possibility is that the story was considered too heavy or too boring for the listeners of Global stations.
It seems deeply implausible that someone from Global would bother to get in touch to block a presumably brief piece on such grounds.
Apart from anything else, several million of Global’s 23 million weekly audience must have HSBC bank accounts and would indeed be interested what their bank had in fact been up to.
Such an “editorial reason” was further undermined when coverage of the story was then resumed several days later.
In the absence of any remotely plausible explanation for the bizarre behaviour the obvious reason remains hanging in the air – the sensitivity over offending what is likely to be an important advertiser.
Luckily, as Global is a company regulated by Ofcom, and a complaint was made by a listener, the matter will become transparent and all will become clear in a way that is not possible with the Daily Telegraph.
Unfortunately not.
Ofcom, after reviewing news output and putting detailed questions to management, decided there was no indication that the independence of its news coverage had been compromised and that therefore there would not be a formal investigation.
Really?
The results of an investigation would have been published and we could all have made up our mind.
Instead all we have is an Ofcom comment saying the regulator was satisfied on news integrity and that “there was no evidence of any third party influencing Global’s decision on this matter.”
Fine, but that begs the most important question of all: if no third party influenced Global, did they capitulate themselves, something that is nearly as bad?
And what precisely were the “editorial reasons” that presumably Ofcom found to be valid?
Ofcom had a chance to put this matter to bed but their stance leaves you feeling that there is still more to this matter than meets the eye.