Conspiracy, half-truths and controversial surveys

As wild conspiracy theories circle ahead of the publication of the Leveson report, we will soon see how great the threat to press freedom really is, says Raymond Snoddy.

Preliminary skirmishes are hotting up in the battle for the future of press regulation as Lord Justice Leveson prepares to publish his long-awaited report.

The increasingly bitter salvoes range from elaborate conspiracy theories and half-truths to blatant propaganda and controversial surveys.

The first casualty could be any sense of perspective or respect for the seriousness of the issues involved.

The first signs that something odd was happening came when the front page of last Friday’s Daily Mail carried a large picture of a beaming Sir David Bell complete with a vibrant tie that Jon Snow would have been proud of.

The former chairman of the Financial Times is well known in the media but is hardly a household name.

My God, had he been caught up somehow in the Savile conspiracy?

This was very different – “disturbing questions” were being raised over “Leveson’s key adviser,” said the article.

Sir David had shamelessly sat through all the Leveson hearings while being connected with a number of interlinked organisations, some of them “secretive.”

Together they added up to a leftist “fifth column” committed to undermining press freedom in this country.

The Daily Mail reports were quickly followed up by both the Sunday Times and The Sun, complete with flow-charts “revealing” how Sir David and his many co-conspirators posed a threat to civil society.

The links were there for all to see. Sir David was a co-founder and former chairman of the Media Standards Trust, a body set up to improve press standards. Financial backing came from a shadowy source, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

The Trust had in turn spawned Hacked Off, the campaign fronted by actors and comics to overturn press self-regulation.

It gets worse. Sir David is also a trustee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism whose efforts everybody knows has undermined Newsnight in the Lord McAlpine scandal.

There is more.

Sir David is up to his neck in Common Purpose, a not-for profit organisation that charges £5,000 for week-long leadership training courses mainly aimed at the public sector.

Lord Currie, former chairman of Ofcom, the communications regulator, and another Leveson adviser, has in the past sent Ofcom staff on the courses.

What a web of deceit.

You have to admire the hard work of the Daily Mail even though it comes rather late in the day when the Leveson report is probably heading towards the printers.

It is one of those remarkable pieces of journalism where the facts are all true but still add up to so much less than the sum of the parts.

While demonstrating links between different groups in society is always fun, there are a few flaws in the conspiracy theory.

When Lord Justice Leveson called to ask Sir David to be an adviser, the former FT journalist warned the judge that he was against statutory regulation of the press. Leveson said that didn’t matter.

Sir David, who has been interested in improving journalistic standards for more than 40 years since being a reporter on the Oxford Mail, immediately stood down as chairman of the Media Standards Trust.

His role and suitability as one of only six Leveson advisers was widely known and discussed at the time and as Director for People at Pearson it is hardly surprising that he was interested in leadership training and Common Purpose is a charity that runs its courses in many countries.

There are many things wrong with how Lord Leveson conducted his inquiry, such as not including an adviser from the popular press and giving endless free rein to everyone with a grudge to bear, however unbalanced or ancient.

Sir David Bell is unlikely to have been one of those problems.

A controversial survey

At the same time the Bell conspiracy theories were pouring out came a poll showing that 71% of the public were against state regulation of the press.

What great news. The vast majority of the public also treasure press freedom and unsurprisingly do not see press regulation as a very important issue compared with unemployment and health care.

The poll was carried out by a perfectly respectable polling group, Survation, to British Polling Council Standards for the Free Speech Network, a loose alliance of publishers.

The key question asked was surprisingly long:

“Recently there has been much criticism of press practices such as phone hacking, making payments to public officials, hacking of computers and contempt of court.

“These practices are all illegal and some people believe that the solution to press misbehaviour is to make sure the existing law is enforced and that journalists that commit such offences are prosecuted for doing so.

“Other people believe that the law needs to be changed to add further regulations to the behaviour of journalists. What should the government focus on to stop bad practices and misbehaviour by the media?”

The choices offered were ‘enforcing the law in full and bringing the perpetrators to account’, ‘add new laws and regulations’ or ‘don’t know’.

Of course there is a choice and it appears even-handed – but one option is explained rather more fully than the other and critics have condemned the question as “loaded” – leading respondents to an answer that was welcomed and publicised by the otherwise admirable Free Speech Network.

When the Leveson report is published, probably towards the end of next week, we will see how great the threat really is to press freedom.

It will almost certainly be legislation “lite” – the Irish brand of statutory underpinning. If so it should be opposed on principle as a potential threat to 300 years of press freedom and as a backwards, counter-institutive step in the internet age.

It should be opposed by measured and rational argument rather than through self-serving conspiracy theories or by polls which end up coming out with the “right” answer for those who organised them.

The emphasis should be on perfecting a system of independent self-regulation – and we are not there yet – which Prime Minister David Cameron can accept a year from now on behalf of the public.