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Unrevised transcript of evidence taken before The Select Committee on Select Committee on Communications Inquiry on

THE FUTURE OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM Evidence Session No. 1.

Heard in Public.

Questions 1-36

TUESDAY 4 OCTOBER 2011 4.30 pm Witnesses: Dr David Levy, John Lloyd and John Mair

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither Members nor witnesses have had the opportunity to correct the record. If in doubt as to the propriety of using the transcript, please contact the Clerk of the Committee. 3. Members and witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Clerk of the Committee within 7 days of receipt.

1 Members present Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Lord Bragg Lord Clement-Jones Baroness Deech Baroness Fookes Lord Gordon of Strathblane Lord Macdonald of Tradeston The Lord Bishop of Norwich Lord Razzall The Earl of Selborne Lord Skelmersdale ________________ Examination of Witnesses Dr David Levy [Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism], John Lloyd [Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism] and John Mair, [senior lecturer in broadcast journalism, Coventry University].

The Chairman: I formally begin the evidence sessions for our most recent inquiry on the future of investigative journalism. I welcome this afternoon as our first witnesses: David Levy from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; John Lloyd, who is director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; and John Mair, who is a senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at Coventry University. I think everybody has a slightly enlarged CV in their papers. As I explained outside—and first I apologise for starting late—we have to declare our interests orally at the outset of the inquiry. I propose that we do it in a tour de table. I will start. I am Richard Inglewood and I am chairman of the CN Group and I have 1,740 shares in it. Bishop, would you like to start? The Lord Bishop of Norwich: I am not sure that I have any interests to declare, except that the Church Commissioners have quite a few, and I have an interest in them.

2 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: I have an interest in investigative journalism from my time at Granada, Scottish Television and the Scottish Media Group of newspapers. Lord Gordon of Strathblane: I have a historical interest as a former chairman of Scottish Radio Holdings and as a member of the board of Johnston Press.

My shareholding in

Johnston Press is now so far below any public interest declaration that it is not worth making. Lord Clement-Jones: I have no current interests to declare. Baroness Fookes: I have none either. Lord Razzall: I have no interests to declare. Baroness Deech: I was a governor of the BBC from 2002 to 2006, and I have a close family member who works for BBC TV. The Earl of Selborne: I have no interests. Q1 The Chairman: Unless you have a particularly pressing point you would like to make as an opening statement, I suggest that we move on into the question and answer session. I would like to kick proceedings off and ask each of you: how would you define investigative journalism and how is it different from other forms of journalism? What are its distinctive attributes? Following on from that, what role do you think it plays in society as a whole, and why do you think it is important to protect it? In particular, are there any differences at national and local level? I do not know which of you would like to begin. John Lloyd: It is often said that all journalism is investigative, or should be, beyond the rewriting of press releases, which is now more common than it was. Investigative journalism takes its meaning from that journalism, whether newspaper, magazine or broadcasting, which chooses to investigate a state of affairs that is held to be of concern to the public, information about which is hard to obtain, that requires more than usually lengthy investigation, that may, and often does, mean deception and often also means a relatively

3 lengthy period of presentation. It needs length in a newspaper or magazine or time in broadcasting. The crucial element is that it is of public interest and is usually at least partly concealed from view. The Chairman: Nobody has to say anything, but if you want to add to that or disagree, please do. Dr David Levy:

I will add a couple of words and perhaps move on to a couple of

illustrations. Investigative journalism takes more investment in resources, time and staff. As John said, it tends to be a longer-term project and involve uncovering things that people do not want uncovered. That is more important when more journalism relies on a certain amount of recycling. It is linked by some notion of public interest in what is being uncovered rather than being just what interests the public. If I may, I shall give a couple of interesting examples of the public interest aspect of investigative journalism. Without repeating the history of journalism over the past 50 years or so starting with Watergate, a range of issues have been uncovered by investigative reporters. A recent example would be the BBC Panorama programme that looked at what was happening in the Winterbourne View care home near Bristol. That is an example of where a certain amount of deception was required. It took quite a long time. From my perspective, it is fairly clear that there was public interest involved in uncovering what was going on in that institution, and it had some clear impact on policy going forward in terms of prosecutions and action in that particular case and in terms of a wider debate about conditions in care homes. At local level, there are opportunities, if one can mobilise the resources, which is not always easy, to uncover things that may not necessarily get attention otherwise. There may have been a time when reporting the council meeting and the courts gave you the essence of what was going on in a local community. I think it is arguable that with the number of other

4 institutions that matter in terms of local communities—hospital trusts or whatever—there are many more places which might benefit from closer scrutiny that are not necessarily automatically reflected through courts and council meetings. There is an opportunity for rather more far-reaching investigative journalism that ranges across a wider spectrum of institutions. I can give some examples of that: hospital trusts, where there may be things of considerable public interest that may not otherwise be scrutinised very much, and many other areas. John Mair: I think investigative journalism is uncomfortable. It finds out things that others may not want you to find out. The phone hacking story, which is why we are here, is a classic piece of investigation. Because of Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies, the truth is starting to be revealed about that. They are the heroes of our time. If the press is a watchdog, then investigators are rottweilers. They are there to bite. It keeps the powerful in check to know that one day their actions may be subject to scrutiny and ridicule in the press or on TV. If we take the example rather close to this House of MPs’ and Lords’ expenses, that was admirably exposed by the Daily Telegraph. Others have taken off that skin and, hopefully, there has been a behaviour change and we will not see any more moat cleaning and duck houses for MPs and Lords. That was a classic investigation. I disagree with David about the local level. I think local investigation is dead because it is problematic.

Local papers are dead or dying on their feet.

They all have intimate

relationships with the local community. If you investigate local football clubs, you will not get tickets. It is as simple as that. They will exclude you from press conferences. Many local papers substitute what I call FOIism for proper investigation. They just bung in FOI requests. I judged the young journalist of the year for the Society of Editors this year, and an amazing number of stories just came out of FOI requests. I do not want to read about hospitals charging for car parks any more, about hospital trusts doing this or about council

5 away days. I have had my fill of them, thank you. Instead of just bunging in FOI requests, do some serious investigation, which I do not think local papers have the staff or the inclination to do. Q2 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: I shall start with Mr Mair. You referred to the phone hacking investigation and said that it was a triumph of investigative journalism. I am not disputing that, but, arguably, it was an inquiry into how people deployed methods in their investigative journalism. John Mair: Unethical and illegal methods, but remember that Alan Rusbridger had a very senior policeman, the commissioner of police, come to see him and say, “Nothing to this Alan, you’re wasting your time”. He had senior politicians and senior journalists saying, “You’re wasting your time”. Q3 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: No matter how noble the cause, illegal methodology is not justified? John Mair: It is justified in the public interest if you can demonstrate the public interest. In the Winterbourne case, there was obviously public interest. Were the methods illegal? I do not know. Phone hacking is never justified. It is illegal and unethical. Q4 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: Never justified, even if you turn up somebody who is going to produce a bomb plot or whatever? John Mair: We are not the police; we are journalists? Q5 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: I am just wondering whether that view is universally shared. It seems to me that inevitably there is a distinction, which Dr Levy referred to, between public interest and what interests the public. It might well be that some of you, even subconsciously, would assent to certain tactics to do things in the public interest that you would not condone for matters that simply interest the public, such as celebrity tittletattle.

6 John Lloyd: Public interest is always defined post hoc. The core of the investigation—or revelations, as it was not so much an investigation—on expenses was a crime. Someone had stolen a disk and sold it to somebody else for a large sum of money. I think somebody in this House raised the possibility of a suit being taken against the Daily Telegraph, but nobody ever pursued it for the obvious reason that it would have been regarded as being malevolent, even if it seems prima facie that there was a crime. On your particular point about whether it would be justified to hack into a conversation from which the journalist learnt that there was a bomb plot, I disagree with John. I think it would be justified, but it would always have to be justified post hoc. Success, at least to an extent, cancels the crime, not legally, but practically. Q6 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: In a way you have got to embark on the “crime” before you uncover something that might subsequently justify your action. John Mair: I come from the world of television where the checks and balances are such that before you even think of doing anything out of the ordinary you have to refer it up and down in both the BBC and in ITV. As far as I can see, those checks and balances do not exist in newspapers. Q7 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: From experience, those checks and balances meant clearing it with the Independent Television Commission, which often gave permission if it thought that the story was important enough for secret filming or even for bugging conversations. It would then have to approve its transmission. John Mair: Yes, it had to give permission in advance of doing it, as in the BBC. Q8 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: I am still not quite clear. Things are retrospectively justified if you produce a story that everyone agrees was worth while doing, but embarking on it morally starts off with breaking the law and doing something basically distasteful in the hope that you will be justified?

7 John Lloyd: That is simply the case. Journalism, especially investigative journalism, exists in this grey world between the highest claims that we journalists are a pillar of democracy without whom democracy would not be democracy on the one hand and on the other the grubbiest, slimiest and often criminal acts. It oscillates between the two poles. Q9 Lord Gordon of Strathblane: One of the great inhibitors of investigative journalism has been the threat of legal challenge.

We have seen that with the Sunday Times and

thalidomide, we saw it when Goldsmith went after Private Eye and, perhaps, with Thames and Death on the Rock, which some said helped it lose its contract. To put it in context, you have been in this business for a few decades now, has it become more or less difficult legally to get stories on the air or on to the page? Are there fewer managements that are prepared to take the chance? John Lloyd: My experience is nearly entirely in newspapers, and there I would say that it is slightly easier. I have worked mainly for the Financial Times, which does publish investigative journalism, but not very often of the kind to which there is a serious legal challenge. In other words, it is legalled very comprehensively beforehand. It is slightly easier in this sense—I could be wrong on this, and David and John might well want to correct me—that judges take a more lenient view than they did in the examples you gave. My impression is that judges now tend to take in more fully and more sympathetically an argument that is the public interest defence; that is: this is justified, even if the means were criminal and transgressed the law. They are more severe on cases that interest the public, which are seen as salacious but nobody’s business but the person involved, but many judges are more lenient on accepting a public interest defence for investigative journalism. In that sense, it is better. In the case of libel, I would imagine it is as strict as it ever was. Q10 The Chairman: Are there not two slightly separate issues here?

The first is

whether the interplay between law and journalism has made it easier or more difficult for

8 stories to get into the public domain, and the second is whether it is appropriate for a responsible and ethical investigative journalist to break the law. They are two separate issues are they not? I think the answer to the second question is that you do not necessarily agree among yourselves. Dr David Levy: In response to the second point, in a sense we are debating the question of what one is entitled to do in the public interest in terms of a journalist code of ethics, a regulatory code of conduct or something similar or in terms of the law. There is some overlap between the two. If one looks at the Editors’ Code of Practice, which the PCC effectively enforces, some of the things that it lists that journalists should have respect to include privacy, harassment, clandestine devices, subterfuge and payments to criminals, and I could go on. These are covered by the code, and many would be criminal, but the Society of Editors’ code then gives a list of the public interest circumstances in which it might be reasonable to violate the code in those areas. That is quite loosely written. It gives a certain set of circumstances in which you might not comply with those areas. If you look at the broadcast area and the Ofcom broadcasting code and the BBC editorial guidelines and take the issue of privacy, for example, as far as I am aware, one sees a requirement that you balance the damage done or the intrusion on individuals’ privacy with a sense of proportionality about the public interest that the producer or the reporter might uncover in pursuing the story. As I read the Editors’ Code of Practice, there is not that notion of balancing the two. There is a notion that where there is a public interest, it might be reasonable not to comply with some of these points but, as far as I can see from the two broadcasting codes I referred to—the Ofcom code and BBC editorial guidelines—there is a specific notion that the degree of the intrusion needs to be justified by the degree of public interest.

9 John Mair: In broadcasting, doing investigations has become more difficult and more codified, but that is to the good because about 30 years ago there was quite a lot of cowboy behaviour going on in television organisations, both in the BBC and on the ITV side, so those checks and balances are firmly there.

They protect the public and stop people being

cowboys, which some of them were. Q11 Lord Clement-Jones: That leads on quite neatly to the broader question, which we have touched on in some ways, of the threats to and opportunities for investigative journalism over the next few years.

John, I think you asked the question whether

investigative journalism is dead or alive in your recent piece in the Huffington Post— John Mair: And in my book as well. Lord Clement-Jones: It is all in your book, which we have all ordered copies of, of course. John Mair: You have all got a PDF for free. Lord Clement-Jones: You have got a ready readership here. You have answered in the affirmative, but it would be very useful to unpick that. What are the main threats to the traditional models and practices of investigative journalism over the next five years? What do you think the main opportunities are within that timescale? John Mair: The major threats are economic and technological. Newspapers are dying. They are dying not so slowly. Local papers are in the intensive care ward. The business model has gone. There are no outlets any more. Good investigative journalism needs outlets, money and institutional support. The money is harder to get, there is a shrink, and it is always worth restating that the Guardian, the investigative newspaper, lost £33 million last year.

That cannot continue.

The institutional support of lawyers and editors is

important. The BBC has been steadfast in its support of stories in which it believes and which it believes are true. So has Channel 4. I have not noticed any investigative stories on

10 ITV recently, unless they have involved videogames and computer game animations. ITV seems to have come out of that market altogether. If you are going to do investigation, and if you are an editor or an executive, as Lord Macdonald knows, you have to be ready for stormy weather because the storms are going to hit you and you are going to have to stay there and hold your line because people will try and put you off it. Those are the threats. As to whether investigative journalism is dead or alive, it is alive. Look at MPs’ expenses, look at FIFA, look at the phone hacking scandal. Day after day, there are good investigative stories coming forward. Why? Because of good editors and good journalists. John Lloyd: It seems to me that there is a very mixed picture. You cannot give one comprehensive answer yea or nay to whether it is getting better or worse. As John said, in local and regional papers, it is getting worse because their finances are so bad and because the pressure, which is not a new thing, of local businesses and local politics is greater. It is easier to threaten a local editor or a local reporter with the withdrawal of access, which is the key commodity in journalism, or of complimentary tickets than it is a national. Elsewhere, there are many positive signs. It is true that the time-honoured mechanism in newspapers of circulation and advertising paying for expensive journalism, and in commercial television of advertising paying for it, has declined, but we have seen extremely encouraging signs of not-for-profit money coming in to investigative journalism in particular. In this country, it is not in a huge way, but in a significant way, in the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is attached to City University, and in the States there is much more. ProPublica has quite a lot of not-for-profit money and last week did a joint and very extensive piece of investigation with the Financial Times on tax dodging, which has had a considerable effect.

11 In universities, again especially in the United States, because the US tends to lead in this, you have journalism schools and departments putting quite a lot of money, both private and, I guess, public, into investigative journalism. You have got people on the web. We have not talked about that much so far, but by volume it is now by far the largest part of journalism, if you define journalism widely. You have people who, on their own bat, are putting in information and building narratives which are investigatory and are investigative journalism. You have a number of experiments, some of which have been more successful than others, which have brought together professional journalists and citizens—citizen journalists if you will. It is what Alan Rusbridger, in a talk he gave last year, called mutualism: mutualism being the mutual creation of journalism between citizens and journalists. The Guardian has done several of these. Increasingly, all of us are doing things like that in one form or another where a member of the public is for a greater or lesser amount of time enrolled as a journalist or enrols himself or herself as a journalist in order to give information which they are privy to and which a journalist is not. That has been made possible by the technology, by the net and by a much greater sense on many people’s part that they can make a difference through journalism which itself is very often, nearly in every case, mainstream journalism: a newspaper, a magazine or a TV or radio programme. Nevertheless, there is a now a space, which for most of my career in journalism simply did not exist beyond readers’ letters or a few tips, that is increasingly and promisingly large of mutual journalism between the public and professional journalists. For a while, professional journalists saw this as a threat. They saw the blogosphere, blogs and citizen journalism as a threat. I think after not very many years—four or five—we have come to the view that this is not going to cancel out our role but will actually increase and possibly assist it in remaining. Journalism is taking different forms, and there is a huge change going on, but

12 there are many positive initiatives now being taken that will deepen the role that journalism that you could call investigative will have and will continue to have. Dr David Levy: I agree with much of what my two colleagues have said. On the threat side, there are the familiar problems about where one finds the resources and the time in the absence of a robust revenue model. increasing role of public relations.

That is challenging.

Alongside that, there is the

A piece of work that we produced at the Reuters

Institute a couple of years ago identified that there were as many people working in the public relations industry as there were journalists in the UK, so for every journalist there is a kind of one-to-one match, or there was two years ago. There is a more fundamental issue as well.

If one wants to do serious investigative

journalism now, one may, on occasion, be working in areas that are outside the traditional comfort zone of journalists. If one wants to explore complex financial transactions, how many journalists are really equipped to do that? If one wants to understand very difficult areas of somewhat technocratic decision-making done by specialised regulatory or other agencies, how many journalists have the time, the persistence and the ability to scour through the huge amount of data and to process it? So on the threats, there are the revenue model threats and the time threats, but there is also the changing nature of some of the material that one may need to look at, and there is a question of what skills journalists have. On the opportunities, some of the same things also create opportunities.

Freedom of

information is an asset for people seeking to do investigative journalism at the moment. We have seen examples of old-fashioned whistle blowers dumping very large amounts of data, so potentially there is more material there for journalists to get their teeth into, but they also need to be competent in terms of how to search and understand that data fast. It was quite interesting that the Guardian book about the WikiLeaks saga showed that one of the

13 problems it initially faced was simply the amount of data that had been received and how it then went through it, classified it, searched it and made sense of it. That was not exclusively an old-fashioned journalistic job. Partly it was just a question of how you deal with a lot of data very fast. Q12 Lord Clement-Jones: I am very interested in the broadly upbeat way in which you have all answered the question. As a lawyer, I find it quite interesting that on the threat side the words “state of the law” or “forum shopping for libel” have not appeared as a threat. It was mainly resources, particularly in local newspapers and so on, and maybe the change from traditional journalism that were cited. John Mair: Can I add something on social media? At the book launch 10 days ago, there was a furious debate about this between the traditional journalists and the new journalists, essentially between single sourcing and crowd sourcing.

On the problem with crowd

sourcing, go to Paul Bradshaw’s website Help Me Investigate, which, so far, has not actually cracked one good story. With crowd sourcing, who is the crowd? One person on Twitter can very quickly become a Twitter mob, and you just retweet something that may or may not be true. Always remember that the gay girl in Baghdad was a straight man in Edinburgh. For months, people thought it was a report on the Iraq uprising, but it was an American master’s student in Edinburgh having fun. Social media is an Aladdin’s cave. You have to decide what is gold and what is not gold. Is WikiLeaks journalism? No. Lord Clement-Jones: That is a threat in itself. John Mair: WikiLeaks is data dumping, not journalism. It took journalists to make sense of it. Q13 Lord Razzall:

The two Johns have both touched on social media and the

blogosphere, but there is, I suspect, a difference between Lord Inglewood deciding that he is going to give us the benefit of his views on John Lloyd’s personal life on his blog and some of

14 the platforms deciding this is an area they want to get into. I was quite intrigued that YouTube announced, I think two or three weeks ago, that it wants to set up an investigative journalist entity that would do investigative journalism stories and sell them into the mainstream media. Do you think this an opportunity? Do you think this is a role for the social media that can be expanded? I completely agree with your point in general terms. If Fred Smith wants to set off on an inquiry, how do we know (a) he is telling the truth and (b) he has the resources to do it properly? But if you have some of the platforms or the major social media organisations doing this, do you not think this could be an opportunity for investigative journalism? John Mair: To go back to Lord Clement-Jones’s point, there is no real law on the internet as such, so people can say and do what they like. Lord Razzall: Libel still applies, if you can catch them. You would catch Lord Inglewood if he did it. The Chairman: It would not be me. Q14 Lord Razzall: Is this a trend that we are going to see continuing? If YouTube is doing it, are we going to find its competitors doing it? Are we going to find this as an alternative mechanism to the Guardian or Granada? John Lloyd: After WikiLeaks, a number of organisations, including the Wall Street Journal, a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, said they were going to set up leak divisions, as it were, and invite people to leak their secrets to it. One of the trends in journalism over the past few years, which is very strong and which we saw in the News of the World affair in graphic form, is that journalism, especially when it is under pressure, as it has been for at least 10 years, increasingly must go into the area in which most rapid profits can be realised, which is the revelation of private scandal. What one saw in the News of the World affair, leaving aside for a second the breach of the law, was an increasingly uninhibited

15 search for scandalous information, usually sexually scandalous information, usually about important people, celebrities, recognisable politicians and so on, but sometimes, as we saw, people who were famous for a wee while because very often there had been a family tragedy. That kind of information, which is of interest to the public—there is no sense in denying it— is very often said by those who seek it and get it to be of public interest. You may well be talking to Lord—not Lord Dacre yet—Paul Dacre about his view, and it is that unless tabloid newspapers are permitted to do this kind of journalism, they will fail and therefore the plurality of the British press will shrink. Plus, he strongly thinks that the tabloids play a highly moral role of the kind once played by the church, especially the Church of Scotland, in regulating people’s morals and that whatever the morals of the people who are regulating, the fear of revelation is enough to deter the would-be adulterer. The Chairman: Is it not the case that traditionally the way you monetised the story was through the scoop, so you kept it exclusive to yourself until you had all the ducks lined up, and then you launched it, while out in social media, you are not going to have that opportunity in the same way? Lord Razzall: You are if YouTube gets an exclusive story and sells it to traditional news outlets. The Chairman: But it is no longer exclusive once it is on YouTube, is it? Q15 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Let us explore a little further what these new models might be. There has been a lot of talk about paywalls and, apart from the financial journals such as the Wall Street Journal and the FT, they do not really seem to work for anybody. I see today that Rupert Murdoch is only 20 per cent towards his target, so even he cannot make it work. However, that is probably a secondary issue because that is about the survival of newspapers. We are talking here about investigative journalism, and there

16 may be more targeted ways of doing that. I wonder whether you can see other models, perhaps micropayments, pay-per-use access and those kinds of things. I say this because at the weekend I downloaded two stories on a Kindle, which cost me about £2 each, because they were investigative stories and I thought I would pay for just those stories, which were extended essays, much more in the American style rather than the British style of newspaper. Where do you see these new models coming from? John Mair: Lord Macdonald, you are unusual in wanting to pay.

Nobody will pay for

investigative stories. If those stories come at you by accident, you think, “God, I did not know that”—what journalists call the F-me factor—and suddenly it hits you. Paywalls do not work. Nobody will scale a paywall, apart from you. Q16 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Micropayments might work. John Mair: Not for an investigative story. Q17 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: That is what I am saying. I am not saying that paywalls will work; I am saying that micropayments might work. John Mair: Very possibly you have to be a certain kind of anorak to want to do that. Q18 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Well, if you have the whole globe at your disposal, and you can accrete enough anoraks, it would probably pay for your trip to the Congo. John Mair: Would you have paid to read about phone hacking if you had seen a headline? Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Absolutely. Lord Clement-Jones: If that was the lead story and nobody else had it. Q19 The Lord Bishop of Norwich: You have already spoken about new funding that is coming in to investigative journalism through not-for-profit organisations and so on. What is the motivation for that funding? It ought to be a bishop who thinks that it is entirely virtue that is leading to people wanting to fund these things, but there must be something in it for them, and I am not quite clear about what is in it for them.

17 John Lloyd: I think David should answer on Lord Macdonald’s question about micropayments and so on because he knows more than I do, but on this, I think it is virtue in the same way that very wealthy people will give large amounts to combating AIDS or famine or whatever. What is happening to investigative journalism—and in one sense it is good and in another it is bad—is that because, as somebody put it, Walmart no longer pays for the Baghdad bureau—advertisers no longer give enough money to keep expensive foreign correspondents and investigative correspondents going—investigative journalism becomes a bit like the opera. There is not enough money from the customer to pay for it, therefore you have to bring in public money—and public money does come in to the BBC and to other public broadcasters—or not-for-profit money, and by and large the not-for-profits put it in for the same reason as they would to any other good project. There is a cynical view that they put it in in order that they will not be investigated. Indeed, the funder, I think the only funder, certainly the main funder, of ProPublica, is a real estate magnate in San Francisco, who may be of impeccable morals, but may not, but nobody is going to investigate since he has the main investigative journalism site, or it would be unlikely that they would. I would be uncynical about this. I think most people who do it, like the Potters, who put £2 million in to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism here—he was a former reporter on the Sunday Times and the family has money—put it in because they believe in it. Dr David Levy: I shall pick up the business model point and then move on to the not-forprofit point. On the business model and micropayments, there is a range of new people one may see investing in investigative journalism, if you do not mind the expression, and some of them could do it as YouTube has—I heard the analysis about YouTube—some of them could do it with micropayments and so on. I suspect that the number of people who will pay, even with micropayments, will be quite limited and that the main model for investigative

18 stories will continue to be larger organisations that are seeking to enhance their brand by putting themselves, as they would see it, at the cutting edge of journalism. They may gather in those stories from independent providers, whether YouTube, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism or some other agency, rather than doing them all themselves.

That is the

optimistic side. The pessimistic side is that the Daily Telegraph invested a lot in acquiring the data about MPs’ expenses, analysing it and divulging it over the course of a month.

Its sales went up

dramatically in the month that the story was running, but the analysis that John Lloyd did in a book published a year ago showed that over the following year from May 2009 to May 2010 the overall circulation of the Daily Telegraph fell by 16.5 per cent. It was the largest fall in circulation among the quality papers, so there was not a long-term benefit. If you like, there is a divergence between the journalistic instinct, which is “get the good story out”, and the short-term benefit, and the lack of long-term benefit. Moving to the not-for-profit point, I am not cynical about the reasons why people put their money in. I think many people would see that this kind of journalism is a public good that is underprovided in the market and is the kind of thing that it would make sense to support through philanthropic efforts if it cannot be done some other way.

There are some

initiatives in the UK, but obviously the US is the place where there have been most. There was a study done a year ago looking at a range of US initiatives in this. Sixty different organisations were profiled by Charles Lewis in an article New journalism ecosystem thrives. He profiled 60 different non-profit journalism organisations with a collective budget of about $80 million employing full-time 658 journalists, so it is quite a big scale and quite a plural environment and quite a lot of different activities are going on. I argue that that is partly because there is a rather different tradition in the US of philanthropic money going in to this

19 kind of area. That is partly because of differences in US culture, but it is also undoubtedly because of differences in US charity regulations and charity law. In terms of not-for-profit here, we published something last month on charitable and trust ownership of newspapers looking particularly at the local level in the UK. I can see that there would be opportunities to do charitably funded newspapers, for example, in the UK that had a very clear community focus. Some people argue that this would be absolutely possible within existing UK charity laws in terms of the community purpose and community benefit that these organisations could commit themselves to. My worry is that it would be rather more difficult to do at the national level where we are used to opinionated press and opinionated organisations where an investigative story might be seen as more partisan or as running some kind of line and it might be more difficult to say that it complied with existing UK charity law. I suppose I would make two recommendations here. First, if one cares about the future of local news, one may need to think harder about the role of not-for-profit support for local news, but if one cares about investigative journalism as a whole, one may need to look more widely and ask whether the regulatory framework is suitable to bring in philanthropic support at that level. I am not saying philanthropy can solve all the problems of the news industry, far from it, but I think it can be a useful supplement, and one needs to see whether the existing legal and regulatory model is fit for purpose. John Mair: May I ask one question of Lord Macdonald? How many investigations has the Times run in the past 18 months? Who knows? I have not seen any. Have you? Q20 Baroness Deech: I have become increasingly worried in the past half hour about investigative journalism, especially with charitable or other public money going in, because I put that together with the statement that one or two of you made that it is with retrospective justification that one assesses public interest. Is there anything that is going to

20 be off limits? This opens the door to fishing expeditions. It makes you feel you could end up living in a state where you cannot go and have a coffee with anyone, go on holiday or go to a party without having it reported. Increasingly, you feel that it is only journalists whose private lives are respected. They are always off limits, but nobody else is. Where is the line going to be drawn? Lord Razzall: I gave Lord Inglewood an invitation to investigate John Lloyd’s private life. He is going to put it out on his blog. Baroness Deech: Is there any limit to investigative journalism with retrospective justification and outside funding coming in? John Lloyd: I think I made the comment about retrospective justification. I sympathise with what you are saying, but I cannot see any way out of it. It is a dilemma within journalism and within society when it regards the exercise of journalism in a free society. The retrospective justification of investigation taken in the public interest is ultimately the only kind of justification. Q21 The Chairman: Who justifies is terribly important, is it not? John Lloyd: The journalist justifies. What I think you have to do in such a case is to make the journalist, the editor, or both responsible for the action. If a publication, a TV channel or a radio channel breaks the law, the editor—the boss—as well as the journalist who breaks the law, must be prepared to take the consequences. That is about the best we can do because if, as in Lord Gordon’s example, through breaking the law on phone hacking and hacking into a conversation, you discover a very large crime, then I think you are justified in doing the phone hacking. Almost certainly, you will know or have some knowledge that that crime was about to be committed. You are not simply hacking into phones randomly in the hope that you discover a vast crime, so, in practice, there always is a prior justification, but, and the case of MPs’ expenses is again the recent classic, the end justified the means.

21 Although it is not at all something you would want to argue in a court of law, that seems to me to be the only way in which free journalism can work ultimately, but crucially, the journalists and those who direct the journalists must bear the consequences. There can be no immunity from it. Dr David Levy: I have some sympathy with Lady Deech’s concern. It is perfectly reasonable to say that if one is arguing that certain things are a public good and should be supported in some way, the public’s expectations of the ways in which those organisations behave are correspondingly higher. The most obvious example is the BBC, which gets direct public funding and has requirements on it that reflect that system of supporting it, including its journalism, so in many respects its journalism is meant to aspire to and meet reasonably high standards. More generally, if in the course of your deliberations you were to decide that investigative journalism was sufficiently necessary for society and was in danger and you needed to think of ways to sustain it—I have not talked about public money going into it, I was talking about charitable status for some forms of it—at that stage, it is reasonable to look at the profession of journalism at the same time and ask what standards journalism meets and are they standards that one could defend in public with a clear conscience. John Mair: I have nothing to say about this. Q22 The Earl of Selborne: To go back to data, you referred earlier to marshalling and assessing online data of some complexity, particularly financial data, in which the average investigative journalist might find himself out of his depth. Does this not demonstrate that investigative journalism has to move on and that there have to be new skills and new expertise? I wonder to what extent these new technologies are of help in investigative journalism. A lot of analysis can be done online now. For that matter, what help has the Freedom of Information Act been over the years?

22 Dr David Levy: This is already happening.

There are specialist courses in financial

journalism and some of the investigative journalism courses I am aware of are looking at some of these new techniques and new skills. My point is that investigative journalism has been here for a long time, but the focus is changing. To do it effectively, journalists who have been in the game for a long time are learning new skills, and many new journalists who are coming in to this territory are acquiring those skills on their way into it. There is a need for new tools and new skills, but ever-more-complicated storytelling skills are required as well as skills of analysis. If you are going to try to make sense of a complex financial or tax arrangement and you want to make sense of it to a mass audience, that requires technical skills, analytical skills and ever-better storytelling, narrative skills as it is not as obvious as some of the things that one may have exposed in the past. John Lloyd: That is one of the most important questions facing journalism.

It was

illuminated recently by the 2008 crash. It was of special concern to papers such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and other business publications because it was clear that very few journalists understood the debt mechanisms that had been used that turned out to be largely the cause of the crash. Regulators did not fully understand them. Indeed, people in the companies which used them did not always understand them. Q23 The Chairman: Politicians did not understand them. John Lloyd: Quite. You had a huge failure of the so-called watchdog function on every level, not just the journalistic level, but the political and the regulatory. It has been a cause of real concern at the FT. There have been many seminars where experts have tried to impart to journalists a sense of how to grapple with these complexities. It is also increasingly true in the cyberworld where new forms of cybercrime and cyberwar and wars of various kinds are also fiendishly complex and extremely difficult, beyond the most general statements, to get to grips with. What can be done? More and better education of journalists. As David said,

23 better skills at explaining. One of the commandments of journalism, apart from holding power to account, is to make the significant interesting. Many of the things that are now significant and have come to be significant are very difficult to make interesting. That too requires new skills, new understandings and new ways of telling stories. Journalism is faced with a whole number of technological and financial challenges, but it also faces challenges from a variety of innovative technologies and trends in society, politics and science, which it is rather badly equipped to deal with. John Mair: I have a problem with quite a lot of investigative journalism; I do not understand it. If I read Michael Gillard’s City Slicker in Private Eye, I am lucky if I get one and half columns down before thinking, “What the hell is this about?”.

I think quite often

investigative journalists, particularly in finance, need a rewrite person to come and turn it into English. That is separate from the question of data journalism. Modern students need to learn data journalism. They need to learn all the normal journalism methods but also how to handle data. Look at the Guardian. It handles data brilliantly. I said earlier that FOI can be a crutch. Too often, it can be, but it can also be a wonderful way to open the oyster, but too often lazy journalists use it as a way to get a story. Q24 Baroness Fookes: I am interested in the training of journalists in specialist spheres so that they can carry out investigative journalism. On holiday, I met somebody who was not a journalist but described himself as a forensic accountant. He was Dutch. He had trained in law and was a lawyer, he had trained as an accountant and he had brought those two things together and did specialist services for courts where cases were taking place. Now I know that is not investigative journalism in the normal sense, but it seems to me that one might need more of that approach where you bring different skills together for investigative journalism. Can I have your comments?

24 John Mair: Journalism education is a mess. Let us be honest. There are 25,000 students doing some form of journalism in higher education in a variety of courses that range from the very good to the simply awful, and there is no agreed form of what should be in those courses. Yes, of course, we would have to use people like your forensic accountant, but journalists should have quite a lot of those skills by the time they leave university or a training scheme. Otherwise, they will not be able to understand the world. Q25 Baroness Fookes: Should we be looking at the training of journalists? John Mair: I think it is possibly worthy of a bit of attention. Q26 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Is it 25,000 on journalism courses or on media studies courses? John Mair: I think it is media and journalism in general. It was 25,000 when I last heard, and there are about 25 journalism jobs a year. Q27 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: To follow up on the role of universities, we have heard that there are endowments in the United States that perhaps play a more significant role. Columbia University is a very good example. We have seen it at City University, which seems to have spun off the investigative bureau, and at Strathclyde in Glasgow, which through Eamonn O’Neill is concentrating on trying to get people who have been wrongly convicted out of jail. How could you train the 25,000 potential foot soldiers that John mentioned? Would you ever go as far as to see the universities as somehow impartial, public-spirited entities that could preserve that form of journalism if it began to atrophy elsewhere in the media? John Mair: City has an MA in investigative journalism and Lincoln has a BA in investigative journalism, so there are specialised courses, but every journalism course should have some element of investigation in it somewhere.

25 Q28 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Do you see universities playing an increasing role in future in this area both here and in America? John Mair: I think universities will take over journalism training by and large in this country. Q29 Baroness Deech: Is it the case that young journalists need an education in history, language and world affairs? It is all very well teaching them techniques and how to use cameras and what have you, but they do not have the historical substance behind them, which is the impression that I have formed. John Lloyd: There was a debate about this when Columbia University in New York, which has the most famous journalism school, brought in its new dean, Nicholas Lemann, who was a distinguished writer for the New Yorker. He put forward a plan for upping the postgraduate degree to two years. In those two years, would-be journalists would learn much of what you say, especially in world affairs and politics. It would not be a degree in, say, PPE, but it would have elements of that. The idea that Lemann had, which I think he would claim as a success in Columbia, is not to train journalists to be, for example, a forensic accountant, but to have enough knowledge of the way in which the world works to know what they know and, above all, what they do not know. In the case of Lady Fookes’s example, you increasingly need the kind of skills that a forensic accountant would have, but he or she would have acquired them over years of education plus experience.

It is not really

practicable for a journalist to have them, but it seems to me that there is no reason why journalists should not import specialists—and to some extent they do: the Guardian has done it, the Sunday Times has done it and the FT has done it—to work on particular stories, especially long-form, long-duration stories and to make sense of material and data which very few journalists could. That should and could be an increasing trend. Dr David Levy: I have a lot of sympathy with the points you make. My view is that journalism training is probably best focused at the postgraduate level rather than at the

26 undergraduate level. Moving on to the role of universities in investigative journalism, which was Lord Macdonald’s question, it was interesting that in the list of 60 non-profit organisations in the survey in the States, 14 were based within universities, eight were part of universities and six were separate but based at universities. The trend there has been for more of this to be done in universities and presumably to use journalism students at universities to advance this. I can see a role for that, but one needs to be quite careful if one thinks that there are still some news organisations that are investing in this and one thinks there is some public worth and public benefit in that happening. One needs to be a little careful about suggesting that the salvation of this particular part of the profession lies in universities providing students working paid or unpaid and delivering stories to commercial news organisations. I am just a little worried. The ideal would be to see the commercial pursuit of investigative journalism sustained; the second best would be to see it supplemented by some additional forms of philanthropic or other assistance. I suspect very few people would want to see it crowded out or disappear entirely because the view among leaders of commercial news organisations was that it was a category of journalism that they did not need to do because someone else would do it for them and supply it to them for free. There is a careful balance to be had here between getting the best out of universities and other sources and making sure that it does not discourage people who are in the market investing in the moment and make them move away from that. Q30 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: I do not think you are scoping that properly because there is an almost limitless number of good stories out there to be found. Surely it is just a problem of having enough people to dig them out and tell them. Dr David Levy: I can see that point. There are obviously problems of resources, but at the moment we are still seeing some commercial news organisations still wanting to invest in

27 this area.

I think it is just a question of how one balances these different sources of

investigative journalism going forwards. I would be sad if commercial entities felt it was not part of their core journalistic mission in the future. John Mair: To follow Lord Macdonald’s point, as he well knows, investigative journalists are a strange breed. They can be quite difficult people. They are good journalists, they are accurate, but they have two or three qualities that make them stand out. The Andrew Jenningses and Nick Davieses of this world have a sense of mischief. They like to cause mischief, and they are also bloody determined. You will not put them off the scent. I am not sure how you teach that. I suspect that people like that will still be coming forward because there is one—or several—in every generation. Q31 The Lord Bishop of Norwich: I notice you have not mentioned the BBC’s College of Journalism. Is it an irrelevance? John Mair: No, the BBC College of Journalism is the most wonderful resource available to students. If they accessed it, they would not pay their fees. Q32 The Lord Bishop of Norwich: Is it not being opened up beyond the BBC? I thought that was the plan. John Mair: It is the result of a joint conference with BBC Scotland. Q33 Baroness Fookes: I am not clear about television. Will it have an extending role or a diminishing role in future with all the various media that we are now dealing with? John Mair: It is the bastion of investigative journalism. It is the thing that holds it together, the BBC solidly, Channel 4 nearly solidly—it may deviate, in which case, it will have to be reminded—but, sadly, ITV seems to have retreated from any sort of serious journalism. Without trying to curry favour, the day it allowed World in Action to wither was a very sad day. That should never have been allowed by the regulatory authorities. Q34 Baroness Fookes: Could the regulatory authorities do more in that case?

28 John Mair: They can certainly make sure that a commercial television licence is not a licence to print money. It is a licence to do serious, responsible journalism that is difficult and does not involve video games. Dr David Levy: I should say that what I am saying here is in an individual capacity. I am a member of the Ofcom content board, but everything I say on this is my own view. I think the role of public service television in doing investigative journalism is incredibly important. It is clear from much of the data that is available that television is the single most important source of news and information for most people at national and international level and, I believe, at local level, so what happens on television is incredibly important. My personal view is that any attempt to institute some kind of quota for a certain number of investigative journalism programmes for each licensee, on the BBC or whatever, would probably be counterproductive because we all know that we have seen many programmes labelled as exclusive investigations or other forms of journalism that hype themselves rather heavily and do not really deliver the goods. My fear would be, even leaving aside other issues about the feasibility or desirability of taking action in this area, that if one took action one would end up with rather substandard— Q35 Baroness Fookes: Quantity rather than quality? Dr David Levy: Yes. Q36 The Earl of Selborne: Clearly the regulatory framework is less than ideal for television.

What regulatory changes would you like to see in order to enhance the

journalistic function? Dr David Levy: Once again, this is a personal view rather than anyone else’s view. Lord Clement-Jones mentioned the libel issue and the fact that none of us had mentioned it. I suspect it is because we are all aware of it—in my case, I think it is an issue—but assume that it is being dealt with in other places rather than here. Leaving that aside, the one issue I

29 would pick up is the point I made earlier about alternative forms of ownership and support for news organisations and whether there is any role for thinking about what is and is not allowed within existing UK charity law, whether at the level of local news or at wider national and international investigative news and the difference that one sees between what it is possible to do in that kind of space in the United States and here. In a debate that is taking place and will, no doubt, take place during the Communications Bill about many aspects of journalism and the media, I wonder whether it is an area where there may be opportunities to encourage philanthropists and other supporters to come in and offer support for this area of activity if the regulatory framework made that easier. John Lloyd: Regulation is much more difficult now because the levers which Government as the regulator had over the BBC and the independent TV companies when we had a scarce spectrum now no longer exist, or are ceasing to exist. The internet means that things which are regulated out of existence in the mainstream media immediately pop up on social networks or in the blogosphere. This is one of the large reasons for the creation of the Reuters Institute. By far the largest and most important issue in this is the way in which journalists approach their task, the ethics of journalism, if you like. In this country they are stronger than in many countries, but they have traditionally been weaker than in the United States where developments, especially in the 20th century, meant that a view was taken of journalism that it was part of the constitution, that journalism was a central and active part of the exercise of democracy in the United States. It is so here too, as it is in any free society, but it is not regarded with the same importance. In the United States, newspaper colleagues especially, but also television journalists and broadcast journalists, regard the provision of information, analysis and investigation in the public interest as a higher duty than most journalists here do. In order to try to inculcate that sense in journalists so that even if we were are not a profession—and there is an argument about whether we are a profession

30 or not—we have at least a professional approach to our craft in that we want to further the public’s understanding of public issues and that is the core of our profession. Inculcating that spirit among journalists is by far the most important thing one can do and is more important than regulation. There is very good regulation in Italy, and Italy’s journalism for the past 20 years has been a scandal. That is due to a well known and somewhat unique state of affairs, but nevertheless it shows the limits of regulation. John Mair: I have one little point to make. It should be made clear to the police that journalists do a job and that it is not their job to prosecute them. I am talking about the Official Secret Act, Lord Gordon.

The major point is that we should salute great

investigation. Great investigations keep us all honest, so salute the great investigations of our time and find ways of making them happen and continue to happen because we would be a far poorer society without them. The Chairman: That seems a very powerful conclusion to draw this session to a close. Time is up, but I think we have covered the ground, unless there is anything even more powerful you want to say. I thank each of you very much for your contribution. We enjoyed hearing from you.