Internationally respected investigative journalist Phillip Knightley on the state of journalism around the world ... most of a speech by Knightley in Sydney early this year at a forum organised by the Evatt Foundation, about the future of investigative journalism.

Mick O'Regan host of ABC Radio National's Media Report which ran an audio of the address described Phillip Knightley is "an ex-pat journalist who worked for Frank Packer's Consolidated Press and Keith Murdoch's Herald. He then moved to London, and has had an illustrious career, twice being named journalist of the year in the British Press Awards. He is the only journalist, apart from John Pilger, to have won the award twice.

By PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY
The death of investigative reporting, and who killed it. I thought that before we get around to revealing the names of the murderers, I’d better anticipate some of the criticism that my colleagues in the journalist game might throw at me. You know, that helpful constructive criticism along the lines of ‘Here’s another old fart looking back at the golden age of journalism that never really existed.’ Let’s pre-empt that. More by luck than skill I spent most of my 60 years in journalism in, yes, the golden age, and I have to make a comparison, I have to have a benchmark to compare something with what’s happening today. So let me just tell you about what the golden age was like.

I started as a copy boy for David McNicol Senior, on the old ‘Daily Telegraph’. Now remarkably, for a columnist who later spent his years as a bon viveur, McNicoll kept me busy running down Castlereagh Street to the Greasy Greeks to bring back a double hamburger and egg, on which he seemed to thrive.

I got my break on The Northern Star, Lismore, as a cadet reporter, doing what I’ve since decided to call public service journalism; keeping the people of Lismore informed of what was going on around them.

Yes, I have to admit that there was the odd moment of shame. The first inkling that everything one reads in a newspaper is not necessarily the truth: one day the senior reporter, a Scotsman on the run from something nasty in the old country, turned to me and said, ‘It’s your turn to do Suzanne.’ I said, ‘Suzanne?’ He said, ‘Yes, yes. “Your Week in the Stars, by Suzanne”, the horoscope column. It’s your turn to be the resident astrologer.’ And when I looked bewildered, he said, ‘Get your arse down to the filing room, turn up some copies of the paper for 10 years ago, and just copy out a bit here and a bit there. But,’ he said, ‘be careful not to give the same people bad luck two days running or they’ll write to the Editor.’

I wrote this many years later, and had a letter from a lady who said she’d been the Editorial Secretary on The Northern Star about that time, and she said, ‘Don’t worry too much about having made up the a Stars column’, she said, ‘It was my job to ring the Weather Bureau in Sydney at night, just before publication time, and find out what tomorrow’s weather was going to be like. And,’ she said, ‘I hated the job because the weather man thought that forecasting was a form of science, and he would dictate the weather report to me beginning, “There’s a cold front moving in from the south-east and the barometer is dropping”, and she said, ‘I’ll have to stop you there’, she said, ‘Look, the paper’s got three little drawings. One’s a man with an umbrella, the other one’s a girl with her skirt blowing up, and the third one’s a girl with a bikini. And I’d say to him, “Which drawing are we going to use?” And then,’ she said, ‘He’d hang up in my ear. So I’d go up on the roof and look at the weather … and write the weather report.’

Now looking back on this, this was clearly a warning to me. Someone was telling me Never work for a paper called Truth (‘Pravda’: Truth), but I did make the mistake, I went to work for Truth and I was ambitious and foolhardy. So when the Editor said to me one Saturday morning the paper was stuck for its usual sex maniac story, and since it was too late to find a genuine one, I’d have to make one up. To my everlasting shame, I did. I invented a sex fiend who travelled on crowded suburban trains, and he’d fashioned a hook from a wire coathanger and kept it up the sleeve of his coat, and he would surreptitiously lower it to a young lady who was standing alongside him, and try and raise her skirt until he got a glimpse of her stocking. And the Editor loved it, he said, ‘A really, really good story, this one.’ He said, ‘It should be true, even if it’s not, it should be true. And the only change he made was to christen the sex fiend The Hook , and to have him operating that very Saturday night on the crowds coming to town for their Saturday night out.

So the next Tuesday when we got into work, it was clear we got away with it. No other paper denied it, how could they? The railway authorities did not complain, there was no word from the police. And then my telephone rang and an official sounding voice said ‘This is Detective Sergeant Plowman from Bankstown Police here. Are you the reporter who wrote that story about the sex maniac, The Hook?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Righto,’ he said, ‘I just want to tell you we got the bastard this morning.’

Well back in 1954 I could see that if I continued to work for Ezra Norton, the truth would get me in the end. So I set off for Fleet Street, and eventually wriggled my way onto The Sunday Times in its heyday. It was a 40-page paper, and it had 350 editorial staff to produce that paper every Sunday. It was so over-staffed that some journalists went weeks without getting anything in the paper. He’d spend money like water on investigative journalism. $2-million, a million pounds in those days, on legal costs alone, fighting for its right to publish a story about thalidomide. It averaged a libel writ a week. The Editor, Harold Evans was unhappy if the libel writ hadn’t arrived by Tuesday because he felt that the paper was not doing its job, defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly. Here was a paper that believed in something which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for editorial integrity.

One day, the owner of the paper, a Canadian called Lord Thompson, knocked on the Editor’s door while a morning news conference was in progress. He said hallo rather tentatively, and then said, ‘Say boys, would it be possible to squeeze in the Canadian ice hockey results each Sunday?’ There was a moments stunned silence. The Deputy Editor turned around and said, ‘Lord Thompson, this is an editorial conference; you have not been invited to it. If you’d like to put your suggestion in writing, I’m sure the Sports Editor will consider it next week.’ And next morning there was a note from Lord Thompson apologising for attempting to interfere in the paper’s editorial policy. Now imagine that with Rupert Murdoch.

So this is my benchmark. It’s against this golden age that I plan to measure the performance of the media today, especially newspapers because I know more about, and especially in the field of investigative reporting.

Newspaper circulations are declining all over the Western world. Viewing figures for News and Current Affairs are down. There’s a general public contempt for journalists. In the last five years half a million AB readers, AB means educated, top-income group readers, have deserted the British quality press. And it’s an extraordinary fact that of the 11-million adults in Britain, about one-third do not read any daily newspaper whatsoever. All over the English speaking world, many young people have all socio economic classes have got out of the habit of reading newspapers.

Now in any other industry if customers were vanishing at this rate, there’d be panic. But in the media industry it’s only recently that hard questions are at last being asked. Le Monde, announcing an English language version of Le Monde Diplomatique, turned on its own. We all know that media can no longer be trusted, that their performance is incompetent, that they broadcast blatant lies as they were manifest truths. That famous Polish correspondent and author, Richard Kapuscinski. agreed. In the old days the most valued thing about news was truth; now that’s changed. An Editor no longer asks whether the news is true, but whether it’s interesting. And if they don’t find it interesting, then they don’t publish it.

From an ethical point of view in journalism, this is a major change. Because the media, particularly TV, in the business of mass production of ignorance? Is it possible that the more TV news we watch, the less we know? There’s a case to answer on both counts. And if it’s the media’s job to interpret the world for us, why has the total output of factual programs on developing countries dropped by 50% in the past ten years? Who and what decides our news values? Conflict in Africa since the Cold War has been responsible for 90% of all the world’s war dead. Yet Africa turns out to be the least covered continent on TV and in the newspapers.

Perhaps this is due to the death of the old-fashioned foreign correspondent. Remember them? The expert in his or her field, who had the language, the knowledge and the background, not only to report on what was happening, but to explain why it was happening. Professor Virgil Hawkins of Osaka University suggests that the new technology killed them off. He says the process goes greater competition among media giants, leads to budget cuts, so resources for news gathering are diverted to buying and maintaining high tech equipment. This means foreign correspondents are expected to cover larger and larger areas of the world, and in the process they lose their specialist knowledge. They race from one humanitarian disaster to another, with little time or background knowledge to grasp the issues behind the conflicts they cover. This tends to produce highly emotional first-hand accounts, described by Claudia Montero of Leicester University, in her analysis of the Portuguese media coverage of East Timor as ‘good cause journalism, journalism of affection, with the journalist as hero of his or her own story.’

Now while all this has been happening, government interest in the media has intensified. It is as if governments realised even before the TV and newspaper bosses, that the power, reach and influence of the modern media are enormous. The CNN news group is available to 800-million people across the globe; BBC World can be viewed in 167 million homes across 200 countries. Al Jazeera reaches at least 75-million viewers in the Muslim world alone. So for any political party, the ability to ‘handle the media’ is these days seen as an essential element in gaining power, and then once in government, in maintaining it, and carrying out policy. The old-fashioned government press officer has gone. The British government has a Director of Communications Strategy, whose job it is to manage the media and manipulate public perception of government actions.

The United States underpins its hard power, its awe-inspiring military capacity with soft power, its ability to achieve its goals through the media. And its practitioners speak of a different world of journalism in which global media strategy and international perception management, use journalists as pawns in the new Great Game. In its updated foreign policy, Washington talks of ‘full spectrum dominance’. The US should aim to be top dog in all spheres: military, economic, production, business, culture, and significantly, information.

In an ideal world, a free press and a curious sceptical army of campaigning and investigative journalists should keep democracies and their leaders in line, especially today. And almost as important, it should act as a check on the increasing power of corporations, especially international ones. So what’s stopping these journalists, what’s gone wrong? The list is lengthy. Government propaganda and pressure from corporations, including those which own newspapers and television stations. Why didn’t we investigative journalists realise early that the corporate world, so often the target for journalists, would one day find ways of fighting back? Legal pressure, social pressure, and professional self pressure, for journalists themselves are not entirely without blame for the state of the media today.

Let’s run through these pressures one by one. Those in power who think about these things, have always been puzzled by this question: If we can so successfully manage the media in wartime, why can’t we do the same in peace time? There’s no trouble doing so in autocratic regimes. The media tells the public what the government wants it to know. End of story. Newspapers and broadcasting stations that don’t toe the line, lose their licences, or their Editors or owners go to jail. Or in extreme cases, are imprisoned or shot. This doesn’t happen in democratic countries, but there are nevertheless ways open to governments to exercise some control of the media. The first and most often used is an appeal to ‘the national interest’. So those in power, especially in the United States, have used the events of 11 September as an argument to deter journalists who dare to criticise or question their home country.

When three times in the course of July last year, The New York Times printed excerpts of a secret Pentagon plan to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration immediately accused that newspaper of reckless reporting, putting American lives at risk, and even treason. But the distinguished journalist academic, Bill Kovach, an American, says that it is precisely at times like these that journalists need to be even more diligent in the pursuit of truth. A journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day.

But there are other ways of managing the media without using the risk of international security approach. The government of India adopts a carrot-and-stick tactic. The carrot can include subsidised housing in a so-called ‘Journalist’s Colony’, a whole suburb set aside for only journalists to live in, and the land there is subsidised by the government so the journalist has very cheap housing. A government-paid trip abroad. A seat on important government or semi-government committees, and even a posting as an Ambassador. As The Pioneer newspaper of New Delhi wrote recently, ‘With rewards like these, who wants to antagonise the government?’ Those who do antagonise the government soon find out what the stick involves. The online TV investigative program, Tehelka.com, revealed, by using hidden cameras, that several senior government politicians, including the Minister of Defence, were prepared to take large bribes from a Tehelka reporter posing as a Defence contractor. Tehelka and staff were quickly subjected, once they’d put this on the website, to a series of raids by the Income Tax authorities, in a move deliberately calculated to terrorise the journalists and their financiers into silence.

The writings of The Kashmiri Times journalist, Ithtakar Jalani displeased the government, so he soon found himself charged with dealing in pornography. The evidence? The police said that when they seized and examined his laptop to see where the stories came from, they found incoming ‘spam’ emails from professional pornographers offering Jalani their services.

Now the battle between governments and media is not new. It’s gone on since the late 19th century when a rise in literacy created millions of new readers for newspapers and magazines, and made those in power worry whether this could cost them control of the electorate. What is new and worrying is the rise of legal pressure on the media to desist from subjecting both governments and corporations to public scrutiny. The libel laws in English-speaking countries are a burden on newspapers, and a major deterrent to investigative reporting. In the United States, it is a sufficient defence for a journalist to be able to show the plaintiff is a public figure, that the journalist had no malice towards the plaintiff, and that the journalist made every effort to get his or her facts right. Elsewhere in Britain and Australia for instance, not only is this no defence, but the onus is on the journalist to prove that what he or she has written is true. Since this is often very hard to do, the awards to the politicians and other public figures are often huge, and often include an element of punitive damages.

A journalist in Melbourne wrote a column suggesting that a local magistrate was too lenient on criminals. The magistrate sued for defamation. The jury found the article was not true, but failed to say what was not true about it, and then confusingly, it found the newspaper was not inspired by malice and it was reasonable in the circumstances for the paper to have published the article. When it came time for the judge to award damages, he made much of the poor magistrate’s hurt feelings, and her loss of reputation. He awarded her compensatory damages of $210,000, but gave no details of how he’d come up with this amount, plus $25,000 punitive damages, again no details, and $11,500 in interest, with no calculations provided. That made a total windfall to the magistrate, all tax free, of $246,500. As the Editor of the newspaper pointed out, ‘If a man were to have his reproductive organ chopped off in a workplace accident, the maximum damages he could receive would be $75,000. And,’ said the Editor, ‘given the choice, reproductive organ or reputation, I know which I’d prefer to lose.’

High defamation damages have a knock-on effect in the way they inhibited investigative reporting. There’s an organistion in Washington, D.C., called the Center of Public Integrity, of which more later. Financed by charitable donations, its aim is to call public bodies to book. It produces each Presidential election time, a book called ‘The Buying of the Presidency’, which lists all donors to the candidate’s campaign, and shows what each donor hopes, expects, to receive in return. It was the Center which revealed for example, that big donors to the Clinton campaign were offered in return a weekend stay as guests in the White House. The Center work is at the cutting edge of journalism, but it’s threatened not just by defamation actions brought against it and the cost of defending them, even if the actions have no merit and will eventually be thrown out of court, but by the cost of insuring against all this. This is because American insurance companies have a rule that if the insured media organisation has three libel actions pending against it, irrespective of the merit of those actions, its insurance policy becomes void. Without defamation insurance, the Center cannot risk continuing to function, and its insurance company has already paid out over $1-million in legal fees defending one case which its lawyers say will eventually be thrown out of court.

American lawyers of course know the three-libel-writs-and-you’re-out rule; if they want to stop a story, one of the first things they do is to see how many writs a media organisation has outstanding, and if it’s two, they file a third one themselves, knowing that frivolous or not, it will effectively shut down the story. Dangers lurk around every corner for the Center. Two freelance writers approached it with an outline of an important story. The Center hired them, but eventually rejected their story because of problems over documentation and reliability. The freelancers took the story elsewhere, and it was eventually published. The people named in the story sued; sued the freelance writers for defamation, but they also joined the Center, which had rejected their story, in the action, claiming the Center had aided and abetted the libel.

American law firms, always keen to push the law to the limits to deter investigative journalism, have come up with new ploys that many consider even more effective than an action for defamation. They advertise, offering corporations and individuals, pre-emptive strikes against troublesome media. Their advice is along these lines: ‘When you learn that journalists are making inquiries about you, or when journalists approach you, don’t wait until the news is published or broadcast and then sue for defamation, the damage is already done. Hit back immediately, and stop the item before it’s published. We know ways of doing this.’ The ways include examining the financial structure of the media organisation to see if pressure can be applied through a parent or associated company; analysing the advertising revenue of the company to see if a major advertiser can be persuaded to apply pressure; and compiling a dossier on the personal background of the investigative reporter to see if he or she can be intimidated into dropping the story.

Well, we’ve done government pressure, pressure from corporations, legal pressure, social pressure, let’s move on to professional self pressure.

The new media technology drew attention to the cost of gathering news as distinct to the cost of producing a newspaper or a TV program. The accountants, the people who now really run the media industry, moved to slash news gathering budgets. All over the world, overseas news bureaux were closed, foreign correspondents called home. So, what’s the outlook for the future? Well not quite as gloomy as I may have made out. There are one or two encouraging signs. In the United States, which usually sets the pace in these matters, the Center for Public Integrity, which I mentioned earlier, has an offshoot, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the ICIJ, and is currently stunning the media world with its successes. Created by Charles Lewis, a disgruntled TV reporter with a little seed money from philanthropic organisations and concerned citizens, the Center specialises in looking at the finances and the behaviour of politicians running for office, particularly the Presidential campaign. The Center’s book that comes from this research, ‘The Buying of the Presidency’, are required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the lobbying and campaign donation system works, and thus to assess the level of corruption in American life.

It was the Center which broke the story about George W. Bush’s failure to find timely reports of his interest and transactions with Harken Energy. Interestingly, the Center first published these details during the Presidential election campaign, but a lazy American mainstream press failed to notice them, and it was not until 2nd July last year that The New York Times columnist, Paul Kruger mentioned them in the context of the deepening crisis in American business, that the Center’s phones started ringing, and didn’t stop for days.

The ICIJ is an attempt to move the Center’s domestic investigations onto the international level. His membership comprises 85 top-ranked journalists from around the world. It meets every two years in a different capital city to discuss projects and provide its members with a chance to help each other on international stories. It thinks big. It was the ICIJ which uncovered the cigarette smuggling operations being run by the big tobacco corporations to undermine government tobacco taxation policies. This exposure resulted in a House of Commons inquiry in Britain, and legal action against the company in other countries.

The ICIJ has recently been running on its website, an investigation into the business of war, which has exposed the companies and individuals who make enormous profits from arms dealing, providing mercenaries, bodyguards and private armies. Then there’s Reporting the World, a project run by Conflict and Peace Forum of Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, U.K. It’s spent a lot of time and effort in getting around a conference table those journalists who’ve reported major conflicts and crises in recent years, and encouraging them to criticise each other’s work in a constructive manner. More than 200 Editors, writers, producers and reporters, helped to produce a practical checklist for the reporting of conflict in the 21st century, trying to find a way of upholding the values of balance, fairness and responsibility in their coverage of international affairs.

Most of these meetings were arranged by the European Centre of the Freedom Forum, based in London. The Centre’s parent body, the Freedom Forum of Arlington, Virginia, is a non-partisan foundation, the successor to one started in 1935 by Newspaper publisher, Frank E. Gannett, with the slogan ‘A free press, free speech and free spirit for all people.’ The London Centre was a beacon for journalists of all colours, creeds and particular beliefs, united by their concern that journalism should remain more than celebrity lifestyle, trivialisation, confessions and comic book stories. Now for the irony.

Six weeks after September 11, the parent body in the United States closed the London Centre down, saying they needed the money to open a news museum in downtown Washington.

For me one of the most important achievements of the Reporting the World project was to throw back to journalists some of the responsibility for the decline in reporting standards. The British reporters, producers and editors who took part in the Reporting the World project agreed they would have to overcome this sort of self-censorship, and the constraints of consensus and inertia, and start thinking through stories for themselves, because (and this is the crunch sentence) ‘Each individual journalist carries at any one moment, an unknowable share of the responsibility for what happens next.’

So investigative journalism is not dead yet, just moribund. Let’s run through what can be done to achieve it. We have to convince news organisations that there is more to journalism than just profits and share price. Slick accountancy and cost-cutting are not going to win an editor of a proprietor a place in the history books. We need a public interest defence in all legal actions brought against the media. A journalist should be able to defend his story by showing that what it reveals is so important to the public, that everything else was irrelevant. And we can support media that does investigative journalism and stop buying and watching media that does not. We can think for ourselves, and as events going on all over the world at the moment, as the protests against the war show, we can campaign because we are not without power.

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Cry Freedom

Ron Fletcher teaches and writes outside of Boston.