Further to my posting about Ipso’s ruling on the “Queen backs Brexit” headline, I can’t let the Radio 4 interview with the Sun’s editor, Tony Gallagher, pass without comment.
Not only did the Today programme’s Mishal Husain fail to land a glove on him, she didn’t even throw a punch.
It is rare to get a Sun editor in front of a microphone and, given that it involved a negative ruling by the press regulator, he should have been tested with some sharp questioning.
Yet he was allowed to get away with a paradoxical argument in which he both criticised Ipso for its ruling and praised Ipso for its existence. Why wasn’t he properly challenged on that contradiction?
Was it in the spirit of the system of self-regulation to publish Ipso’s finding and yet assert that the ruling was wrong?
He also said at one point that the incident was an example of self-regulation working. Surely, given the context, that assertion required further explanation?
Husain appeared to lack a proper background briefing because it was widely speculated soon after the story was published that the source for the Sun’s story may well have been the paper’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch?
Gallagher should have been asked about that possibility, even if his answer could have been predicted.
There were other questions that were not asked. What was the Sun’s (and Gallagher’s, and Murdoch’s) position on Brexit?
Would the Sun have published a page 1 lead if anonymous sources had leaked to the paper’s reporter that the Queen backs Remain?
Instead, the central matter of the Queen-Brexit story was abandoned too quickly in favour of asking about the previous Ipso ruling against the Sun, over the story headlined “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis”.
Fair enough, but in answering the point Gallagher mentioned that the Sun had not had as many Ipso rulings against it as certain other national papers.
Did the interviewer not think to ask which that might be (the Daily Telegraph, in fact, if surprisingly)?
Then she wandered off further from the point by raising the conviction of Gallagher’s predecessor, David Dinsmore, under the sexual offences act for running a pixellated photograph of a girl who had been sexually molested.
Leaving aside the fact that it had nothing to do with Gallagher, a point he made, it was clear that Dinsmore had been found guilty of a technical breach of the act. The Sun had gone to great lengths to conceal the girl’s identity, as the judge accepted.
And there the interview ended. An opportunity to hold a Sun editor to account and to reveal the Sun’s EU stance had been missed.
Gallagher hardly broke sweat as he sat in the BBC’s radio car. Husain, I am sorry to say, should have done better.
