The Press Complaints Commission's subterfuge report is better than expected. I have some reservations, but let's consider the good stuff first. It has unequivocally restated that speculative mobile phone-tapping is unacceptable and, of course, illegal. Yet it also defended the use of subterfuge when demonstrably "in the public interest". Who can argue with that?
The PCC's six recommendations to ensure undercover reporting is as squeaky clean as possible are welcome. It will be interesting to see whether owners and editors comply with the suggestions that compliance with the code, and the data protection act, should be included in journalists' contracts of employment.
Similarly, its call for paper to introduce a "subterfuge protocol" for reporters is sensible, as is the demand for "rigorous audit controls for cash payments". It's difficult to imagine in these cost-cutting days that any paper, including the News of the World, should allow journalists to hand out money without justifying it.
I was also heartened by the way the PCC appears to have gone about its questioning of the News of the World. I fully expected the paper to claim that Clive Goodman's activities were a one-off. They would say that, wouldn't they? But the NoW's new editor, Colin Myler, obviously felt the PCC's inquiry was serious enough to warrant him providing lots of interesting information about the Goodman affair that casts the scandal in a new light.
Apart from confirming that Goodman's "nark", Glenn Mulcaire, was paid a retainer of £2,019 a week, Myler revealed that Goodman secretly paid him a further £12,300 over the course of 10 months. To do so, he engaged in what might be regarded as "internal subterfuge" by claiming to his bosses that he was paying a confidential source he called "Alexander" for royal stories.
This is an eyebrow-raising admission, not least because Goodman was allowed to pay more than £300 a week to a source whose identity he was not required to reveal to NoW executives for obtaining an occasional trivial story. Why did no editor query such payments? No wonder the PCC observed that "internal controls at the newspaper were clearly inadequate for the purpose of identifying the deception."
In my eight years at News International - running The Sun features department and the Sunday Times news operation - I cannot imagine any member of my staff having the licence to spend money as Goodman did. Rupert Murdoch's accounting overlords ran a very tight ship. It was the job of managing editors to question all payments and, despite money sloshing around in the form of advance expenses, no journalist could have paid out large sums to a mysterious contact on a regular basis.
Then we come to the revelation of Mulcaire's other "formal" contracted duties for the paper. Again, the PCC inquiry has cast light on some dark arts. We discover that he was carrying out "legitimate investigative work" which involved "gathering facts for stories and analysing the extent of the paper's proof before publication; confirming facts and suggesting strategies". Call me old-fashioned, but isn't that the work of professional journalists?
But there was more, much more. He also did credit status checks; Land Registry checks; directorship searches and analysis of businesses and individuals; tracing individuals from virtually no biographical details, including date of birth searches, electoral roll searches and checks through databases; county court searches and analysis of court records; surveillance; specialist crime advice; and offered professional football knowledge. Oh yes, and he verified handwriting too. It's a wonder that he had time to tap into royal mobile phones.
In other words, Mulcaire's "duties" are a form of journalistic outsourcing. Presumably, it is cheaper to pay a man with such expertise more than £100,000 a year than to hire staff journalists to do such work. And let's be honest. How often does the News of the World require a Land Registry check? How many of its kiss-and-tell stories hinge on credit status checks? And why can't staff journalists trace people? (The former Sun and Daily Mirror reporter Harry Arnold was a master at finding people with "virtually no biographical details" and didn't break the law to do so). And there is also merit in the argument of the National Union of Journalists that there are hundreds of freelances available for such work who have signed up to the editors' code of practice.
Finally, a word of criticism for the PCC for deciding to allow the former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, off the hook. Having resigned in the wake of Goodman and Mulcaire being jailed, the PCC refused to interview him. I think that was a bad mistake. Coulson is a journalist and his resignation as editor should not have insulated him from the inquiry. Surely regulators in other professions - the law, medicine, politics - would not have failed to ask a person involved in a scandal to take part into their inquiries? I can imagine the press outcry if a politician tried to escape scrutiny by standing down as a minister. It was a poor decision.
That said, this report has much to recommend it and, if papers adopt its new guidelines, it will be seen as a landmark document.
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