I contended yesterday that the Daily Telegraph’s sting on Sam Allardyce was justified. There were plenty of people who disagreed with me, and who went on to lament the FA’s decision to bid the England football manager farewell.
Among them was the Times’s sports columnist, Matthew Syed, who made the most coherent argument in a piece headlined, “FA should have stood by its man.”
I’m not so interested in whether the FA was right to jettison Allardyce. For me, it’s the media ethics that matter, so I’m sticking to that.
Syed’s opening point was that what people say in private is, and should be, their own affair. More pertinently, he thought it “morally egregious” to publish a sentence or two from “a four-hour chat” during which a person has been “incited to say anything that might look bad on the front page of a newspaper.”
Allardyce felt at ease in the company of the Telegraph’s undercover reporters, Syed suggested, because they had cultivated him over a period of time.
In his view, the resulting conversation “was, when you step back from the furore, conspicuous by its blandness.” Most of it was “tittle-tattle.”
Let me stop there for a moment. While I agree that there was some frivolous material, which was neither here nor there, his references to money-making were surely serious errors of misjudgement on Allardyce’s part.
He explained how it was possible to circumvent a “ridiculous” ban (his description) on the third-party ownership of players.
And he was prepared to enrich himself beyond his £3m FA salary (plus bonuses) with a £400,000 deal to make speeches and offer advice.
These may have been private indiscretions, but his position as an FA employee in parallel with his public role as the England football manager elevated them into public significance.
Syed is totally unconvinced by that line of argument. Allardyce was critical on the third-party ownership ban and, by extension, his employers. So what?
Similarly, his readiness to make £400,000 “is not a crime” and, anyway, he told the reporters masquerading as businessmen that he would need to run it past the FA before accepting it.
But Syed overlooks how such statements would be perceived by people. Public perception of football finances is largely negative. And a relaxed attitude towards the issue would conflict with the FA’s purist stance since the Fifa corruption scandal broke.
Of course one should be able to enjoy one’s privacy. But there is a qualitative difference between the tittle-tattle about Allardyce’s views on footballing figures and matters touching on the finances of a sport awash, as the Telegraph stated today, with “almost unimaginable” sums of money.
There lies the public interest justification for the subterfuge, although I readily concede that it would be good to know more about the context. Was he induced to say things that, in ordinary circumstances, he would not?
Syed’s reference to incitement indicates that he is convinced about the reporters having groomed him to make such comments.
It is a reminder that the use of subterfuge and impersonation is always controversial, a grey area that calls for very difficult editorial judgments. Sometimes there is no other way to break a story.
Syed understands that. He wrote: “I am in favour of journalistic stings”. He then cited two examples - the Sunday Times’s cash-for-questions exposure and the News of the World’s revelation about the willingness of three Pakistan cricketers to accept bribes - as being “clearly in the public interest.”
But, in his opinion, Allardyce “did nothing wrong in anything like the same sense”. So the difference between his view and mine is entirely down to our differing interpretations of the public interest.
Every case has to be treated on its merits with a rigorous assessment of the specific details. Inevitably, this leads to disputes and it is not helpful to make comparisons.
For example, Syed compared the exposure of Allardyce to that of Max Mosley, the former head of motor racing’s governing body, the FIA, who was filmed by the News of the World in 2008 while taking part in an orgy. [Mosley subsequently won £60,000 in a privacy action against the newspaper].
But there is no equivalence between the two cases. First, Mosley was not a public figure, while Allardyce, by virtue of being the England manager, was. Second, Mosley’s activities were not related to his day job: he did not refer to the FIA.
Third, Mosley was the subject of an entirely false accusation (about the orgy having a Nazi theme) while Allardyce has not disputed the veracity of the Telegraph story.
In a short statement to reporters this morning, he acknowledged that “it was an error in judgment on my behalf”, but added: “Entrapment has won.” So I suspect he agrees whole-heartedly with Matthew Syed.
