Journalism has always had an ambivalent relationship with respectability. The noblest ambition of the press is to hold power to account on behalf of the powerless, which means behaving in a way that sustains the trust of a wide audience while sometimes upsetting those in authority. If newspapers never caused controversy they would not be doing their job properly. If they are deemed to be routinely scurrilous their authority is diminished.
Sometimes pursuit of the truth will lead journalists to deploy subterfuge. When breaching walls of official secrecy, for example, the greater good might even be served by breaking the law. But the decision to embark on that path is, or should be, felt as an acute ethical dilemma requiring examination of conscience and the highest standard of public interest.
That test was not met by Mazher Mahmood, convicted on Wednesday of perverting the course of justice in the trial of Tulisa Contostavlos – a pop star inveigled into offering to broker a drug deal by the Sun on Sunday’s star investigative reporter. Mahmood and his driver, Alan Smith, were found to have conspired in the revision of a police statement, excising information that might have helped Ms Contostavlos’s defence. (The case against her collapsed.) This is the opposite of pursuing the truth, the antithesis of decent journalism. Inevitably, questions are being raised about other convictions secured on the basis of Mahmood’s evidence and cavalier methodology. The case also invites scrutiny of police who appear to have sought prosecutions based on a standard of investigative rigour below that which they would expect of fellow officers. The glamour attached to a trial with a celebrity defendant appears to have trumped prosecutorial diligence.
Mahmood built his career as the “Fake Sheikh” of Sunday tabloid stings in the grey area between that which is in the public interest and that which interests the public. That distinction is not often interrogated enough in newsrooms when handling a “good” story, which might be a commercial judgment before it is an ethical one. In that sense, the techniques involved are a secondary to the purpose of the investigation. The Independent Press Standards Organisation makes it clear in the editors’ code of practice that misrepresentation, subterfuge and clandestine recording – Mahmood’s modus operandi – are to be shunned whenever alternative means of procuring information are possible, and permissible only in the public interest.
There are times when corruption has been uncovered that could only have been exposed by a reporter pretending to be something else. The stung party there needs little sympathy. But there is another genre of investigation that involves the reporter using a financial inducement and alcohol to pester targets into doing something sensational when there is no reason to believe they would have broken the law without provocation – a kind of aggravated entrapment. That appears to have been the scenario in the Contostavlos case and some others. In that way, Mahmood proved only that people are not perfect and can be manipulated into making bad decisions. This is not news.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this is the squandering of resources and goodwill. Proper investigative journalism is a painstaking, costly and sometimes risky business that fulfils an important function in the relationship between a democracy and its media. There is no shortage of places where Mahmood’s capabilities might have been deployed to expose real wrongdoing. Closed circles of the rich and powerful sometimes need to be penetrated by devious methods to uncover abuse. But the unwritten permission to do that is itself a source of power that is corroded when abused.
No media organisation can afford to be pious or complacent about its status as a gatekeeper of public standards. Mistrust of journalism has spread in tandem with declining faith in politics. The “mainstream media” is often now cast as an institutional cog in an elitist machine, regardless of journalism’s self-image as a check on the establishment. And while changes in technology, the way news is consumed and public attitudes make for an ever more challenging commercial environment, the underlying ethics of the trade are remarkably constant. The line between what is justifiable in the public interest and what is not rarely moves, but the penalty for crossing that line is getting higher.
