Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Joshua Rozenberg, Professor Steven Barnett, and Professor Brian Cathcart—Oral evidence
(QQ 119–161)
people’s properties. We have to keep these things in perspective when talking about
commercial survival and profitability.
Professor Cathcart: I endorse entirely what Steve says. I think the idea of offering a
waiver, as it were, on what are essentially other people’s rights to privacy in order to sustain
the newspaper industry would be very hard to sustain.
Q124 Paul Farrelly: Steven, in your overview of evidence you say, “Press
standards and intrusion have been a problem for at least 30 years.” That might neatly date it
back to the involvement of Rupert Murdoch in the British press. Would you point that
finger, along with the impact of the increasing competitiveness of the market?
Professor Barnett: I have had arguments with my colleagues about this. It is very
interesting; it comes back to the old dichotomy between, taking sociological views, structure
and agency. Is it a structural issue—in other words, because of the levels of competition—
that individual journalists have been driven to a point where they have to get stories in order
to sell newspapers; and/or to what extent can you say that there is an individual owner or
proprietor who encourages, or at worst allows and facilitates the kinds of stories or
practices that produce the excesses we have seen? I have read virtually every biography of
Rupert Murdoch—I even met him when I went with the Lords select committee to
Washington—and I take on board everything that is said about his ability and willingness to
fund journalism, but it is fair to say that he has not done very many favours, in particular at
the lower end of the newspaper market, the tabloid end, in terms of the kind of practices
that are allowed and encouraged within his newspapers. I am very reluctant to point the
finger at individuals but if you read the Murdoch biographies, including those which are very
flattering about his impact on journalism, it is perfectly clear that his philosophy is much less
about investigative or watch-dog journalism than about sensationalism and prurience.
Q125 Paul Farrelly: Can I help stiffen your finger? When the Culture, Media and
Sport Committee did their report on Press Standards, Privacy and Libel, the cry of the
tabloid press about the McCanns was that this was very much a one-off, and yet we were
able to cite the case of two newspapers that felt compelled, no doubt for their own
competitive reasons, to identify where the daughter of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who
raped her, was trying to rebuild her life in a new village. The reporters from those
publications were called, “Satan’s reporters” by the rest of the European tabloid press, and
those two newspapers were The Sun and the Daily Mail. Do you think that there might be
more than one culprit?
Professor Barnett: In terms of the decline in press standards? Is there more than
one culprit? Let us put it this way: you can point to the McCanns and what happened with
the Express newspapers. There we have at least three culprits. The fact is, these practices
would not happen unless they were at the very least quietly allowed by those who own the
newspapers and those who run them. On that basis, I do not think competition alone can
be the answer. Ultimately I think that owners have to bear responsibility.
Q126 Paul Farrelly: Brian, I think it was back in 2008 you wrote a seminal article
in the New Statesman entitled, “How the press tried to destroy the McCanns”, and you have
just recently written a very good, long piece in the Financial Times about the Christopher
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