Media Matters

Owning a tabloid newspaper has become a bit more expensive recently thanks to Max Mosley, Robert Murat, the McCanns and a few lesser-known individuals.

What's the link between them? Apart from the obvious one — they've all won damages from newspapers for untrue or partially untrue articles written about them — it's that they've been victims of one of the worst parts of the old tabloid journalism paradigm: "Never mind the facts, give us the story."

Put simply, the urge to make the story fit the hoary old template - whether it be "Boss has sex in some kinky way" or "Bad parents responsible for child's death" — was allowed to twist the facts (or lack of them) so they appeared to fit the template better than they actually did.

So Max Mosley HAD to be having Nazi sex because his dad was a fascist. And the Murat had to be prime suspect because the police were investigating him and he was a single middle-aged man — surely he had to be paedophile didn't he? Except, of course, he didn't and, as far as we know, isn't. Of course in his as being made an official suspect didn’t help. But if it had happened in this country the papers would have been a bit more circumspect. But somehow because it was all abroad it was ok to go wild with speculation.

Not showing the proper restraint is what's cost papers so dear financially at a time of increasing costs and decreasing revenues.

More importantly it's cost them in terms of their reputational assets too. How many readers will believe the next exposé so readily? How many will buy another paper? Why should they keep buying papers at all?

Newspaper owners and editors may well see cases like these as one of the costs to factor into a cost-benefit equation (cost versus extra cover and ad revenue) when deciding whether to run an incomplete story as if it's 100% fact, but if they simply see it on that short-term basis they stand to keep losing on all fronts, including risking triggering tighter regulation of the Press.

The Max Mosley story was a particularly bad example. They had "Boss in orgy with five prostitutes" Why did they have to gild the lily badly with the Nazi element? Yes, it would have been a better story, but couldn't they see that it has to be water-tight (as Roy Greenslade rightly points out) — so checking what was said would have been a good idea? Surely they must have expected Mosley to be particularly sensitive to that allegation?

Worse, all the papers which rely on reporting what the public is interested in (rather than that which is genuinely in the public interest) have announced today that this is a bad day for press freedom and the ability to do investigative journalism. What absolute tosh!

Sure, their ability to do what they do will now be curbed, but it has nothing to do with those things we should know and everything to do with what they believe sells more paper.

Purely coincidentally, last night I was watching a repeat of a Charles Wheeler profile of JFK. In it he asked Walter Cronkite why the press didn’t report what they knew about JFK’s philandering. The answer was that they worked by a rule of thumb — did it affect his job performance? If it didn’t it wasn’t a fair matter of public interest.

That distinction seems about right to me.

Labels: journalism, Max Mosley, McCanns, public interest, Robert Murat, settlements

# posted by Unknown @ 7:45 pm