Tuesday, January 11, 2011 

Richard Desmond and the PCC: still not a fork in the road.

Richard Desmond has then followed through on his threat to cease the funding of the Press Standards Board of Finance, the body that independently (snigger) subsidises the running costs of the Press Complaints Commission. Unlike the last time he did so, the PCC has stated that it will immediately cease to exercise regulatory oversight over the titles Desmond's Northern and Shell company publishes, which as well as the Express and Star also includes OK! and another couple of celebrity focused magazines.

While it's still difficult to know what Desmond's exact motivation is for withholding funding, especially as Northern and Shell have refused to comment on the news, it's clear he was informed of the consequences of his actions this time round. Almost certainly recommended as a result of Desmond's previous non-payment, the PCC adopted a policy of excluding publishers that refused to pay their dues, although only as a last resort. PressBoF plainly made this apparent in response to the initial indication from Northern and Shell that they would no longer be funding the PCC, ostensibly according to Roy Greenslade as it "no longer suited Desmond's business needs", and it's equally clear that despite this PressBoF had next to no expectation that he would change his mind. Quite whether he anticipated that both bodies would make their disapproval so apparent in their press releases, as well as bring further attention to his first period of not funding the body is less certain. Desmond didn't however get where he is without being utterly shameless, even if he has a remarkably thin skin, so the criticism seems unlikely to have much of an effect.

In one sense at least it seems to be an incredibly short-sighted action on the part of Desmond. While it's long been apparent that his publications with the possible exception of the Express regard their own readers with utter contempt, the PCC doubtless acted as a helpful shield when it came to those with some sort of clout behind them. Not all celebrities or those with the resources will instantly resort to m'learned friends when they feel they've had their privacy invaded or been libelled, instead at least giving the PCC a whirl to begin with. With that avenue now denied to them, the number of suits or claims against Desmond's papers is only going to increase. The PCC is also useful when it comes to negotiating the wording and placement of retractions and apologies, so even if lawyers now essentially take up the role PCC staff would have formerly played, the bill for their work is bound to be exponentially larger than the £150,000 to £200,000 a year it's estimated Desmond is refusing to stump up.

One conclusion to be drawn is that while any paper and proprietor is concerned about libelling the rich and famous, it's far more irksome and embarrassing when any pleb can complain about an inaccurate story and essentially force the newspaper to admit just how badly they got it wrong. The likes of the Star and OK! take this to a whole different level: they don't just show a complete lack of care in the composition of their articles, they actively lie and mislead on their front pages with the aim of drawing in readers. The number of times the Star and OK! have run headlines or blurbs on their front pages which bear only the slightest resemblance with the actual articles inside simply can't be counted as it happens on almost a daily (or weekly) basis, on occasion with the celebrities themselves complicit. One such example was Jordan appearing on the front page of OK! in tears at Peter Andre's dalliance with another woman, only for it to be revealed inside that the person involved happened to made out of plastic. On more than five occasions over the past few years this exact practice has been complained about to the PCC, all resolved without adjudication. It was presumably only a matter of time before either a reader took it to the board to make a judgement on or for the PCC independently to make clear that they weren't going to tolerate many more complaints on the same matter.

Just how into disrepute Desmond's decision will bring the PCC and the wider press as a whole is uncertain. No one with any real knowledge of the PCC regards it as either anything approaching independent or an effective regulator, despite its increasing attempts to both make itself more relevant and fight back against those critical of it. It also seems unlikely, for now at least, that any other publisher will follow suit. The obvious candidates would be Trinity Mirror or the Independent (excepting the Guardian making a further protest over the PCC's hopeless investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World), and that would probably be as a result of pleading poverty rather than any real problem with the PCC's actual role. Key will be the response from politicians, some of whom have long been critical of self-regulation and will see this quite rightly as an opportunity to show how the media policing itself, despite being allowed to do so for so long, has abjectly failed. No one however either has a viable alternative to the PCC, or the stomach to get into a fight with the media over it, especially as everyone regards Desmond as a rogue rather than someone to model; one thing this isn't is a repeat of Wapping. This time round Desmond has chosen his fight carefully: the only real losers will be the poor bastards who continue to buy his papers. It's up to everyone else to try to convince them to stop doing just that.

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1/11/2011 10:54:00 pm | |

Tuesday, December 14, 2010 

Richard Desmond and a "fork in the road".

(Hat-tip to Anton.)

The saying goes that you can't keep a good man down. With Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star, the Television X softcore subscription TV channels and since the summer, Channel 5, it's more that effluent tends to float. Last July, it seemed that Desmond's apparent inexorable rise might finally be checked, and all as a result of his own insecurity and vanity. He had brought what turned out to be a disastrous libel action against Tom Bower, the unauthorised biographer, for claiming in his book on the downfall of Conrad Black that the Canadian media tycoon had "ground him [Desmond] into the dust". Integral to the case was that Desmond had played the role of a newspaper owner of the old school, interfering directly in the editorial process, or dropping the most blatant of hints to his journalists as to what they should write, including on his business rivals and enemies. Bower's win seemed to open the door to the publishing of his own biography on Desmond, titled Rogue Trader.

Almost a year and six months on, Rogue Trader is still without a publisher. Desmond, meanwhile, succeeded in purchasing Channel 5 with barely a squeak of protest, not even from the usual likes of Private Eye, and has started the same process he carried out at the Express and Star: sacking dozens of employees while cutting costs to the bone, with the focus to be on the pumping out of celebrity obsessed content, cheaply produced and piled high. Desmond, who has long cited Rupert Murdoch as the person he would most like to emulate, has gone even further than his idol in wholly owning a terrestrial British television channel. He even supposedly recently offered Murdoch a billion for News International, something the Australian-American regarded as a good price, even if he had no intention off selling.

It's not therefore much of a surprise, flush with cash as he is, that Desmond is once again objecting to paying the annual fee to the Press Standards Board of Finance, the body that funds the Press Complaints Commission, having previously spent nearly two years refusing to pay the bill, supposedly as a protest against the editor of the Daily Express having to leave the board after the payout to the McCanns. Whether this is just the usual prevarication from a businessman who objects to any variety of oversight concerning his dealings, or signals that the end of his patience has been reached with the frequency with which the Daily Star especially has been referred to the commission is not entirely clear, although if it was the latter it certainly wouldn't be a shock.

While it would certainly be a stretch to describe the Star as ever being a newspaper of repute, increasingly over the past few years it's became little more than a daily version of OK!, Desmond's downmarket version of Hello! The front page lead article is invariably more inaccurate than it is accurate; today's cover, speculating on Katie Price being pregnant for the umpteenth time is for instance completely false. When the cover hasn't been dedicated to the entire industry that seems to follow the antics of a couple of permatanned half-wits, it's been given over to even more inflammatory material, such as this story from earlier in the year on "Muslim-only" toilets in a shopping centre in Rochdale, according to the paper funded by the local council. The only problem was that they weren't Muslim-only, as anyone could use them, and they weren't put in place with the use of public money. The Star, without apologising, was ordered to recognise these facts in a clarification on page two, after the Exclarotive blogger complained to the PCC. Numerous other recent examples of the Star and Express either deliberately misleading their readers, displaying a wholesale lack of normal journalistic ethics or just a complete lack of care abound.

Should Desmond carry through his threat to withdraw funding, it's not immediately clear whether or not the PCC would just continue as it did previously: still taking complaints against the papers, simply without the ability to force them to publish adjudications or corrections. Far more serious would be if he actively took the papers out of the PCC's oversight, something which as Roy Greenslade explains has only happened previously once. Even then, it's hard to see this as being the "fork in the road" or the threat to press freedom some have already put it down as; rather, as all the other newspaper groups are dedicated to keeping up the pretence of self-regulation, almost nothing would change. Any blame would be put purely on Desmond continuing to operate as a rogue proprietor, with doubtless the other owners and editors privately trying to persuade him to rejoin. We've already seen recently how terrified government ministers are when they start to even think of taking on the likes of News International; the idea that a form of state regulation would be imposed now in the social networking age, especially when David Cameron is just as hand in glove with the Sun as New Labour ever was, is unthinkable.

More pertinently, the PCC always has been and remains a cartel rather than anything approaching an active and concerned regulator, as even a glance at their piss-poor investigations into the phone-hacking at the News of the World demonstrates. The PCC's code is hardly set in stone, and changes to it are more than possible. Extra allowances could be made for publications that dedicate themselves almost solely to the discussion of celebrities, where the facts are far more difficult to establish and where rumours are actively encouraged by the stars themselves, so often complicit in much of the content printed about them. After all, how can they possibly operate under such onerous restrictions when gossip blogs, often operated from America, only answerable to their courts can put up almost anything they like? We should never underestimate the ability of organisations under apparent terminal pressure to adapt, regardless of how their actions appear to anyone outside the industry. As all the polling undertaken has shown, trust has never been lower in the tabloid press. The readers almost expect to be lied to; why should a regulator prevent that from happening when it's almost what they want?

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12/14/2010 10:18:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 23, 2009 

The rise and fall of Richard Desmond.

In the world of catastrophic legal cases, Richard Desmond's humiliation in the High Court must rank up there amongst the very top. Last year's disaster for the News of the World at the hands of Max Mosley seems to be the only really apposite comparison, but the key difference is that was a case brought by Mosley; here Desmond has brought the entire thing upon himself.

Quite why Desmond brought what was such a trivial claim for libel against Tom Bower remains unclear. Bower's QC, Ronald Thwaites, who has somewhat acquitted himself after his disgraceful performance representing the Met at the Jean Charles de Menezes health and safety prosecution, said in court that the real reason was because Desmond's ego couldn't allow him to described as a wimp, "ground into the dust" by Black, even if it was in a book that was unlikely to be read by many in a passage that was hardly remarkable. Others however believe the real reason was to ensure that Bower never had a chance of publishing a supposedly finished manuscript on Desmond himself, provisionally titled Rogue Trader. If it's as damning as Bower's other works, and when you have such a target it's hardly likely not to be, Desmond has far more to fear from that than from claims that Conrad Black had "ground him into the dust".

Surely the only thing that ensured Desmond had anything approaching a chance of victory was our ridiculous and damaging libel laws, where the defendant has to prove their case rather than the accuser theirs. Everyone in the media world knows how Desmond operates: he is a bully, a born liar and someone who surrounds himself only with sycophants and those he has total trust in. Only someone with a personality like Desmond, where the slightest insult can result in a feud lasting for years, could be thin-skinned enough to take offence at being described as a pornographer. Desmond made his money in softcore pornographic magazines, having obtained the licence to publish Penthouse in the UK in 1983. From there he built an empire thanks to his diversifying into most of the more acceptable fetishes, with among his more famous titles the likes of Asian Babes and Skin and Wriggly. This led inevitably to satellite and cable channels broadcasting much the same content, although his channels show the softcore variants of the produced smut; whether he actually owns the companies which produce the hardcore versions is unclear.

For a man who yearns for respectability and to take his rightful place amongst the establishment, owning wank rags and jazz channels is usually a no-no. While decidedly last century, one way to acquire that sort of status is to purchase a newspaper, and while the Daily Star is hardly what most would describe as an educational read, and the Daily Express has been in decline for half a century, his purchase of both ensured that he had finally entered the world of not just business but also political power. Some of course at the time questioned whether such a man should own a newspaper which used to be the biggest seller in the world; happily, a donation by Desmond of £100,000 to the Labour party ensured that no obstacles were placed in his way.

Desmond has since behaved exactly as you would expect a man of his stature to: he has made hundreds of journalists redundant from both papers, turned them even more than they already were into celebrity rags with a side-serving of news, the majority of which is inflammatory and bordering on the openly racist, and paid himself vast sums of money in the process, anything up to £50m a year.

Most modern proprietors of newspapers, like Desmond, deny that they would ever influence anything which their employees write, let alone tell them what to. In court, Desmond's QC Ian Winter said that it was "difficult to think of a more defamatory allegation to make". Most proprietors of course don't have to tell their journalists what to write, for the simple fact that they already know how they think, what their interests are and how to defend them, as Rupert Murdoch's editors do, although Murdoch at least admits that the Sun and News of the World's editorial line is directly influenced by him. Desmond, while also using that kind of influence in the newsroom, is both more brutal and direct. David Hellier, a former media editor on the Sunday Express, described how Desmond was seen in the newsroom "virtually every day between five and seven o'clock" and would regularly demand editorial changes. Any casual reader of Private Eye will have noted down the years Desmond's regular appearances in the Street of Shame, often ordering journalists around and insulting them on their appearance. One more memorable episode was when Desmond apparently told Express editor Peter Hill that his current front page was "fucking shit". Hill, fed up with Desmond's constant interference, finally lost his temper and left, leaving the deputy to redo the paper. Most notoriously, Desmond punched the Express's then night editor, Ted Young, in the stomach after his failure to run an article on the death of an obscure 60's musician. Desmond settled with Young the day before the case was due to go to an industrial tribunal for a six figure sum. Young was prevented from giving evidence in the High Court by Justice Eady, but thankfully his testimony was not needed.

Perhaps the most damning evidence however was given by the person who wrote the offending article which led Black to sue Desmond and consequently "ground him into the dust". Anil Bhoyrul, one of the former Mirror journalists involved in the Viglen shares debacle which was another stain on Piers Morgan's character, wrote the "Media Uncovered" column in the Sunday Express between 2001 and 2003 under the pseudonym Frank Daly. Despite supposedly being a witness for Desmond, Bhoyrul made clear that he was directly influenced in what he wrote by what Desmond "liked and disliked", which was made clear to him by the editor Martin Townsend in phone calls on a Tuesday. Bhoyrul boasted of how he "got a pretty good feel for who, you know, to be positive about and who to be negative about. The impression I got over time was that Conrad Black and Richard Desmond were not the best of friends." Bhoyrul was hardly exaggerating: he wrote around 27 hostile pieces about Black, and attacked the owner of the Independent, Tony O'Reilly, in much the same fashion when Desmond was in dispute with him.

Then there was just the sort of in the public domain knowledge which made Desmond look like an idiot. Three days after Desmond had threatened a business contact down the phone, telling him "[he'd] be the worst fucking enemy you'll ever have", the Sunday Express ran a defamatory article about the contact and his hedge fund, Pentagon Capital Management. When Desmond had to settle the libel claim from Pentagon, a statement was read out in open court that "Mr Desmond accepts that it was his comments in the presence of Sunday Express journalists that prompted the Sunday Express to publish the article." Yet Desmond denied when questioned by Thwaites that he had complained to the editor about his predicament, or in front of the journalists. Unless Desmond was committing perjury, he presumably only agreed to that statement in the libel settlement to get it over with.

Whether in the long run much will come of Desmond's humiliation, apart from the possible publication of Bower's biography, is difficult to tell. Undoubtedly his enemies at the Mail will tomorrow have a field day, as will the others that despise Desmond, but readers of his own papers would never know that he had even lost his claim. The article in the Express doesn't so much as mention it, merely setting out that Desmond "set the record straight", while even more mindboggling is his claim to that it was "worth it to stand up in court". Certainly, the estimated costs of the action, £1.25m, is only about a week's wages to Desmond, but to someone with his sensitivity to criticism and determination to be seen as a honest, generous, philanthropic businessman, he must be secretly devastated. Most damaging to Desmond though is certainly Roy Greenslade's conclusion that he is an even worse newspaper owner than Robert Maxwell was. Greenslade should know: he was Mirror editor under Maxwell (His book, Press Gang, is also a fine post-war history of the British press). Although Desmond has clearly not defrauded the Express in the way which Maxwell did Mirror group, he has stripped it of assets in a similar fashion. The Guardian describes how while Greenslade was giving his evidence, Desmond gripped the table in front of him tightly, while his wife asked whether he was OK. That might yet be nothing on what he does tomorrow when the papers quote Greenslade in an approving fashion.

(Other sources for this apart from the links include the latest Private Eye, 1241, and its report on the trial on page 9.)

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7/23/2009 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 

More on the Shannon snobbery, Allison Pearson's despicable hypocrisy and the McCanns' legal action.

Roy Greenslade expands at length on why the Shannon Matthews case hasn't attracted the same amount of coverage as the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and comes to the same conclusion as I did; that social class is overarching the whole thing.

Reading Greenslade's analysis and the article he links to in the Sindy, you realise just what Shannon's parents are up against. I didn't know that her mother, Karen, has six other children with five of them from different fathers. This is because such facts don't make any difference, or shouldn't make any difference, and haven't been featured in any of the coverage I've read. Just knowing that, it instantly becomes apparent why the Daily Mail for example hasn't gone overboard with its coverage: such a "lifestyle" as that apparently lived by the mother offends against every single sensibility in the Mail handbook. As Nick Davies and Private Eye in the past have outlined, even if you're respectable but black you're unlikely to get anything like the hearing you would if you were white, with numerous sources alleging that stories that were all ready to go were spiked at the last minute because they about those of the "dusky hue". You can imagine the casual prejudice which therefore is informing their coverage of Shannon's disappearance; why do "our people" care about a average-looking little girl unlucky enough to be born to an overweight, promiscuous mother, doubtless bleeding the state for all it's worth?

Unlike some of the posts I write here, this is one that is coming out more as a stream of conciousness. I was going to end the above paragraph with a quote from the Daily Mail columnist Allison Pearson, where she wrote of the McCanns "this kind of thing doesn't usually happen to people like us". She might as well have added, nor is it supposed to. After all, the McCanns were the Daily Mail dream family, except for perhaps Kate McCann working instead of staying at home to look after the children. They hadn't done anything wrong, or weren't a family where what happened to their daughter could be either justified or deemed excusable. Searching Google to see if I could get the exact article where Pearson wrote that, I instead came across a dispatch from Pearson where she writes about Shannon's disappearance, and it's as disgraceful, hypocritical and two-faced as you could ever possibly have imagined:

Poor Shannon was already a lost child

At the time, critics claimed that if the middle-class McCanns had lived on a council estate, they would have been in trouble with the police for neglect.

So where is the outcry over the disappearance of Shannon Matthews?

...

Four hours is an eternity for a little girl to be out on a dark winter's evening. And Shannon was afraid of the dark. Why did no one walk with her or care where she was?

But Karen insists Shannon was fine and enjoys a good relationship with her current boyfriend, 22-yearold Craig.

"Only on Monday, they were having tickling fights and telly cuddles. She views him as her dad."

Oh really? In that case, why was Shannon so desperate to be reunited with her real father?

...

But allowing a passing parade of boyfriends to play tickling games with your vulnerable small girl is, at best, naïve.

We must all hope and pray that Shannon is only missing and that her disappearance is not linked to any of the substitute dads who have trooped through her brief life.

But like too many of today's kids, Shannon Matthews was already a victim of a chaotic domestic situation, inflicted by parents on their innocent children, long before she vanished into the chill February night.

Incredible, isn't it? Gobsmackingly offensive, prejudging everything without so much as the slightest insight into the case whatsoever. The reason why there has been no "outcry" is because there is nothing except in Pearson's warped head to outcry about. The McCanns were condemned in some quarters because they had left their children alone in their apartment instead of putting them into a creche while they swanned off to have dinner with their friends. In Shannon's case, what happened was that she simply didn't come home, and doubtless her mother was already deeply worried if not panicking before she raised the alarm four hours after she had left school and failed to return home. In that time she was likely phoning round her friends, asking if she was with them, or even searching herself. Pearson has been one of the McCanns' most ardent supporters, comparing their anguish to both hell and to a Kafkaesque nightmare; that she condemns Matthews' parents simply because of who they are and what she thinks they've done shows the innate snobbery, bordering on class hatred which some who profess to be journalists suffer from, and which has so chequered the coverage so far. There hasn't been an outcry against Matthews' parents; there has however been almost precisely half the coverage given to Madeleine's disappearance, almost certainly because of the attitudes of those in Fleet Street which match Pearson's.

What we saw with the disappearance of Madeleine now also seems to setting in with the disappearance of Shannon. With no real developments to report, the media instead turns to speculation, innuendo, and downright scaremongering. The Sun, which to its credit has given the most coverage to Shannon's disappearance, was already at this on Monday, asking whether Sarah's law was the answer, despite there being no evidence whatsoever that any convicted sex offender is involved in her disappearance. Today it's turned it up a further notch with this fearmongering report, which will have no doubt done nothing to set minds at rest in Dewsbury:

NEARLY 1,400 registered sex offenders live within 25 miles of Shannon Matthews’ home, The Sun can reveal.

Many are based just a five-minute drive away.

...

And the Home Office statistic showing 1,387 registered sex beasts in the area was a stark reminder of the mountain detectives must climb. A further 400 live just 30 miles away in Manchester.

In the IoS article the local rector spoke of "helplessness... not hopelessness but anger, certainly". The Sun seems to be wilfully fanning the flames rather than making any effort towards keeping the calm.

P.S. Today's Private Eye (1205) reports that the McCanns are suing Richard "Dirty" Desmond's newspapers through Carter-Fuck, and are demanding a cool £1 million from each of his four newspapers for the incessant suggestions that they might have had something to do with the disappearance of Madeleine. A couple of thoughts: firstly, hiring Carter-Fuck doesn't come cheaply, which must mean that even more of the money donated to the McCanns is going on things other than directly finding Madeleine, although seeing as so far they've spent the most on the useless Metodo 3 private investigation agency which said that "Madeleine would be home by Christmas" they might as well be pouring that down the drain too. Secondly, if they do get suitably high damages, and Desmond has already apparently offered £250,000, will all of this be put back into the fund, or will some of it instead end up lining the McCanns' own pockets? The Madeleine fund's objectives are that only if she is apparently found will anything left over be given over to charity. As that seems ever more unlikely, questions will undoubtedly be asked about will be done with any eventual surplus.

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3/05/2008 08:52:00 pm | |

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