Out-Law News 3 min. read
11 May 2011, 4:53 pm
The PCC has backed a complaint made by Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron MP about stories published by the newspaper late last year, some of which led to Business Secretary Vince Cable being stripped of some of his ministerial responsibilities.
The stories were based on recordings made when journalists posed as the MPs' constituents. The Telegraph reported that what the MPs had told its reporters about policy issues contradicted what they had said elsewhere in the media. The MPs secretly recorded included Cable and Michael Moore, Secretary of State for Scotland.
The paper violated the Editors' Code of Practice when it recorded the ministers, the PCC said.
"The Commission was not convinced that the public interest was such as to justify proportionately this level of subterfuge. The newspaper had provided some supporting material to establish the claim in advance that there were differences of opinion and philosophy within the Coalition government. This was, in the context of debate about politics in the UK, significant. But the Commission did not consider that it was enough to warrant the use of undercover reporters taping MPs as they went about their constituency work," the PCC ruling said.
"Clause 10 of the Code states that newspapers 'must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices'. It also makes clear that 'engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge...can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means'. The Commission has consistently ruled that so-called ‘fishing expeditions' - where newspapers employ subterfuge and use clandestine devices without sufficient justification - are unacceptable," the PCC said.
The PCC said that the newspaper had "not sought to discount" its adherence to the Editors' Code, but had reached the wrong decision in judging that recording ministers secretly was acceptable.
The Telegraph said that it had not engaged in a 'fishing expedition' but was pursuing a pre-existing story based on sources who had told it about discrepancies between the public and private views of some Liberal Democrat ministers.
"The evidence on which the newspaper was acting ... was of a general nature. The newspaper did not appear to have any specific information ... that the ministers in question had expressed private views at odds with Coalition policy. Rather, it was responding to broad assertions of party-wide disquiet, which perhaps could have been reported on an unattributed basis," the PCC ruling said.
"It did so by focussing what amounted to disproportionately intrusive attention on a number of MPs. This was demonstrated by the fact that - as the transcripts made clear - each minister had been asked to respond, in effect, to the same lines of questioning," PCC said.
The Telegraph had argued that contradictions in policy between members of the Coalition merited the publication of the stories and that a constituency was not a private forum.
"The newspaper said that its enquiry was undertaken in the public interest: it was predicated on the fact that there was "a reasonable expectation that some legitimate public interest would be served" (a factor to which the Editors' Codebook made reference), based on information received from multiple sources. Visiting constituency surgeries was the only way to do so without disproportionate effort," the Telegraph had argued, the PCC ruling said.
The Telegraph could have justified its publication of secret recordings if it had proven that it held enough evidence to support its belief that there were differences of opinion on policy within the Coalition before taking the decision to send reporters to the constituency surgeries, the PCC said.
MPs could only be accountable for what they had said in public, the Liberal Democrats had argued.
The PCC said that there was public interest in what Vince Cable had said regarding News Corporation's bid for BSkyB. Cable told the undercover reporters that he had "declared war on Mr Murdoch" who is the owner of News Corporation. He was later removed from the decision-making process for the bid.
The way the Telegraph approached the Cable story meant it had not justified secretly recording him, the PCC said.
"There had been no suggestion that the intention of the newspaper had been to explore how he had been handling the bid (it made clear in its coverage that Mr Cable had spoken "despite not being asked about the issue"), and the newspaper itself had chosen not to make it a focus of its first day's coverage. The test for the Commission was whether there were grounds in the first place to justify the subterfuge: the Cable disclosures about Sky were not relevant to that," the PCC said.
The press watchdog said it would issue further guidance on the subject of subterfuge "with a view to ensuring high standards across the industry," the PCC ruling said.
The Telegraph published the PCC's adjudication in full on page four of the paper, and online, on Tuesday.
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