This guest post is written by Paul Gibbons, aka FoI Man.
Today (Monday 20th February), a group of us are formally launching a new campaign. As the title of this post suggests, we are campaigning to #saveFOI.
This week sees the beginning of the long heralded post-legislative scrutiny of Freedom of Information promised by the Coalition Government last year. On Tuesday morning, the first witnesses, including the head of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, Maurice Frankel, will be appearing before the Justice Select Committee.
Last week the Committee published the written evidence that it has received. What is striking about this evidence is how many public authorities have called for restrictive amendments to the Freedom of Information Act. Some have called for charging to be introduced. Some have suggested that the cost limit for answering requests should be brought down, so that more demanding requests can be refused. Others have even suggested bringing in whole new exemptions for information that they hold.
This comes hot on the heels of comments from the outgoing Cabinet Secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell who has been openly critical of the Information Commissioner’s decisions in respect of Cabinet minutes. Others will be aware that our former Prime Minister Tony Blair considered himself a “nincompoop” for introducing FOI. There have been plenty of others queuing up in recent months to add their voices of complaint to the chorus of disapproval of this legislation, only 7 years after it came into force.
It is hard to think of another requirement on public bodies that attracts such venom and open hostility. And these views are diametrically opposed to the views of most people outside the public sector who welcome this important tool for holding public authorities to account.
Even some inside Government are suspicious of the motives of the Act’s government critics. The Minister responsible for FOI in the Ministry of Justice, Lord McNally, commented in a recent House of Lords debate that:
“…when Prime Ministers and mandarins object, this Act might actually be doing something that it was intended to do.”
And yesterday, writing in the Observer, the Information Commissioner himself made it quite clear where he stands. He dismissed Lord O’Donnell’s criticisms, and dispensed with suggestions from universities that they need a whole new exemption for research data.
Nevertheless, the mood music suggests that there is a desire to contain this young legislative upstart. Some of us even inside the public sector feel very strongly that to do so would be a backwards step. Yes, some individuals abuse the right to access information. Some requests are expensive to answer. It can feel personal when a request affects your work. But the overall benefits, whilst difficult to quantify in hard numbers, far outweigh the problems.
It has forced public authorities to open up in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. It has allowed groups from protesters against library closures to disability rights campaigners to make their case to Government on something approaching an equal footing. It has exposed unfairness and inequality in our country. I believe it is starting to make an impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of some public authorities. In short, it makes the UK a fairer country to live in.
And the UK doesn’t exist in isolation. Countries across the globe are adopting FOI legislation. As Nigeria and the Philippines debate the opening up of their governments, is it right that the UK can be considering reducing the rights of its citizens?
So we are standing up to make the case for FOI this year. And we want as many people as possible to join us. So please take a look at our campaign website and consider how you can help us to #saveFOI.
Paul Gibbons is creator of the FOI Man blog and is @foimanUK on Twitter.
Cross-post: Press ‘omerta’ – How newspapers’ failure to report the phone hacking scandal exposed the limitations of media accountability
Cross-posted on the Media Standards Trust blog, by Daniel Bennett and Judith Townend
Tom Watson MP grabbed headlines last November when he accused James Murdoch of being a “mafia boss” and operating a code of silence, but he wasn’t the first to use the “media omerta” analogy in the phone hacking scandal.
The media’s treatment of developments had been markedly selective. Curiously, it was not just the News International titles that avoided certain avenues of inquiry, following The Guardian’s 2009 revelation of widespread voicemail interception.
In a chapter of a new book about phone hacking we examine Oborne and Rusbridger’s assertions that the press significantly under-reported the phone hacking scandal – a news story which would eventually lead to the demise of the News of the World, several high profile resignations and the ongoing Leveson Inquiry.
Despite significant revelations in July 2009 about the possible extent of phone hacking at the News of the World, coverage of the issue in the press was minimal. Exempting The Guardian and The Observer, a trawl of the articles published in the UK’s major national press titles between 10 June 2006 and 10 November 2011 reveals a failure to report the phone hacking scandal in a sustained and systematic manner.
As shown in our graphs here, there are distinctive patterns in levels of coverage and angles chosen by different national newspaper titles. Coverage only picked up after an investigation by the New York Times at the end of 2010 and the revelations of July 2011.
The story warranted very little newsprint before the major developments in 2011. Whereas The Guardian had written 237 articles by the end of 2010, The Independent had 83, the Daily Telegraph 46, and The Times 43. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tabloids gave the story barely minimal coverage. By the close of 2010, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday had written 38 articles, The Sun 17, and the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror a mere 11 [more on methodology here].
At various times between 2006 and 2011, aspects of the phone hacking story were simply not reported by British journalists. In the words of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, they were apparently ‘blinded’ to ‘the significance of the issue’.
In our chapter we look deeper into the ways media covered the story. We argue that explanations for the non-reporting of the phone hacking scandal need to delve beyond simplistic, if valid, assertions of industry cover-up.
To understand why the majority of national newspapers didn’t regard phone hacking as newsworthy, it is necessary to unpick a tangled web of contributing factors.
We explore competing professional, political and commercial interests; the failure of other organisations – particularly the Metropolitan Police – to investigate the matter thoroughly; and the intimidating power of News International.
On this occasion, a large part of the media failed to deem its own industry’s scandal ‘newsworthy’ enough to warrant proper attention, which has ramifications far beyond the phone hacking scandal.
The inclination for journalists not to regard a scandal within their own industry as ‘newsworthy’ is hardly surprising, but other stories might also be suppressed for a similar combination of professional, political and commercial interests – a fact that ought to be considered by Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry and other bodies considering the question of press regulation.
The vigour of journalism and healthy democratic debate is not merely dependent on the effective regulation of what is reported, it is also dependent on ensuring that harmful illegal activity is regarded as sufficiently ‘newsworthy’ to be investigated and reported.
A new system of regulation should not only end the abuse of self-regulation by the News of the World, it should also consider whether newspapers ought to be independently held to account for their editorial decisions regarding ‘newsworthiness’.
Our full chapter is available on the Social Science Research Network here. It is an extract from The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair (Arima 2012). The book was launched at an event in London on Tuesday 7 February.
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