James Harding on Mistakes Made

By Elizabeth Culliford

In December 2007, James Harding was named the youngest ever editor of The Times. He has a First from Cambridge, speaks five languages and has worked as a speech writer to the Chief Secretary of the Cabinet in Japan. His Wikipedia page reads as a series of feet put right; all the way from St. Paul’s to the Shanghai bureau of The Times to editorship history. But on 30th May 2012 he spoke to Oxford Media Society about mistakes.

Harding was late and he was apologetic – but apologies extended only to the subject of trains. While he plainly said that the outcome of Leveson would be ‘that newspapers will have to treat people better’ and while he has previously stated that he expected much better of his paper than the reports of hacking, he is evidently not the man to go to if you want grovelling regrets about poking noses and camera lenses in too far.

He set the scene with stories of false obituaries read with surprise by the supposedly dead and of the Harcourt Interpolation - the time when a rogue compositor inserted an obscenity into the middle of a speech by a leading politician of the day and The Times had to send out telegrams to hastily recall all of the unsold editions. While these mistakes are not on the same level as the ethical misjudgements made by hackers today, his point was that newspapers are not infallible or superhuman; they make errors and always have done. Harding did not use these as excuses but as history; he seemed very aware that when the newspaper is one that Abe Lincoln described as ‘more powerful than the Mississippi’, the repercussions of those errors may be frighteningly large.

Harding quoted Lincoln; he is evidently proud of the paper and still excited by his position at its helm. This excitement is what makes Harding so impressive; at a time when other editors might be slumped at desks, worn out from giving evidence and not be so keen to come and answer bald questions from students, he travelled to whole-heartedly back ‘a boisterous press’. He gave us the headline that there is not too much investigation but not enough. Taking collective responsibility he said ‘we haven’t looked deep enough into the riots, or at what was going on inside Downing Street’. He argued that we know very little about Iraq and that we were kept in the dark about the banking mess. This man is one who believes that Britain’s press is not ‘too free’, knowing no bounds and pulling limitless skeletons out of cupboards but is not searching nearly deep enough.

As we sat noting things down he was doing reviews of his own - hands up surveys of print vs. digital media, pulling consumer information from the younger generation even as he gave the talk. He was adamant that the owners of newspapers had no say in their content, entertained by the way papers were entwined with identity – ‘The Express is awful, going downhill, writings rubbish. . .but I wouldn’t buy another, I’m an Express man, me’ – and firm about what he believed. He answered questions but then had to dash, apologising for having to go, but going back to run The Times unapologetically. 

An Audience with Lord Carter of Barnes

By Susan Yu

In the furore that surrounded the Leveson Inquiry, the past few months have shone the spotlight on the relationship between politics, the media and its regulators to the publics’ attention.

To get an insight into this complicated web, Lord Carter of Barnes, former minister for Communications, Technology & Broadcasting and Founding Chief Executive of Ofcom, came to speak at the Oxford Media Society and gave us a shrewd overview on the profit, policy and politics: balancing the public and private interest in the media and communications industries.  

‘There was a great joke doing the rounds in Downing Street’, Lord Carter enthused. ‘The Pope was on a visit to the UK and was keen to go on a trip up the River Thames. A gust of wind blew the mitre off the Pope and into the river it fell’. Tony Blair being ‘muscular and athletic, without hesitation, took off his jacket and shirt and leapt off the boat, swam to get the mitre back to the Pope’. The next day the news headline says ‘Tony Blair walks on water’. Five years later, Gordon Brown is in power and the ‘Pope makes another visit up the Thames’. Same thing happens again, the wind blows the Pope’s hat into the river. Brown, remembering what had happened before, takes off his jacket, leaps off the boat, he doesn’t dive in, ‘he walks across the water, doesn’t get wet at all, picks up the hat and walks back to the Pope’. And the next day, the newspaper headline reads ‘Gordon Brown can’t swim’.

So what does that tell you? ‘Apart from the fact that it is completely a fictitious story’ with which Lord Carter amused us, the underlying message is that sometimes the media conditions the environment within which reality is seen. And that is ‘the reason why we have a different relationship with the media unlike any other industry’. The press have the ability to play back what actually happened with a perspective. ‘People have higher expectations of the media industry,’ Lord Carter explained, because ‘they inform us, reflect our opinions back to us; shape our opinions’. Indeed, the media is a powerful tour de force that can profoundly shape our thoughts, and without tight regulations, things can get out of hand and people can and have stepped over line, as exemplified by the phone hacking employees of the Murdoch empire.

This leads us to the question, who is then responsible for refereeing the media? A fair game of football simply would not work without a referee. ‘Regulation is a critical part of any industry’. The media industry is ‘not black and white’. Indeed, ‘there are shades of grey’.

The genesis of Ofcom, the regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, started in 1997 just as the Labour party came into power. Importantly, Ofcom ‘brought broadband to the UK and thrashed its wholesale prices’. As a consequence of this, all the newspapers have been making less profit over the last ten years. Most newspaper companies are ‘not funded by the state,’ and are therefore out there to make a profit, and not just any profit, but ‘an unreasonable profit because everyone in business wants to make an unreasonable profit’. With ‘less money to invest, less profit to reap’ what do you do in order to stay alive? You take a risk. And the more risks you take, you push the rules, and that is what we are uncovering in the Leveson Inquiry. Journalists in that environment found themselves to take more risks, because the competitive environment that they were in, was such that it made it more difficult to operate. Ultimately, what they did was not right, but to get to the crux of the problem, it is imperative to understand the context in which it all happened.

Lord Carter suspects what will happen next after the Leveson Inquiry is a tougher regime for the regulation of the newspaper market will ensue, albeit it will ‘happen about five years after that market is really that relevant’.

In truth, both the press and its regulators all have a hefty lesson to learn from the Leveson Inquiry. Rules are not to be broken.