The Scandal of Selective Reporting

Tabloids gave minimal coverage

A comparison of coverage at the end of 2010 demonstrates how little newsprint the story warranted before the major developments in 2011. Whereas The Guardian had published 237 articles, The Independent had 83, The Daily Telegraph 46, and The Times 43. Unsurprisingly, the tabloids gave the story minimal coverage. By the close of 2010, the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday had published 38 articles, the News of the World's sister paper, The Sun 17, and the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror a mere 11 between them.

However much individual editors stress their independence, the News International-owned newspapers' aversion to covering the story until July 2011 is not difficult to comprehend: the legal, commercial and political stakes were high if additional allegations of phone hacking were made to stick. Some of the fallout has already occurred as a result: the collapse of News Corporation's bid to take over fully BSkyB; the closure of the 168-year-old News of the World; further arrests of former News International staff; and James Murdoch's resignations as chairman of BSkyB and executive chairman of News International. The broader failure of news organisations to regard the phone-hacking scandal as newsworthy, however, was the consequence of a complicated set of factors.

First, phone hacking was not considered “news” by the newsrooms. Newspaper editors argued that the public had little interest in how journalists obtained their stories. As Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror, told the Society of Editors conference last year, phone hacking was scarcely covered before July 2011 because it was a “meeja story”. “It's a very straightforward editorial decision… we didn't think our readers were interested in it. Frankly, they weren't”. Wallace might be right, but it is also likely that tabloids were wary of investigating the News of the World in case some of their own practices were subsequently investigated more closely.

Allegations that illegal voicemail interception was widespread across Fleet Street have so far been denied, but the use of various “dark arts” to find news stories was not regarded as unusual. Their implementation was justified for a broad range of stories, from those clearly with a “public interest” to many others which were, as the cliché has it, only of interest to the public. There was minimal coverage of any investigation which might have shed any light on these practices. Operation Motorman, the Information Commissioner's investigation into journalistic breaches of the Data Protection Act in 2003, represents a case in point. A Guardian editorial in 2006 described the first ICO report, What Price Privacy?, as a “highly detailed, if little reported, document” about newspapers' use of private investigators. The ICO's follow-up report six months later, What Price Privacy Now?, reflected on media coverage of What Price Privacy? to date and noted that “coverage even in the broadsheets at the time of publication was limited”. The muted tabloid response was even more marked.

The tabloids have also been silent on the unauthorised publication of selected files from Operation Motorman on the Guido Fawkes blog. The extract revealed more than 1,000 alleged requests for information from News International journalists to the private investigator Steve Whittamore. The ICO condemned the unauthorised leak, a fact reported by the Financial Times, the freesheet Metro, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, but a database and online search indicates no coverage of the leak or the ICO reaction by the other national titles despite agency reports by the Press Association and Associated Press. The Guido Fawkes blog claimed there was “no political will to see this [disclosure] through” and that “the newspapers are keen, for their own reasons, to suppress the truth”.

Newspapers have also had powerful allies to back up their assertions that phone hacking was not news. For a long time the phone-hacking scandal was not deemed newsworthy by a variety of official sources of information, including the Press Complaints Commission, the Information Commissioner's Office, the Metropolitan Police and members of the Conservative Party during 2010. It was therefore difficult to stand up The Guardian's investigation independently without repeating Nick Davies's painstaking work, which presumably discouraged journalists from further inquiry. The Times's editor, James Harding, speaking on the same Society of Editors conference panel as Richard Wallace, said that one of the reasons why his newspaper had not followed up The Guardian's coverage in July 2009 was the response of the police: “On the day that it broke, the police came out later that day and said there's nothing to see here. If you're calling and asking the question and the company says: ‘No, there's nothing to see here’ and the police say: ‘No, there is nothing to see here’… that will inform the way in which reporters look at the story.”

Politically-motivated left-wing crusade

Finally, the newsworthiness of the story was attacked by representatives of News International and other journalists who portrayed The Guardian's story as part of a politically-motivated “left-wing” campaign or a commercially interested “anti-Murdoch” crusade. James Harding maintained that less coverage was given to phone hacking before 2011 partly because of the sense that when one news organisation reports on another “there is an agenda there”. “I think when that story broke in The Guardian, there was a tendency to see that.” The same argument had greeted a New York Times investigative piece on News of the World phone hacking early in 2010.

A series of run-ins between The Guardian and The Sun has further exposed the tensions between the organisations. At the House of Lords communications select committee, The Sun's managing editor Richard Caseby responded angrily when a police update revealed that some of Milly Dowler's voicemails may have been automatically deleted rather than removed by News of the World journalists, as The Guardian had originally reported. Caseby claimed the allegation caused the closure of the News of the World, which The Sun subsequently reported under the headline “THE guardlyin: Paper blasted ‘for sexing up hacking stories’”. Media commentator Roy Greenslade has since contended on his Guardian blog, however, that there is “not the slightest proof that the deletions were the single reason for the closure ordered by Rupert Murdoch”. Caseby renewed his attack on The Guardian in front of the Home Affairs select committee in April 2012, prompting Labour MP David Winnick to observe that Caseby “perhaps has some sort of grouse” against The Guardian. Of course, disputes such as these expose the emotional subjectivity of inter-media reporting, when a title is assessing the “newsworthiness” of a particular story concerning its own affairs or those of a rival.

The phone-hacking scandal demonstrated that “newsworthiness” is subject to overlapping personal, professional, political and commercial dynamics which meant many journalists and editors came to regard the phone-hacking story as anything but newsworthy for a substantial period of time. It was a failure of the media's role as an accountability mechanism in the public interest.

Phone hacking might not be a lone example of blinkered reporting. Neglect to scrutinise thoroughly the situation in the lead up to the great financial crash in 2008 is one of the more famous examples in recent history. But it is difficult regularly and systematically to monitor what is making the news in the UK. Every day editors make decisions about what is newsworthy, shaping the framework of national debate. As we have demonstrated, why they regard some stories as newsworthy requires close analysis, but there isn't a comprehensive and publicly-available mechanism to understand what the newspapers regard as newsworthy. However, the increasing mass of data available from online articles means there is no longer any reason why the news values of the press cannot be monitored in a far more coherent manner for the benefit of the future of journalism and public debate.

In the past, it would have been exceptionally time-consuming, if not impossible, to conduct an annual survey of every topic or subject that made the news. Today, nearly every news story that appears in print also appears online. Digital news is relatively straightforward to archive and academic research has benefited considerably from resources such as the Nexis UK database, which allows searchable access to decades of news articles. For this article we were able to trace all news articles relating to an individual news topic — phone hacking — over a four-year period, but research that considers all news values or topics is often available from only a few newspapers for a limited and short period of time.

In an era of “big data” and digital search tools, however, it should be possible to design far more sophisticated software to provide the public with an annual “newsworthiness” audit of all UK newspaper articles over an entire year. The data could be aggregated to produce a breakdown of what news subjects were reported, how they were reported, by which journalists, how often, and with how much prominence based on page location and word count. This might be analysed in conjunction with data provided by audiences from clicks on web links and the number of times articles have been shared by web users on other websites — data that news organisations are already collecting internally. The review could also be expanded beyond “newspapers”—a category of increasingly dubious relevance in a convergent media world — to include major online news sources whether they are newspapers, broadcasters, new media websites or influential bloggers. Independent researchers could analyse the data to produce an accessible and publicly available online report on the nature of UK news content, providing the public with a more detailed understanding of what was regarded as newsworthy by media organisations.

Public can make its own comparisons

Work of this nature is not only possible; it is also being done outside the UK. In the United States, the Pew Research Center's State of the News Media 2012 report analysed 46,000 stories from 52 news outlets to provide a comprehensive understanding of which stories and topics were regarded as newsworthy by American journalists. Its report included data for news stories and topics being covered by bloggers and Twitter users, while an interactive online feature allowed the public to make its own comparisons between news coverage in different media outlets.

It would be useful to combine the Pew Center approach with that of the Media Cloud project, run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, an open source tool that highlights which key words were used in relation to a major news topic on a weekly basis by individual news organisations. In the UK, perhaps the closest we have to anything similar is Journalisted.com, run by the Media Standards Trust. This website monitors articles written by individual journalists and has a weekly and yearly round-up of which news topics are “covered lots” or “covered little”. This is a useful starting point, but the depth of data and analysis is limited compared with the projects in the United States.

The lack of coverage of phone hacking highlighted the failure of the outgoing system of self-regulation to act as a mechanism to ensure that the “newsworthiness” of serious stories is largely defined by the public interest. In response to this, an external audit of news content, undertaken by an independent organisation would provide an accountability tool that could benefit news organisations as well as the public. While it would be only a small part of the solution, neither fully illuminating journalists' decision-making nor holding them to account before publication, it would be a practical step forward which would provide a comprehensive overview of what stories are making the news as well as trends in the way those news stories are reported. For journalists and editors, it would be a useful resource helping them to reflect on the shape of their coverage over the course of a year. For the public, it would provide an informed starting point for a broad discourse on what news should be covered in the “public interest”.