Abstract
The crime reporter Jimmy Nicholson, best known as the Prince of Darkness and now in his late 80s, has often said that he has been on “more doorsteps than a milk bottle”. These days, of course, milk bottles are not as common a sight as they were in Nicholson's heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, but reporters have to go doorstepping for good or ill. The practice has come under scrutiny because of the case of Gareth Davies, chief reporter on the Croydon Advertiser, who was served with a “prevention of harassment notice” by three Metropolitan Police officers after he contacted a fraudster who was due to be sentenced after pleading guilty to a series of scams.
According to the newspaper, Davies explained himself to the police and was told: “You say you were just doing your job, but that's what the News of the World and the phone hackers said.” The Advertiser and Davies received the backing of both Liberty and Index on Censorship, whose chief executive Kirsty Hughes said that “a journalist pursuing a serious case through questions and requests to interview is a world away from illegal phone hacking and yet the police appear to be conflating the two in threatening a harassment case”. Davies said that he approached the woman convicted of fraud at her home to give her a right to reply and then sent two e-mails “politely” asking for a comment.
So what are the ethics of doorstepping? When I interviewed Nicholson for a book about crime nearly 30 years ago and the subject came up he told me that “after a horrific murder people often want to talk to you … if they're guilty. I've had people rehearse their story to me before they speak to the police. With many you feel as though you're intruding on private grief You go in and say ‘James Nicholson, crime reporter, I'd like to talk to you’. In a lot of circumstances, you have to put a foot in the door.”
I wish I could say that I had found that people often wanted to talk about murder; on the occasions I have knocked on the door of people I believed – and still believe – had got away with murder, none of them broke down and helpfully confessed, and I departed empty-notebooked.
Doesn't the justification for doorstepping depend on the story? I know one former Fleet Street reporter who was sent to doorstep a woman whose neighbours had complained because she kept 80 or 90 cats – she was called the Catwoman of Balham or something like that – and they objected to the noise or the smell. She refused to answer the door so my friend found himself on his knees shouting through the letterbox at her. This was his epiphany: he thought, “What on earth am I doing to this woman whose only crime is to love cats?”, handed in his resignation and became a successful author and screenwriter.
There are two different types of doorsteps: in one – the naughty doorstep, if you like, as in the case of the Croydon Advertiser – a reporter is confronting someone who may have done something wicked or illegal, but has to be given a chance to answer the allegations. Here, most would agree that the knock is justified.
Indeed, the BBC and NUJ guidelines on the subject give backing to it. The BBC guidelines suggest that doorstepping should occur only “when there is evidence of crime or significant wrongdoing” and if the subject has failed to respond to repeated requests for interview without good reason. The guidelines add that “proposals for doorstepping should be proportionate to any wrongdoing”.
Indeed, they should be and not everyone who is the subject of doorstepping has the same robust sense of humour that Hilary Mantel displayed when she was pursued after her remarks about the Duchess of Cambridge had been misrepresented in the Daily Mail. “It was funny to have the press camped out across the road in our quiet seaside town,” she wrote in the New Statesman about the experience. “If the pressmen saw any fat woman of a certain age walking along the street, they ran after her shouting, ‘Are you Hilary?’”
But there is another, rather different type of doorstepping – the old “death knock” – when the person who answers the door will be the bereaved relative of the victim of a murder, suicide or accident.
There may be a few occasions when a bereaved person wants to talk to the media, but these are rare, and under item six of the NUJ's code of conduct a reporter should do “nothing to intrude into anybody's private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest”. Ah, our old friend, public interest. The test has to be this: if it was my family being doorstepped after a sudden death would I tell the reporter how much I appreciated the chance to put my side of the story or would I tell them, on their second knock, to use their imagination about how the recently bereaved might be feeling and if they couldn't manage that, then to piss off?
Rarely do journalists ask themselves this question and on the occasions when they find themselves at the wrong end of a scandal or a news story they are often the ones who squeal loudest.
The death knock has changed somewhat since the arrival of social media. There is now no shortage of people, both well known and unknown, prepared to tweet their usually banal thoughts on the death of anyone famous and how “very sad” it all is. Who knew? For reporters stuck to desks or computers, this tempting cocktail of narcissism and necrophilia from the Twitterati now provides acres of handy copy without the bother of having to stand on any draughty doorstep.
To summarise: doorstepping to establish the facts for a story – OK. Doorstepping just to see if people are coming to terms with a tragic but not mysterious or suspicious death – not OK. Meanwhile, if either of those two old murderers are reading the BJR and feel like making a deathbed confession, do get in touch.