Abstract
What on earth did we write about before John Whittingdale? The culture secretary has become a one-man news story for his role in the future of newspaper regulation, his blood curdling threats against the BBC and for not being a story at all.
That last matter is of course connected to the first two. To recap: in 2013, Mr Whittingdale, a divorced MP, had a relationship with a single woman. He discovered she was a professional dominatrix and ended the relationship in 2014, a year before becoming a cabinet minister.
A good story? Well, it sounded interesting enough to encourage several national newspapers, on hearing the rumours, to inquire further. One after another, they printed nothing until – as Peter Jukes explains on page 9 – Byline published details of both the affair and the abandoned newspaper investigations, Private Eye ran a full page and the BBC's Newsnight piled in. Now the papers summoned sanctimonious rage to condemn an intrusion into privacy by the very people who purported to believe in it.
Why had nothing appeared? Did the newspaper industry conspire – as campaigners for greater regulation alleged – to hold back the story as a “sword of Damocles” to encourage the minister's belief in soft touch regulation? Or – as editors insisted – was this racy piece of gossip simply a private matter, something no newspaper would print?
Most of us might have accepted that Mr Whittingdale's dominatrix was a non-story if only papers hadn't suggested that we were dim even for considering the opposite. When will the industry learn that belligerence is counter-productive? But the pro-regulators' accusations of a sinister conspiracy were not convincing either: newspaper decisions are rarely as calculating as the outside world suspects. As rational thinkers, perhaps we should conclude that this was a perfectly good story – and the kind of entertaining gossip that would make at least a diary item – but not good enough to risk falling out over with a secretary of state who seemed generally in favour of newspapers.
Certainly Mr Whittingdale has always seemed to view the newspaper industry more kindly than he does the BBC, not least in describing the broadcaster's demise as a “tempting prospect”. Happily, the publication of the government White Paper demonstrated again the gap between political rhetoric and reality. Less than a week after creatives used the Baftas as a platform to rail against the imminent destruction of the BBC, the culture secretary showed that this government had no such intention.
There is little in the White Paper to worry those who feared the BBC would be eviscerated – and nothing to encourage those who thought it should be. The newspaper industry will continue to protest at the inequality of competition with a rival that has used the munificence of licence-fee funding to support an expansion into all areas of publishing. But, as we have discussed before, it is difficult to sustain an argument that a creative organisation must make itself less good. It may be that newspapers do not have the funds to create websites that match those of the BBC, but destroying high quality journalism because not everyone can afford to do it is an unhappy solution.
Let us welcome instead the initiative designed to promote the journalistic scrutiny of local authorities, a task local papers say they are now too poor to undertake effectively themselves. The BBC is to fund 150 journalists who will be employed by papers – or other “qualifying news organisations” – to report councils and public services. It is an idea that has been around for a while, despite being presented as new in the White Paper.
Having rubbished the idea when it was first mooted, the industry has stopped moaning about the unfairness of life and embraced it. The National Union of Journalists has not, asking why private businesses should be propped up with money levied for BBC purposes. It is a proper question, but perhaps the benefit of having more journalists is a good that justifies a little finessing of their funding. It's no help saying newspaper companies should have returned more profit to journalism than to shareholders when the going was good. They didn't, the world changed and now they lack the means to report so widely. The distinction between public money and licence money is a fine one, but the objectivity of local journalism is safer for having the BBC, rather than politicians, holding the wallet.
