Abstract
Like dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others, I'd known the allegations about John Whittingdale's relationship with a sex worker for months. Whatever their reasons for not publishing, the affair had been investigated by at least four newspapers for nearly three years, with many journalists assigned to track the couple, tape recordings made, photos and videos circulated.
Until almost a year into his appointment as culture secretary, the MP for Maldon's unconventional sex life must have been the best-kept secret since news of an affair between Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson had emerged during the pre-trials phone hacking hearings. Back then, contempt of court had kept everyone schtum. But the silence over what would normally be a tabloid staple – a dominatrix and a prominent politician – was harder to understand.
So for six months I waited to see which news organisation would jump first. I had no idea a fledging crowd-funded journalism site, Byline, which I first advised on its launch last April and began to co-curate last October, would be the first to break it. I still find that troubling, if not downright terrifying.
Our scoop had two threads. Nick Mutch, a young Kiwi journalist, was already talking to one source, mainly about another matter, and began to scope out more. At the age of 24, Mutch had exclusively revealed on Byline new photographs of Prime Minister David Cameron in the Bullingdon Club during the general election (rapidly ripped off uncredited by other sites such as Guido Fawkes). He'd also broken crucial new details about Tory bullying and the death of the young activist Elliott Johnson (ripped off by the Daily Mail with the solecism “it has emerged”). He finally posted his version of the story on April 1.
The date didn't help. Though the traffic to the site was huge and the social media response dramatic, virtually no other news organisation followed up. According to The Guardian, David Cameron read the story on the site. But for over a week it just hung out there, like an embarrassment. But for whom?
My main source of information, had been Jim Cusick, The Independent's veteran political reporter. Cusick had been looking into the strange disappearance into the upper echelons of newspaper management of at least three versions of the Whittingdale story with his fellow journalist Cahal Milmo. He had accumulated three large ring binders full of details and interviews, and compiled a forensic timeline tracking the multiple investigations into Whittingdale's private life with his statements about the BBC and press regulation. After his editor, Amol Rajan, had announced the closure of The Independent's print edition, Cusick was free to tell his version, providing he didn't sign the enhanced redundancy agreement and its stringent gagging clause.
But there was still a problem. While several other outlets could see the public interest in the press's unusual treatment of Whittingdale's private life, none of them wanted to be the first the break the dominatrix angle. Since that had come out, Cusick agreed to crowd-fund his own account on Byline. To provide a bit more legitimacy and oversight, I contacted online forum Open Democracy to cross post, publicise and provide their own comment.
Byline has no prior restraint or editorial process. It's more a platform than a publisher, and though I had some general idea of the story Mutch would cover, I did not see his piece till it was published. Cusick was more old school and wanted someone at Byline to input the text. Given the higher level of editorial oversight, we sought wider legal advice. He overshot his crowd-funding target in less than day. On 20 April Cusick's 3,000 word account and supplementary comment was published.
It was met with another deafening wall of silence. However I knew this careful inferential account could not be ignored for long. Two days later Private Eye followed with similar supporting account. Then BBC Newsnight decided to run it and the sluices opened. A flood of vitriol followed.
No one attacked Private Eye for breaking the story but the BBC was vilified, and soon the attention turned to Byline – credit where credit is due. The original conspiracy theory advanced by David Aaronvitch of The Times and the Guido Fawkes website was that Tom Watson was behind our splash, though Watson had zero involvement. Within a couple of days the conspiracy target changed. According to the Daily Mail and Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Telegraph, Byline was some proxy publishing arm of the phone hacking victims group Hacked Off. Both articles have already undergone major corrections, and show how clueless most proprietor-owned press journalists are about crowd-funding and independence.
Anyone can fund a project or column on Byline, but the idea that a purchaser controls content makes as much sense as saying someone who subscribes to a newspaper has editorial input. Apart from interviewing Hugh Grant for a student magazine two years ago, Mutch had never spoken to anyone in the pressure group.
Though I'm used to misunderstandings about the model, and frankly inured to op-ed hatchet specialists like Toby Young and Louise Mensch, the shooting of this particular messenger went to inordinate lengths. There was an attempted “spear phishing” attack on my emails via the Society of Editors server the day after the story broke on Newsnight. Five days later Andrew Gilligan's Telegraph hit piece, boosted overnight by automated computer “bots”, and misleading paragraphs about me, copied to an obscure blog, were somehow rated so “in the news” by algorithms that they were automatically emailed to the 500 or so who follow me on LinkedIn
Ever since covering the phone hacking trial, I've tended to brush off personal attacks on the principle that a quiet street is a dangerous street. But it's not so easy to be sanguine about others being attacked. Within days Byline journalists were subject to threatening texts, calls and messages, some of which suggested they would have a hard time finding future employment if they carried on writing for a website.
If Britain's press wants to protect free speech it has an odd way of going about it. Or maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe these attacks were a compliment to Byline, a kind of obscure Fleet Street hazing ritual welcoming a newcomer.
Either way, I have a hard time trying to recall any other time in recent history when so many in the media came to the defence of a minister. Maybe that is because he is minister for media? Until I hear otherwise, the press's reaction to our Whittingdale scoop confirms to me something only inferred in Cusick's patient forensic account: that the cabinet minister was seen as some kind of “asset” by senior newspaper executives and so had escaped the normal tabloid attentions – unlike our new website.