Abstract
What’s the answer when journalistic practice comes face to face with real life moral questions: did this writer do the right thing? Would you?
This is the closest I have come to writing a confession. I have tried to be honest, but distinguishing right from wrong in our murky world is not always easy. Moreover, although, in effect, I am putting myself on trial, I am also outlining the case for the prosecution and the defence and acting as both judge and jury. But the verdict that really counts is yours.
There are four charges against me:
1. Ripping off the Daily Mail
I was in Malaysia reporting the annual BMA clinical congress in Kuala Lumpur when I was asked to interview Derrick Gregory on death row on the island of Penang. He had been arrested with more than a pound of heroin in his boots and clothes. I did not get the interview, but I met a nun who regularly visited death row.
Scootering across the island to meet me, she was caught in a heavy, tropical storm and arrived at my hotel door bedraggled and embarrassed. Things took a worse turn when I suggested that she should strip off in my room. Of course, I meant the bathroom. Fortunately, she had a sense of humour.
Wrapped in my hotel dressing gown after room service had taken her habit for drying, she spoke at length about life on death row and her role in comforting frightened, vulnerable prisoners. She was an eloquent, passionate speaker, worthy of my comprehensive notes.
After about an hour, she suddenly paused and uttered that classic, heart-sink phrase no reporter ever wants to hear: “You’re not going to put this in the paper, are you?” She pleaded with me not to file. She would be banned from the prison if the piece were published. She would be in trouble from Mother Superior. I eventually agreed not to file.
VERDICT:
GUILTY AS CHARGED. I had been travelling at the Mail’s expense on a generous salary. The nun’s story would have made a compelling spread, especially as she knew Gregory, the first Briton to be executed under Malaysia’s stringent drug laws.
IN MITIGATION:
The world really would have been a worse place if she had been banned from the prison on the basis of a here-today, gone-tomorrow piece.
If I had been a freelance, this ethical dilemma would have had a razor-sharp edge. What would I have done? Now, there’s a thought…
2. Bias against the National Front and helping the police
As a young local newspaper reporter, I covered a National Front meeting. I did so reluctantly, hoping that what I wrote would be (as we used to say) “spiked”. I did not and do not like extreme right-wing groups and the type of publicity that fosters racism, as this would have done. But I took full notes and interviewed two of the speakers. As I left, a local CID sergeant, a contact, asked if he could “have a word”. He wanted help to prepare a report of the meeting for MI5. I was his sole source. I helped him.
VERDICT:
GUILTY AS CHARGED. As the US Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists says: “Helping police can be considered a conflict of interest. Journalists cover police all the time and a working relationship seen as too close or too friendly could be seen as showing favouritism, and is wrong.”
IN MITIGATION:
A key part of the concept of freedom of the press should enable journalists to decide whether or not to share information with third parties, such as the police.
3. Going on paid-for press trips
When I was respectively the Daily Mail medical correspondent and The Guardian health editor, Flora, which produces a low-fat spread, ran a series of so-called heart disease study tours in Japan, the US, Jamaica, Australia and Europe. Flora was promoting the idea that people with high blood levels of cholesterol have a significantly greater risk of cardiovascular disease.
Today, Flora would claim, to use that popular phrase, that “they had been led” by the science, as indeed they had been. But science is not static. The fashionable cholesterol hypothesis was challenged at an annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by no less than the late Professor Michael Oliver, one of the most eminent cardiologists of his era and a former president of the Royal College of Physicians of edinburgh.
This was the story of the day and I wrote it as such – hard. As I did so, I thought: “I’ve probably been on my last Flora trip.” Yes, this suggests that I might have been tainted by my association with Flora.
VERDICT:
GUILTY AS CHARGED.
IN MITIGATION:
In deciding whether to go on paid-for press trips, I have one criterion: is there a real story to report? The Flora trips provided fascinating copy. For example, in Jamaica we found that Caribbean populations were getting fatter as the West was becoming thinner. In the 60s, heart attacks in Jamaica were rare, but they became increasingly common as the local people developed an insatiable appetite for fat and “the Western way of death”. Obesity and cardiovascular disease in Japan were also increasing as high-calorie and high-fat food became fashionable at the expense of the traditional diet that is high in fresh, unprocessed ingredients and low in fat and sugar. There is no more important epidemiological lesson in cardiovascular medicine.
4. Playing the press card to bully erring companies into submission
A few weeks ago, our kitchen tap, a Franke model from John Lewis, would not stop leaking. John Lewis eventually provided us with a replacement, but not until I had emailed the press office to say that I had worked for the Mail, Guardian and Observer. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how things happen so quickly after such threatening interventions.
VERDICT:
GUILTY AS CHARGED. Ethically, none of us should use our journalistic status to resolve a personal domestic problem or crisis, but I wonder how many of us have done just that?
IN MITIGATION:
I cannot think of anything… except that I might have written something if the outcome had not been positive. No, of course, this does not resolve me of my guilt.
Footnotes
John Illman is a former editor of GP who spent five years as the Daily Mail medical correspondent, eight years as the Guardian health editor and three years as The Observer’s medical correspondent. He was chair of the Medical Journalists’ Association for six years and is a former visiting lecturer at the universities of Cambridge and Westminster. He is the author of seven books. 