Former health secretary Matt Hancock has lost an accuracy complaint against the Daily Telegraph over a front-page story based on leaked Whatsapp messages.

Hancock claimed the Whatsapp messages gave only a partial account of government activities during the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020 and the story was therefore misleading. The story claimed Hancock rejected advice from chief medical officer Chris Whitty that there should be Covid testing for all those going into care homes.

The article was based on Whatsapp messages given to Telegraph journalist Isabel Oakeshott by Hancock in order for her to ghostwrite a book with him. Hancock accused Oakeshott of a “massive betrayal” but she insists she acted in the public interest.

The story – headlined: “Hancock rejected Whitty’s advice on care home tests” – was shortlisted for scoop of the year in the 2023 British Journalism Awards.

Matt Hancock: Telegraph’s Lockdown Files gave incomplete picture

In evidence to press regulator IPSO, Hancock said he had not rejected Whitty’s advice but rather, “due to testing capacity, the advice could not be operationalised”.

He also complained that the article was based on partial material and said that Whatsapp chats were informal, but numerous other meetings would have been going on at the time.

Hancock also said the newspaper breached the Editors’ Code by failing to contact him for comment in advance of publication.

Rejecting Hancock’s claim that the article was inaccurate, IPSO said: “The committee were of the view that the basis for the headline’s claim that the complainant had “reject[ed]” the scientific advice was clearly set out in the article.

“The article had expressly referenced and had published the relevant Whatsapp messages upon which this claim was based, which made clear the exchanges which had taken place between the complainant and his aides and allowed readers to interpret the content for themselves; it had also provided additional context about testing capacity at the time, which contextualised the complainant’s position on the issue.”

On the right of reply point, IPSO said: “The committee noted that a right or reply or an obligation to contact the subject of the article prior to publication is not an explicit requirement of Clause 1 [of the Editors’ Code], though this may be necessary as part of Clause 1(i)’s requirement to take care over the accuracy of the articles.

“However, where – as noted above – the article did not include any inaccurate, misleading, or distorted information, there was no case to answer under the terms of Clause 1 (i) in relation to the complainant not having been contacted prior to publication.”

Read the Matt Hancock versus Daily Telegraph IPSO ruling in full.

Hancock has previously had two IPSO complaint against the Mirror upheld and one rejected.

IPSO previously memorably ruled that it was not a breach of the Editors’ Code to describe Hancock as a “failed health secretary and cheating husband who broke the lockdown rules he wrote, doubled down on the lies he told, helped enrich his mates via the infamous VIP PPE lane, and couldn’t resist monetising the infamy he acquired as a result of his ineptitude at managing the pandemic”.

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Channel 4 News correspondent and presenter Ciaran Jenkins has said he wanted to secure a “benchmark” for government transparency when he asked Nicola Sturgeon if she would provide her Whatsapp messages to any future Covid inquiry.

Jenkins asked Sturgeon, then Scottish First Minister, at a press conference in August 2021 whether she would guarantee bereaved families “that you will disclose emails, Whatsapps [and] private emails” to the then-promised inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.

Sturgeon said she would – but this week told the UK Covid inquiry that she had in fact already deleted Whatsapp messages at that point.

‘Nicola Sturgeon is being measured against a benchmark that she herself set’

Jenkins told Press Gazette on Wednesday his question “set a benchmark about the level of disclosure that the public and specifically the bereaved families expected”.

At the time, Jenkins was Scotland correspondent for Channel 4 News. Much of his reporting from the height of the pandemic, he said, had been focused on those who had died of Covid, their families and the key policy decisions that influenced the progress of the virus in Scotland.

“As a journalist who had for several years tried to extract information from various public authorities, I felt that for the public inquiry to do justice to those families, that they would require a certain level of disclosure,” he said.

“It felt important to place on the record that, when the time came, when the pandemic was over, that they would get all the answers they deserved.”

Jenkins said the important point about his question was that it asked Sturgeon to set herself a standard to meet.

“Nicola Sturgeon is being measured against a benchmark that she herself set in answer to my question during the pandemic, which was to give bereaved families the assurance that nothing would be off limits. And the question today is whether nothing was indeed off limits.”

The specific question Jenkins asked was: “Can you guarantee to the bereaved families that you will disclose emails, WhatsApps, private emails if you’ve been using them, whatever – that nothing will be off limits in this inquiry?”

Sturgeon responded: “If you understand statutory public inquiries you would know that even if I wasn’t prepared to give that assurance – which for the avoidance of doubt I am – then I wouldn’t have the ability [to not hand them over]. This will be a judge-led statutory inquiry.”

Sturgeon admitted on Wednesday to having deleted the messages, but said no decisions of consequence to the Scottish government’s pandemic response were made on Whatsapp and that all relevant communications were handed to the inquiry. She nonetheless apologised for the deletions.

Value of asking Sturgeon about Whatsapps in advance ‘speaks for itself’

Jenkins said he thought the deletion of Sturgeon’s Whatsapp messages would have come to light regardless of whether he had asked about it. But the value of asking about them, he said, “speaks for itself”.

“The Scottish bereaved families group said they were deeply unsatisfied with her answers today in respect of disclosure of their Whatsapps. If there’d been the disclosures that they wanted, then this question [to Sturgeon] would have been forgotten – it would never come to light and it would never have recirculated on social media.

“It’s only the fact that clearly, some have judged that there was a case to be answered, that the question has become significant in retrospect.”

But Jenkins did note that Sturgeon had not hidden from scrutiny: “She did repeated press conferences and media appearances and she would take any question from any journalist present in those press conferences.

“And so, in a way, the fact that I was able to ask that question is testament to one aspect of the process working – in that during this period of huge consequences for us all, the First Minister was willing to be held to account by by the media, irrespective of the consequences of her answers at the time.”

Asked at the Covid inquiry this week about the apparent contradiction between what she told Jenkins and what she actually did, Sturgeon had said she had been attempting to address the substance of his question.

Jenkins wouldn’t be drawn on whether that question satisfied him personally. But he said: “I think the question probably is whether Nicola Sturgeon feels that she has acted in accordance with her own assurances at the time. And by giving an apology, perhaps that tells you what you need to know.”

[From March 2023: Channel 4 News journalist Ciaran Jenkins to lead new data and digital Fact Check unit in Leeds]

The post C4 News’ Ciaran Jenkins wanted to set ‘benchmark’ for openness with Sturgeon Whatsapp question appeared first on Press Gazette.

As we enter the fifth year of the coronavirus pandemic — the disease still kills roughly 280 people per week in the UK and 1,000 per week in the US — Press Gazette has investigated the media’s role in uncovering the origins of the virus.

We wanted to know why the Wuhan lab-leak theory, now very much in the mainstream, was ignored by major newsrooms for months or even years.

Press Gazette contacted 20 journalists, read 165 academic journal articles and news reports, and sifted through nearly 4,000 pages of leaked and FOIAed documents to create this retrospective of how the Wuhan lab story did, and did not, get covered.

We found:

• Credible sources urged The New York Times to investigate the Wuhan lab, but the paper baulked
• Scientists advising National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci told the NYT that the leak theory was “false” even though they had seriously considered it
• Academic papers published in The Lancet and Nature Medicine shut down the lab-leak theory without hard evidence
• Science journalists were sometimes “captured” by their sources and thus avoided investigating the story
• Reporters feared false accusations of racism if they proposed investigating the lab.

Man or nature could have made virus that killed more than seven million

On 28 November, Michael Gove, the former minister for the cabinet under ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, sat down to answer questions in the government’s official inquiry into how the UK handled the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 49th minute of his testimony, Gove said: “There is a significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man-made, and that that presents a particular set of challenges.”

He was immediately shut down by Hugo Keith KC, the lead counsel for the inquiry. “That forms no part of the terms of reference of this inquiry, Mr Gove, to address that somewhat divisive issue, so we’re not going to go there.”

The inquiry moved on.

But, for a dozen or more journalists around the globe who have investigated the origin of Covid-19 for the last three years, it was a satisfying moment. A senior secretary of state — Gove has been in the cabinet of the last four prime ministers — had said the quiet part out loud.

Since the early days of the pandemic, these journalists believe, the media has done a poor job of telling what they regard as the biggest story of the century: That the US government funded coronavirus research for years, via experiments in which the viruses were manipulated. Much of that funding went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, just a half-hour drive from the Huanan Seafood Market which was initially suspected as the source of the pandemic.

Their reporting shows that multiple scientists and US intelligence officials worried that the research was dangerous and that the Wuhan lab was not operating safely. And then, in late 2019, people in Wuhan began dying of a mysterious new coronavirus that the Wuhan lab itself said was “highly similar” to one it had studied. Ultimately, seven million people were killed according to the official tally (though the true figure could be multiples higher according to some estimates).

There are two threads to the lab-leak theory: One argues it might have been a sample collected from nature — perhaps from one of China’s many bat caves — that escaped from the lab by accident. The other posits that the lab was manipulating samples it had collected into more infectious “man-made” versions, one of which also escaped, probably by accident.

To be clear: There is no scientific proof that SARS-CoV-2 (the official name of the virus) leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Rather, many prominent scientists say, the virus likely emerged from nature. But there is no definitive proof of the “natural origin” theory, either. On both sides, the jury remains out.

In the meantime, the circumstantial evidence linking the Wuhan lab to the pandemic continues to emerge. Thousands of pages of emails, Slack messages, leaked documents, intelligence reports, and regretful testimony from senior US officials have been unearthed by reporters. Much of it demonstrates that government officials and the scientists advising them regarded the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab more seriously than they admitted in public.

In a story published on the same day as Gove testified, former US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said: “The most likely origin of Covid-19, of the Wuhan virus… was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

That scoop did not come from the BBC or The Guardian or The Washington Post or The New York Times, but from Sky Australia’s Sharri Markson. Much of the most detailed reporting on the Wuhan lab came from similarly unexpected outlets: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Medium, US Right To Know, The Intercept, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine.

Journalists ‘astoundingly’ close-minded about lab-leak theory

Several sources expressed frustration with The New York Times specifically. Three sources told Press Gazette they made early approaches to the NYT science desk with evidence suggesting that a lab leak was plausible, and were rebuffed or ignored.

Nicholas Wade was one of them. Wade was the former science editor of the NYT and wrote for the science desk between 1982 and 2012. He still writes freelance for the NYT.

In April and May 2021, he pitched a story to the NYT describing, at length, with on-the-record sources, how the Wuhan lab had been researching coronavirus for years; that it was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health; that it created a novel coronavirus in 2015 by taking the backbone of the SARS virus and replacing part of it with material from a bat virus; and that — contrary to popular belief — viruses routinely escape from labs, usually by accident. (In the year before the pandemic, there were 219 unplanned releases of biological agents and toxins from US labs, roughly one every two days, according to the US government’s reporting system.)

“I had a great deal of difficulty trying to place the story,” he told Press Gazette. “I offered it to almost every publication I could think of that had a broad circulation or had a science interest. It was turned down three times by my former employer, The New York Times. It was turned down by The Wall Street Journal, turned down by The Economist. Turned down by just about everyone.

“I was just astounded at how close-minded all the publications were when I sent them the piece.”

Update 5/1/2024: Economist senior science editor Geoffrey Carr told Press Gazette he did turn the piece down but said: “My motive in doing so was not a particular scepticism about the thesis. It was that our in-house team were already considering the matter.”

Baffled, Wade published it himself on Medium. It was immediately republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The stories “got a very large number of page views, I think a million page views on each outlet,” Wade said.

Wade wasn’t alone.

Milton Leitenberg, a specialist in biological weapons at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, sent a 600-word memo to a journalist at the NYT in January 2021. It said: “Since at least 2015… the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been carrying out a particular form of research, ‘gain of function’ (GOF) research – using the newly discovered novel bat SARS-related coronaviruses.” He urged editors to look into it.

Leitenberg’s contact said he shared it with editors at a breakfast meeting. “He emailed me the day after the breakfast and [an editor at the meeting] promised that she would discuss it with the others… and that ‘they would take it very seriously,’ end quotes. Nothing happened.”

The rejection was significant because eight months earlier Leitenberg had written a lengthy discussion, also for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which described how frequently pathogens leak from labs, and that the Wuhan lab had possessed “the most closely related known virus in the world” to SARS-CoV-2, a bat virus named RaTG13.

While neither Leitenberg nor Wade’s stories featured a smoking gun, they both made detailed, fact-based cases that lab leaks are a common and expected part of virology.

Another scientist, Richard Ebright of the Rutgers University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, told Press Gazette he kept NYT reporters briefed on evidence around the plausibility of the lab leak after May 2020, but the reporters did little with his information.

“The science desk at the Times was interested in keeping up to date on the facts and knowing the facts in full, but then not reporting them,” Ebright said. “Or when they would report, only those developments that could be spun as favouring a natural accident origin, and systematically not noticing any other developments.”

Other writers who competed with the NYT also told Press Gazette they were puzzled by the NYT’s apparent lack of curiosity about the lab.

All the NYT staff named by Press Gazette’s sources were contacted for comment. They did not respond. Instead, a spokesperson for the newspaper said: “The New York Times has covered every angle of this story, including a wide array of news and opinion coverage that explores the unanswered questions about the origins of the virus, but does not take any institutional position on which of them is more definitive.

“In fact, as our coverage points out repeatedly, the origins may not be known because of China’s censorship campaign that has stifled the search for truth.”

How New York Times was thrown off scent of lab-leak story

In the NYT’s defence, one of its science reporters did make an early inquiry into the lab-leak theory. Donald G. McNeil Jr. sent several emails to members of the group of scientists advising NIAID director Anthony Fauci around 6 February 2020.

One said: “I’m trying to check out a rumour that an editor got from a government source — that the US government is trying to seriously investigate the possibility that the nCov [new coronavirus] came out of the Wuhan Virus Laboratory rather than out of a wet market. I know that’s part of a lot of silly conspiracy theories circling. But is there any possibility that it could be from the Wuhan lab?”

At the time, the Fauci group was actively discussing whether it came from the lab. Their Slack and email messages — released via FOIA requests, Congressional investigations, and leaks months later — showed that in the early days of the pandemic some of them regarded the lab leak as plausible.

“On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!” wrote Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome, a major funder of virological research, on 2 February 2020, weeks before the lockdowns began. “My guess is that this will remain grey, unless there is access to the Wuhan lab — and I suspect that is unlikely!”

Farrar forwarded notes from an exchange with Mike Farzan, a Harvard Medical School researcher. Farzan was bothered by the virus’s structure and “has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab,” Farrar wrote. “Accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40,” he said of Farzan’s opinion.

On the same day, Kristian Andersen, director of Infectious Disease Genomics at Scripps Research, told his colleagues: “Natural selection and accidental release are both plausible scenarios explaining the data – and a priori should be equally weighed as possible explanations.”

The scientists discussed in Slack how to respond, and decided the best course was to not tell McNeil their suspicions. On 6 February 2020, Andersen drafted a reply to McNeil: “A lot of conspiracy theories are talking about this being either a lab strain … or some new recombinant. These rumours are demonstratively false.”

The NYT was thrown off the scent.

All of the scientists were contacted for comment. At the time of writing, none responded.

Over a year later, McNeil wrote a post on Medium in which he admitted he was too quick to dismiss the lab-leak theory.

“I was offended by some aspects, such as [the] attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, both of whom I have known for years,” McNeil wrote.

In an email to Press Gazette, McNeil said: “This past July, I was startled to learn what had really happened behind the scenes in early February 2020 when I first raised questions about the possibility of a leak or viral manipulation.”

McNeil added that he had a book coming out in the new year in which he will discuss “the lab-leak theory and my role in both debunking and propagating it.” He declined further comment.

The Lancet and Nature ‘helped shut down’ story

In March 2020, the group who rebuffed McNeil published a paper in Nature Medicine. It said: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” It said there was a “possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release” but the existence of similar coronaviruses in the wild was “a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation”.

The paper came on the heels of another article, published in The Lancet on 18 February 2020, authored by coronavirus researcher Peter Daszak and others, which said: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet and Nature papers remain a source of anger for reporters investigating the Wuhan lab. It was not possible, at that early stage, to rule out a leak from a lab, they say. Neither paper demonstrated proof that the lab was not the source.

Even though in their private conversations they initially considered the lab as a possibility, both papers set a strong tone: The scientists closest to the US government said the virus did not come from a lab. (In July this year, Andersen laid out a lengthy argument criticising the media’s reporting of these events on his Twitter/X account.)

Jon Cohen is a senior correspondent at Science who emphatically does not favour the leak theory. Even so, he was one of the earliest to report, on 31 January 2020, that “concerns about the [Wuhan] institute predate this outbreak”. He expressed some misgivings about the Lancet/Nature papers to Press Gazette. “I think that both of them would have been stronger had they spelled out the possibility of a lab origin that wasn’t a conspiracy theory,” he said.

“There were prominent [unfounded] conspiracy theories about a lab leak being promoted in China and elsewhere in early January before that came out in February. And there were also solid scientific reasons to probe the lab origin. And the Lancet editorial didn’t make that clear. And I think it would have been much stronger, had it separated the two and made that clear,” he said.

Scientific groupthink permeated media

The two papers placed an immediate roadblock in front of any journalist asking the obvious question — wasn’t it an amazing coincidence that the coronavirus pandemic started near that coronavirus lab? — because very senior scientists had already rubbished the leak theory.

“A specific difficulty in reporting on the Covid origin issue is that Andersen and his close virology colleagues all stuck to the same position, and all sceptics held their tongue because conformity in science is even worse than in the media,” Nicholas Wade said.

Yuri Deigin, a gene therapy entrepreneur and founder of YouthBio Therapeutics Inc., found the papers dissatisfying. So he wrote a lengthy and influential discussion of the history of gain-of-function research and the “genealogy” of SARS-CoV-2 on Medium, in April 2020.

“The prevailing narrative was that the esteemed scientists have concluded that it’s natural and only crazy conspiracy theorists are still insisting that it’s not,” Deigin said. Daszak blocked him on Twitter/X, he said.

Emily Kopp, an investigative reporter at US Right To Know, which has obtained dozens of documents via FOIA requests, describes herself as “pissed” at those scientists. “Because I look like an idiot, I have interviewed multiple experts but I found out from a FOIA somewhat recently, actually, I think earlier this year, that all of the people I’ve talked to for that story were at the time talking to each other and talking to Ecohealth Alliance [Daszak’s research company] and talking to NIH about how to suppress stories about this.”

Cohen vehemently disagrees that the authors set out to “suppress” anything. Rather, he says, the Fauci group changed its mind as the evidence developed.

“The initial concern of it being a lab leak came from people who had not studied coronaviruses. And a group call was put together by Jeremy Farrar with people who had studied coronaviruses. And after that conversation, the people who had studied coronaviruses for decades didn’t think the evidence supported it, and told the people who did have concerns about it why they thought they were wrong. That’s what it was about. That’s what happened.”

Because of the competing narratives — initial concerns about the lab being replaced with an affirmation in favour of a natural origin — the two papers have since become infamous among lab-leak reporters.

Even Science’s Cohen says he wished he had written about the pre-publication meetings when he learned about them from a source in July 2020. “I didn’t pick up that there was this meeting that was historically important. I was overwhelmed with whatever I was doing, and I missed it. As we’d say in baseball literature, I missed the ball, I swung the bat and missed the ball,” he said.

How journalists were captured by scientific sources

“We’d seen the same article” in The Lancet, said George Arbuthnott, deputy editor of The Sunday Times’ Insight investigations team, which began publishing detailed stories about the lab’s history in July 2020. “Our assumption was these eminent scientists were almost certainly right and we’d be doing a piece about the interesting science of the bat caves.”

“We spoke to Peter Daszak. He was almost the first person we spoke to because he was the most prominent natural origin advocate. We asked him benign questions, we asked him to explain the natural origin theory, which he did. But again we found it unconvincing. We didn’t understand how he could back up the claim that the lab theory was a conspiracy theory.” Arbuthnott talked to other scientists and found them strangely reticent as to why, exactly, the Wuhan lab should be ruled out.

Another UK newspaper which began taking the Wuhan lab-leak theory seriously early on was the Mail on Sunday, which in April 2020 published a story headlined: “Did coronavirus leak from a research lab in Wuhan? Startling new theory is ‘no longer being discounted’ amid claims staff ‘got infected after being sprayed with blood”

Daszak’s paper in The Lancet had stated: “We declare no competing interests.”

Yet Daszak had a lot at stake, Arbuthnott said. Daszak’s New York company, Ecohealth, had received millions in NIH funding for coronavirus research and had given $750,000 of it to the lab in Wuhan, documents from the NIH show.

In June of 2021, The Lancet ran a corrective note in which Daszak admitted the conflict: “EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China was previously funded by the US National Institutes of Health”.

In September 2021, The Intercept obtained from the online research group DRASTIC a leaked copy of a grant proposal Ecohealth had written in 2018. It asked the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to give Daszak’s company $14m for a project in which researchers at six institutions in the US and China would collect bat coronaviruses in China, reverse engineer samples, and then insert the samples into different coronavirus “backbones” to form new “chimera” viruses. The intent was to see whether a new, engineered SARS coronavirus caused disease in human cells.

Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan lab would “conduct PCR testing, viral discovery and isolation from bat samples collected in China, spike protein binding assays, humanised mouse work, and experimental trials on Rhinolophus bats,” the proposal said.

The grant was never funded.

Much of this was already sitting in the archives of academic journals. Daszak and Shi Zhengli had published a paper on bat coronaviruses as early as 2005. Together, they had jointly authored at least five papers on coronaviruses prior to 2020. One of them announced they had “constructed a group of infectious bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones with the backbone of WIV1 [a type of coronavirus] and variants of S genes from 8 different bat SARSr-CoVs.”

Yet science journalists the world over were slow to highlight this back story, multiple reporters told Press Gazette.

“Some of these reporters who have failed to scrutinise this relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were covering gain-of-function research for years,” said US Right To Know’s Kopp. “And suddenly, when a pandemic emerged near this lab, they forgot all about it.”

Sometimes, columnists rather than news reporters led the way.

The NYT spokesperson sent Press Gazette a selection of the NYT’s best stories on the lab. The most thorough one was not from the news or science desk but from a guest opinion column in June 2021, by Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, who laid out the case in depth and urged the public to keep an open mind.

Josh Rogin is a columnist at The Washington Post who broke a story on 14 April 2020 that said US State Department officials were worried in 2018 that the Wuhan lab was conducting risky research. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the leaked diplomatic cables obtained by Rogin said.

But two months earlier, US scientists involved with the lab had said in The Lancet that worries about the lab were “conspiracy theories”. So the science journalists sympathised with their best sources — the scientists — Rogin told Press Gazette.

“A lot of science journalists, especially at papers like The New York Times, were captured. It’s called ‘source capture’”, he said.

What happened to NYT’s McNeil was a classic example, Rogin said. “His [McNeil’s] best sources were Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, the head of the Ecohealth Alliance, who assured him that the lab leak was totally impossible, and he believed that because he trusted them.”

“And that is like the clearest admission of ‘source capture’ I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of being a journalist.”

At the NYT, health policy correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg tweeted in July 2020 that she had acquired an Anthony Fauci bobblehead doll, a promotional toy often bought by fans. “You certainly shouldn’t have a bobblehead of someone you’re covering,” a source moaned to Press Gazette. “I think that’s just so inappropriate.”

Claims of ‘racist roots’ for lab-leak theory clouded the issue

The fear of false accusations of racism also clouded journalists’ judgement, several sources said.

The lab leak theory became politically toxic when President Trump began blaming China for Covid-19 using racist language, such as calling it “kung-flu”.

Trump also talked to the press in late April 2020 and claimed, without evidence, that he believed the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab. From that point, the lab leak theory became a pro-Trump talking point, reporters told Press Gazette, which made it very difficult for any journalist who wanted to test whether it might actually be true.

Again, the NYT muddied the issue. In May 2021, science and global health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” She later deleted the tweet.

Sources told Press Gazette that Mandavilli’s attitude was common in newsrooms during the pandemic. Somehow, because of Trump, it was “racist” to want to understand what happened in the Wuhan lab. Yet, these reporters said, it was apparently not racist to believe that the world was in lockdown because of China’s trade in live bats or pangolins or racoon dogs.

Nicholson Baker, who wrote about the lab for New York Magazine, also said he got pushback from editors due to the political atmosphere. “I tried the story out on several editors at places I’d written for in the past. This was in June 2020. They all said no. Everyone was worried. When those rejections came back, part of me was relieved. I didn’t want to feed the crazies — the Trumpists, the China-haters, the anti-vaxxers.”

After the story was published seven months later: “There was some unpleasantness on Twitter,” he said. One virologist accused him of “Sinophobic jeering.” “Not fun, but it didn’t matter — I was so relieved to have gotten the piece out finally,” he said.

A story too complicated to tweet

It is true that there has not been a shortage of coverage about the Wuhan lab. But given the stakes — seven million deaths — it is noteworthy that major media brands took such a long time to probe deeply into the pandemic’s origins.

With science journalists sidelined because their sources were waiving them off, much of the investigative work fell to news reporters without science backgrounds.

Coronavirus research is bafflingly complicated for the newcomer: the viruses have complex family trees, there is a tricky debate about what counts as “gain of function” and what does not, and scientists themselves have not identified the virus’s immediate predecessor either in the wild or in a lab sample. Merely explaining the background can take hundreds of words — which is tough in a world where newsrooms want shorter and shorter angles. You cannot argue the lab leak case in a tweet.

The fact that the science is inconclusive doesn’t help. There were other hurdles, too. The Chinese government washed down the Huanan market on 1 January 2020, spoiling the evidence there. On 3 January 2020, the government ordered its labs to start destroying samples and deleting data. Chinese people who have questioned their government have disappeared or gone to prison. Shi Zhengli herself feared being arrested, according to one email obtained by US Right To Know. What the Chinese government really knows about the Wuhan lab remains a mystery.

The debate continues today. On the same day as Gove’s statement, some scientists pushed back. One, Professor Alice Hughes of the Biodiversity Analytics of Terrestrial Ecosystems group at the University of Hong Kong, said: “There may be a body of judgment [about the lab theory], but sadly this has come from a political and not a scientific basis… Like the majority of viruses Covid is almost certain to have a natural origin.” She declared “No COI”, meaning no conflicts of interest, but disclosed that she had done work on bats and Covid in China.

In fact, she does have an “interest”. In June 2020, she authored a paper jointly with researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a coronavirus found in nature that was somewhat similar to SARS-CoV-2, but didn’t make that link clear in her critique of Gove.

“I was actually unaware any of my coauthors on the paper were from WIV — they were obviously brought in later by one of the Chinese collaborators,” Hughes told Press Gazette.

“In China often the author list is added to the final proof.”

There’s nothing nefarious about that. But, in terms of disclosure and transparency, it was another head-scratching moment for journalists curious about the lab in Wuhan.

The post Covid-19 origins: A media conspiracy of silence appeared first on Press Gazette.

GB News has been rebuked by Ofcom for the first time following “materially misleading” comments made about Covid-19 vaccines by presenter Mark Steyn in April last year.

Steyn quit GB News last month claiming he had been asked to sign a contract that the broadcaster could have used to make him personally liable for any Ofcom fines his show received.

Ofcom investigated Steyn’s 8pm show on 21 April 2022 after four complaints from viewers saying he had made “dangerous” and “fatally flawed conclusions” from UK Health Security Agency data.

In his monologue, he told viewers he was referring to official UKHSA data and said there was “only one conclusion from those numbers, which is that the third booster shot, so zealously promoted by the British state and its group-think media, has failed. And in fact, exposed you to significantly greater risk to infection, hospitalisation and death.”

He went on to quote figures that he said showed “the triple vaccinated are contracting Covid at approximately twice the rate of the double, single and unvaccinated.

“Got that? If you get the booster shot, you’ve got twice as high a chance of getting the Covid. In the United Kingdom there’s twice as many people with the third booster shot who got the Covid as the people who never had the booster shot. It’s a widespread phenomenon…”

Ofcom said these comments, and more in his monologue, were materially misleading because the way the data was presented did not take into account differences in age or health of the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups studied.

Ofcom also said the way the data had been interpreted was presented in a definitive fashion and that there was no “adequate counterweight or genuine challenge”. It pointed out that UKHSA itself had made clear the data should not be used to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the vaccine.

Overall Ofcom found Steyn breached Rule 2.2 of the Broadcasting Code, which states: “Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience.”

GB News denied that it materially misled the audience, telling Ofcom “precise numbers of those who have died as a result of the vaccination is not yet clear – it is certainly several thousand – but The Steyn Line has been one of the few programmes scrutinising the available data to throw more light on the subject”.

It denied that Steyn’s programme was “anti-vax” and claimed the UKHSA data does show what Steyn said it did, although others “may have a different interpretation” and it was clear he had been giving his personal opinion.

GB News argued that if the programme “was guilty of anything, it was nothing more than a rather forceful tone”.

Ofcom said its rules allow broadcasters to transmit programmes that may be considered controversial and challenging or question official statistics, but added: “However, with this editorial freedom comes an obligation to ensure that, when portraying factual matters, audiences are not materially misled.”

“In this case, our investigation found that an episode of the Mark Steyn programme fell short of these standards – not because it exercised its editorial freedom to challenge mainstream narratives around Covid-19 vaccination – but because, in doing so, it presented a materially misleading interpretation of official data without sufficient challenge or counterweight, risking harm to viewers,” the regulator said.

GB News had argued a “clear alternative view” was provided in the next edition of the show, with Jamie Jenkins, former head of health analysis and labour market analysis at the Office for National Statistics, disagreeing with Steyn about his interpretation of the data. However, Ofcom said this did not act as mitigation because it was four days later and the initial programme had not indicated that any such follow-up would be taking place.

A separate Ofcom investigation into comments made about the Covid-19 vaccine rollout by guest Dr Naomi Wolf on the 4 October edition of Steyn’s show is ongoing.

Ofcom previously cleared an edition of Nigel Farage’s Talking Pints programme over the airing of “offensive language”.

Ofcom revealed on Monday that Ofcom has received 3,432 complaints about GB News since it launched in June 2021, representing 3% of all broadcast complaints made to the regulator in that time. Of these, 1,665 related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The post GB News broke Ofcom rules with Mark Steyn’s misleading Covid-19 comments appeared first on Press Gazette.

Journalists who expressed criticism of measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic were monitored by Government units, according to a new report.

The action was taken by Government units set up to tackle disinformation, according to the report from privacy campaigning organisation Big Brother Watch. These include the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) based in the Cabinet Office which was set up in 2018, and the Army’s 77th Brigade.

Among the report’s findings, made using a series of freedom of information and subject access requests, were that the DCMS unit claimed a Talkradio clip of an interview about vaccine passports may have breached Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policies and that it debated whether to report three posts by Spectator associate editor Toby Young to the platform.

Staff were warned that reporting the journalist, who had posted links to articles on his site the Daily Sceptic, would “require further analysis of the FoS [freedom of speech] implications” and Young was not ultimately flagged.

The Big Brother Watch report said: “It is worrying that government officials were considering to recommend that a foreign Big Tech giant censored a British journalist, only opting not to on account of the individual’s profile.”

The human rights group also raised concerns that in one of the three posts, pictured below, Young was sharing factual information about the scale of objections to vaccine passports in France. “There is no interpretation either by the state or by Twitter that should view this as false; it simply reflected opposition to a government policy direction, yet was actively considered as a case of misinformation.

“This suggests that either certain people, such as Mr Young, were subjected to specific scrutiny for their tweets around the coronavirus or the dis/misinformation net was cast so wide by the CDU that vast amounts of legitimate, lawful speech was caught up in it.”

Society of Editors executive director Dawn Alford said in response to the report: “At a time when many journalists put themselves at risk to provide the public with accurate and timely news, analysis and information during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is deeply concerning to hear reports that a number of reporters were put under surveillance for questioning government policies at a time when unprecedented restrictions were placed upon civil liberties.

“Journalists were critical to public safety and understanding of Covid-19 during the pandemic and, as part of their role, there was legitimate public interest in them scrutinising the decision-making of officials.

“The Society will be seeking urgent confirmation from the Government as to the specific remits of its disinformation units moving forward alongside assurances that public money is not being misused on recording government-critical reports.”

The Counter-Disinformation Unit within the DCMS was ramped up in March 2020 to tackle fake news about Covid-19 that was being spread online, having previously looked at narratives around the European Parliament and UK general election in 2019.

During the pandemic, the unit created reports about certain topics and circulated them to other government departments. One report entitled “CDU Vaccine Mis/disinformation: Narratives and Engagement” featured news articles about vaccines, for example, one described as having “low engagement” from the Daily Mail about the introduction of compulsory booster jabs for care home staff and foreign travel. It included examples of how named people were sharing the links online, alongside comments about their perceived attitudes to vaccines.

Also highlighted in a CDU report, created by AI-based internet monitoring firm Logically for the unit, was a Telegraph article co-authored by Conservative MP David Davis in May 2020 headlined: “Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?” Davis was described in a report as “critical of the Government”.

Another DCMS-commissioned Logically report on “Covid-19 Mis/Disinformation Platform Terms of Service” repeatedly featured Hartley-Brewer. Initial subject access requests showed only that she was featured in “reports on online activity” before more information was provided.

Among her lockdown-sceptical tweets reported to the Government was one in January 2021 sharing a clip from her Talkradio show alongside which she wrote: “Another personal experience of the damage lockdown causes from a @talkRADIO listener. Her fiancé’s business is closed down, her father’s cancer treatment cancelled and her grandma is scared to even leave her home. This lockdown is a national tragedy way beyond Covid deaths.”

Another, in February 2021, was a quote tweet from a Government Covid press conference in which she wrote: “So the education, physical and mental health of millions of children are being sacrificed at the altar of the slogan “Protect The NHS”. I thought the NHS was supposed to protect us, not the other way round. If the NHS can’t cope, after 10 months to prepare, why not?”

In the same report, a clip of an interview Hartley-Brewer conducted on her Talkradio show with Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo about vaccine passports was flagged, apparently to suggest it may have breached Twitter’s terms of service although it is not clear how.

The Big Brother Watch report accused the CDU of “mission creep” in its activities, saying: “These reports raise questions about the CDU’s remit, as the routine monitoring of mainstream media outlets and their article’s social media reach is a long way from battling propaganda from hostile entities.

“With live topics and fast-moving debates, it is incumbent on the state to refrain from overzealously labelling outlets and views as fake news and disinformation given the risk that legitimate minority views could be hit with these labels and consequentially censored.” The report also suggested that special attention was paid to the website of Russia state-backed RT.

The Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit was launched in 2018 under Theresa May’s Government, in part targeting “alternative” news sources and “sensationalist” stories using its team of analysts, data scientists and media and digital experts. They monitored news as it was being shared around the clock to decide how to tackle “stories of concern” in order to reclaim a “fact-based public debate”.

In 2020 its remit around the pandemic focused on “tackling a range of harmful narratives online… from purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation to criminal fraudsters running phishing scams”. The unit has since been disbanded.

Mail on Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens was flagged by the RRU in November 2020 when he shared a Daily Mail article based on leaked NHS documents claiming the data given to justify that month’s lockdown was incomplete.

RRU staff accused Hitchens in an internal email of using the article to “further their anti-lockdown agenda and influence the Commons vote [to approve the lockdown] tomorrow”. He was also flagged for sharing a Spiked article, raising its engagement, in a weekly counter-disinformation report to Whitehall.

The Big Brother Watch report said: “…Mr Hitchens’s tweet simply shared an article from his employer’s sister paper, without offering comment on the contents. It is worrying that a journalist’s post, which had fairly low engagement, was monitored by the RRU simply because it linked to an article that criticised government policy.

“It is even more concerning that the monitoring appeared to take issue with information being shared that might influence a vote in parliament. The very purpose of journalism is to inform the population and, as such, benefit democracy.”

Also flagged by the RRU was a Daily Mail/Mail Online article by journalist Ross Clark, which was widely shared by high-profile lockdown sceptics. Officials suggested press officers should get in touch with the Mail to “make them aware of the public health impact”, in other words, the public potentially not complying with the lockdown, although there were seemingly no inaccuracies or elements of disinformation in the article.

The Department of Health eventually shared its own rebuttal tweet claiming the article was “misleading” but the newspaper asked for this to be removed for “relationship management” reasons, a request that was met.

Separately, in an October 2021 report, Hartley-Brewer was labelled among “vaccine sceptics” for disagreeing with cabinet ministers even though she publicly stated she had two doses of the vaccine. Young was similarly mentioned in a “vaccine hesitancy” report for disagreeing with government policy.

The British Army’s 77th Brigade describes itself as meeting the challenges of “modern warfare” by monitoring and disseminating media material online. This unit was accused of collating tweets by people who expressed dissatisfaction with Covid-19 policy and passing them to the Cabinet Office.

A Government spokesperson said: “Online disinformation is a serious threat to the UK, which is why during the pandemic we brought together expertise from across government to monitor disinformation about Covid.

“These units used publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends and narratives.

“They did not target individuals or take any action that could impact anyone’s ability to discuss and debate issues freely.”

The post Government monitoring of Covid-19 policy media critics revealed appeared first on Press Gazette.

A new report has found Gen Z are much more likely than older consumers to fact-check their information – but are nonetheless more susceptible to Covid-19 conspiracy theories.

The report, produced by social-first publisher The News Movement and consultancy Oliver Wyman, urges news publishers to invest in personalisation and creating more entertaining, informative content.

The report is the culmination of a two-year research project into what businesses should know about consumers aged between 18 and 25.

The research reaffirms the already widely understood notion that young consumers get much of their news from social media. But it also makes clear the extent to which they do not trust that information.

The report said: “For news Gen Zers are 2.7 times more likely to tap social media than broadcast news, and while they might trust traditional news sources, less than a third use digital or print newspapers and magazines for information in the first place.”

While 57% of Gen Z respondents to the research said they use social media as one of their most common sources of information, they also ranked it as their least trusted source. Radio was the most trusted, followed by print news, podcasts, the internet in general and YouTube.

However, the report said: “60% of Gen Zers worry that short articles or videos… do not provide the full story. And over 50% feel more susceptible to misinformation on social media than on traditional news sources.”

Because they favour personalised content, 50% of the research’s Gen Z respondents said they were worried their social media content might be too biased. Less than half said they felt informed about the news, “compared with nearly 70% of other generations”.

Being conscious of this, respondents reported doing their own fact-checking: the report found that Gen Z is “nearly twice as likely as older generations to fact-check their news, and nearly 60% say they’ve developed techniques to spot unreliable or fake news”.

However, this appears to clash with another of the report’s findings: “Gen Zers who say they fact-check their news were 2.5 times more likely than other generations to generally agree with the idea that Covid-19 was a hoax promoted by the government.” Some 77% of Gen Z respondents who said they fact-check their news reported believing “at least one Covid-19 related conspiracy theory”.

The report’s authors speculated that what the respondents described as "fact-checking" may be more of a sniff test than actual verification: “While [Gen Z] might use traditional sources to verify the information from bigger news sources, they are often relying on ‘social proof’ methods to quickly distinguish faulty information on social media.

“By using comments, discussion, tone of voice and popularity as indicators of whether they are looking at the ‘truth’, Gen Zers are often allowing intuition to drive fact-checking.”

The authors encouraged news providers to incorporate links into their social-first content to make it as easy as possible to check information, citing Snap’s dynamic stories feature as a successful example of established news outlets catering to young audiences.

How news publishers can reach Gen Z

The report had some key takeaways for news businesses hoping to reach Gen Z.

To get in front of younger consumers, the authors said “businesses must engage with this demographic on its preferred platforms, using content that is both informative and entertaining”.

For news in particular, they said: “Gen Zers like the convenience, immediate access and diverse viewpoints available on social media.”

Gen Z respondents said it was twice as important to them that their media content was created specifically for their age cohort than it was that it had an honest tone or style.

The authors recommended: “To reach this generation, news organisations and companies should create visually and sonically pleasing content dripping with (authentic) personality.”

Similarly, companies should hire “niche creators who are highly educated in their topic and arm them with quality information that can be shared in digestible fashion”.

[Read more: How do you sell news to Gen Z? Write about social justice, don’t insult them and stop saying ‘newspaper’]

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Update, Wednesday 18 January 2023: The BBC has apologised for not being “better prepared to challenge” claims made by a guest who hijacked an interview to call for a suspension on mRNA vaccines.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, five days after the incident, the BBC contextualised some of Dr Aseem Malhotra’s claims and wrote: “Professor Peter Openshaw from Imperial College London, and also a member of the UK Vaccine Network, was also interviewed on the News Channel and explained that cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) following the Covid vaccine are very small and the risk of complications that are seen after Covid by comparison is ‘probably 100 times greater or more.’”

Nonetheless, the corporation said: “We apologise that we were not better prepared at the time to challenge Dr Malhotra’s points during his interview.”

Original story, Friday 13 January 2023: BBC News appears to have been taken by surprise by a guest who used his appearance to call for a suspension on mRNA vaccine inoculations against Covid-19.

Dr Aseem Malhotra appeared on the BBC News channel on Friday morning to discuss new NICE [National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] guidance that more patients should be issued statins for their cardiovascular risk.

However, about three minutes into his appearance Malhotra pivoted suddenly to claim Covid vaccines that use mRNA technology – i.e. the Pfizer and Moderna jabs – were themselves a cardiovascular risk.

Malhotra said: “What is almost certain – if I can just say this – my own research has found, and this is something that is probably a likely contributing factor, is that the Covid mRNA vaccines do carry a cardiovascular risk. And I’ve actually called for the suspension of this pending an inquiry, because there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment over what’s causing the excess deaths.”

Presenter Lukwesa Burak, apparently unprepared for the claim, asked: “So what you’re saying in terms of the mRNA link to cardiovascular risk is that that’s been proven medically, scientifically?”

The overwhelming bulk of peer-reviewed literature suggests that mRNA vaccines are safe. One recent meta-analysis did identify a slightly elevated risk of myocarditis following a second mRNA vaccination among younger people, in particular men, but the author of that paper nonetheless said: “As a clinician, I strongly recommend that people get a Covid-19 vaccine unless there are absolute contraindications such as known allergies.”

Malhotra subsequently tweeted a video of his seven-minute appearance shortly before 10am on Friday with the caption: “BREAKING BBC News – Cardiologist says likely contributory factor to excess cardiovascular deaths is Covid mRNA vaccine and roll out should be suspended pending an inquiry.” At the time of writing his tweet had received 3.1 million views and the video 1.2 million.

The BBC News broadcast was met with triumph among those opposed to the vaccine, who often complain of being shut out of the mainstream, and anger toward the corporation in most other quarters.

A typical quote tweet from a supporter of Malhotra said: “This is huge. If the BBC is willing to acknowledge the dangers of mRNA jabs, it’s all over.”

Another said: “Hard to believe MSM [mainstream media] is finally admitting the harm being caused by the vaccine.”

From the opposite camp, one person commented: “Very, very poor judgement from the BBC in inviting him on.”

A BBC spokesperson said: “Dr Aseem Malhotra was invited on to the BBC News Channel to talk about the latest NICE recommendations on statins. During the discussion he made unprompted claims about the Covid mRNA vaccine.

“We then asked Professor Peter Openshaw, who represents the overwhelming scientific consensus on the vaccine, to be interviewed on air on this topic and he challenged and rebutted the claims that had been made.”

The post BBC News accidentally airs call for suspension of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines appeared first on Press Gazette.

If your publishing company is facing a dip right now you might draw some consolation from the story of Ink.

In 2019 it was the largest in-flight magazine publisher in the world with turnover of $100m per year. Then, in March 2020, it suddenly had to struggle to stay afloat as every airline in the world was grounded by the pandemic.

Chief executive Simon Leslie told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast how he reinvented and re-energised the business with the help of 50 of the world’s leading motivational speakers.

This year Ink is back to $80m a year turnover, is growing fast and looks completely different to how it did in 2019.

Leslie’s book – Equanimity: Diary of a CEO in Crisis – tells the story of how he weathered the pandemic and also includes transcripts of 50 talks given to Ink staff by famous inspirational figures form around the world.

“The essence of the book is I made 50 phone calls, 52 phone calls, and I asked people to come and help me just to keep my team inspired because that was the only thing that I thought I could do that would be useful.

“I treated this as off season. We were in training camp and when the season starts again, we’ll be ready to go.”

Speakers joining the team via Zoom included cold water health guru Wim Hoff, Everest climber Alison Levine and Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort.

“These were really highly known motivational speakers. What I realised was that as part of this process of helping them, actually, I was giving myself an education and some inspiration.

“I designed in my head a business that would come out of the other side and that’s what I went about building.

“In ’19, we had 33 in-flight magazines. We just had record issues in most of them in February and March. So it was at its peak when the legs got taken from underneath it. We had a very small TV network and we had some digital websites and that was it.

“Today, it’s a marketplace. We have four in-flight magazines with maybe one more coming back next year.

“We bought Business Traveller (US edition) and we’ve turned that around. We bought some retargeting technology and we sold that to 13 airlines and people like Agoda so we can help them monetise their data.

“CNN decided to leave the airport and I saw an opportunity in that and we took over all their gated screens and luggage carousel screens, and we turned our nice TV business into an absolute monster. It’s now the biggest TV network at the airports, all over the US. It’s just about to open in Addis Ababa of all places.

“And we’ve got very close to an Asian airport as well, so we’ve grown that TV network into something very special. And we’re also providing free wifi in flight, which was an expensive medium before, and now we’re allowing people to get free wifi by watching some adverts.”

Leslie’s hunch that travel would bounce back post pandemic bigger than before has paid off. He said October was the biggest month ever for global travel with many airlines now booked out well into the New Year.

Asked what he sees in his crystal ball for media companies in the year ahead, and for advice about how to react to a recession, he said: “The immediate thing it triggered in me was, to all my recruiters make some phone calls. There’s lots of people available for work. It’s been a tough recruiting market.

“During the whole pandemic, very few businesses went bust because the government underwrote them, lent them money, and there wasn’t a proper clear up. And I think that was part of the problem. So we need a little bit of clear up.

“There’s too much media, there’s too many things going on, being sold, we need a bit of consolidation.

“I think there will always be appetite and there’ll always be a good market. You’ve got to be prepared to fight for it though. The phone’s not going to ring. You’ve got to get out there and make a lot of noise and make people aware of what you’re doing and help them with solutions.”

The post From $100m in-flight mags giant to zero and up again: How Ink bounced back appeared first on Press Gazette.

Five men and a woman who verbally abused BBC journalist Nicholas Watt at a protest have now been convicted of a public order offence, according to police.

A court previously heard how members of the group intimidated Newsnight’s political editor Nicholas Watt during the politically charged incident in Whitehall on 14 June last year.

Djazia Chaib-Eddour, 44, Christopher Aitken, 62, Martin Hockridge, 58, Alexander Peat, 34, and Gary Purnell, 45, all denied using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to use harassment, alarm or distress.

They stood trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court from 29 June to 1 July, while Joseph Olswang, 40, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing.

A verdict of guilty in all cases was recorded on Monday and the group will be sentenced on 30 August, according to the Metropolitan Police.

Olswang, who the court heard has bipolar disorder and was in the midst of a manic episode at the time of the protest when he was seen “shouting and screaming” at Watt, was previously given a 20-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months.

Jonathan Munro, director of BBC News, said: “Nick Watt is a brilliant journalist who was just doing his job that day when he was targeted on the streets of Westminster. All journalists should be able to carry out their work without intimidation or impediment and we will continue to stand up for our right to do so.”

National Union of Journalists general secretary Michelle Stanistreet echoed this, saying: “The harassment of Nick was completely unacceptable and convictions against those responsible should send a clear message – that journalists must not be targets because of the work they do and that attacks will not go unpunished.”

Detective Constable James Harold, the officer in the case, said: “A video of this incident prompted a huge amount of online comment and public concern. The behaviour shown by these people was unacceptable.

“Members of the public, of any profession, have the right to go about their day without being subjected to verbal harassment or actions that put them in fear for their safety.”

At the trial, Watt told Westminster Magistrates’ Court he felt like “prey” and that he was “very scared” as he was pursued by demonstrators last year. He had gone to observe the protest, which started “reasonably good natured” but “deteriorated”, he said.

Footage played in court showed Watt, who was wearing a BBC lanyard, walking away from the crowd after people started shouting in his face. He then started running, making his way behind the gates of Downing Street.

Some of the shouts heard in the video included “traitor” and “how can you sleep at night?”

Prosecutor Alex Matthews said the five defendants in the trial had “engaged in mob rule” and that the crowd in general had “whipped up in joint fervour”. Watt said that despite reporting from unrest in Northern Ireland he had never had an experience like it before.

Aitken told the court he was “sorry” for “any distress that Nick Watt’s family feel” over the incident but added that the journalist was partly responsible and may have attended the protest to agitate demonstrators.

Co-defendant Hockridge accepted shouting “traitor” at Watt several times but denied trying to make him feel threatened, saying “that’s not what I’m about”.

Peat also accepted saying “traitor” but told police in his interview “I didn’t call him any four-letter words”. Chaib-Eddour walked with Watt for several metres and told him “you need to start reporting on honest journalism”.

Purnell gave a no comment interview to police and chose not to give evidence in court.

Picture: BBC Newsnight/Youtube screenshot

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The editor of City AM has said the “underdog” free paper’s return to pre-pandemic distribution levels “probably proves a lot of sceptics wrong”.

Referring to City AM as well as competitors which include Metro and the Evening Standard, Andy Silvester said: “I think the free sheet market – I don’t think it’s going away, but I just think all of us have had to work bloody hard to keep our readers’ attention.”

Silvester discussed City AM’s journey through the pandemic and digital transformation, as well as prospects for his competitors, for the fifth episode of Press Gazette’s weekly podcast The Future of Media Explained.

The City AM presses turned off in March 2020 for what they thought at the time would be three to four weeks – turning into an 18-month hiatus which included two cancelled plans to relaunch in autumn 2020 as commuter footfall remained low and, then, two more lockdowns followed.

Silvester said if he and the team had known how long the print break would be, “we might not have thought that we would have survived”.

But in the meantime City AM became a digital-first operation for the first time, putting more focus on SEO, early and late breaking stories, launching podcast The City View and email newsletters, refreshing the website infrastructure, and building relationships with platforms from Google to Flipboard.

In addition the website attracts certain sets of readers that go beyond its core City print readership, for example people who may come for its Crypto AM section each day.

City AM’s website surpassed three million monthly unique visitors according to Comscore for the first time in February 2021 and now regularly tops two million, which Silvester said was around a 100% increase since pre-Covid.

City AM editor Andy Silvester in the office. Picture: City AM

Silvester, who succeeded Christian May as editor in November 2020 and was The Sun‘s head of PR before joining City AM in 2019, said: “We’ve changed a bit as a company and our focuses have changed but fundamentally the newspaper is part of our DNA.

“The City of London, Canary Wharf is part of our DNA and being there back in a physical presence has been really satisfying and I think, you know, it sounds odd to say it, but, actually we’ve probably come out of the 18-month hiatus in a stronger place as a media organisation, as a newsroom, than we were going in because we were forced to accelerate our digital transformation…”

City AM Awards 2022 at The Guildhall in London on 28 April 2022. Picture: Gretel Ensignia/City AM

Events have also returned, with around 400 people attending City AM’s first awards evening since the pandemic began in April at London’s Guildhall.

A number of staff were made redundant during the pandemic, primarily those involved in the production of the newspaper, but “many” have since returned. There are now around 25 members of editorial staff, about the same as pre-pandemic despite nine being made redundant in autumn 2020.

Silvester said: “Without the legacy costs of some of the other publications that are out there we are able to actually focus most of our resources and spend on reporters and making sure that we’ve still got news reporters with enough time and space to actually get to know their beats.

“You look at some of the other places, it always seems like reporters and subs end up on the cuts list and obviously that’s not in the long-term going to do anybody in the media any favours if the people that end up getting lost in tough environments are the people who are out there chasing the news because without actually producing decent original content we’re all buggered, I think is probably the best phrase I can use.”

Since returning in print City AM’s free distribution has ranged between 76,465 in January and 81,713 in April. This compares to 85,738 in February 2020 just before the pandemic.

Silvester said this "probably proves a lot of sceptics wrong - on getting the paper back, step one, but also getting it back at those circulation levels. I think there's been a lot of discussion about the death of the freesheet and whether or not freesheets can survive.

"I fundamentally think that they can and they will and that if they're done properly and done well you can keep an engaged audience..."

This distribution level has come despite some "teething problems" which included a shortage of van drivers able to run the papers into central London each night.

However the paper has "significantly upped" its office distribution and the team are now considering home delivery for the first time later this year, which would follow in the footsteps of the Evening Standard which experimented with delivery during the pandemic. City AM also has new distribution points further out in the commuter belt to reach people who may be working at home more but leaving their homes in the morning to grab a coffee.

Silvester added: "There's a value in a print newspaper and I know there are some people who think that such a thing doesn't exist but I think if you put it together well, if you are a friend of the reader and giving them something they can't get online, if you're allowing them to sit down for five, ten, 15 minutes and feel informed but also feel like they're a part of this revival of the City of London and of London more generally I think people will still pick it up."

Silvester noted that it probably helped City AM that it is smaller in "ownership, size, legacy costs" than other free newspapers it is often compared to like Metro and Evening Standard and therefore has different commercial pressures. But he said: "More power to all of them."

Of the market, he added: "What I would say is there remains a place for free sheets in the same way there remains a place for paid-for newspapers, which is giving people properly curated, thought-through, news, features, analysis. I don't think the desire for newspapers and print newspapers is ever going to go away.

"What I think has changed is the level of competition that we've got to grab five, ten, 15, 20 minutes of people's attention has gone through the roof. So we've got to get better and become more engaging and innovate every day in order to keep those audiences.

"The eye-catching front page still matters. The championing of certain causes that your readers care about still matter. And there's always elements of that online and there are some online-only publications that do that really well. But I think print papers that have personality, that can be trusted and that people are really spending time putting together and designing so that you get light and shade and all the news you need and all these phrases that editors use and throw around - I think that's still there and I think we're just being forced to compete more and more...

"It's just doing it in slightly different ways and making sure we're staying ahead of the competition, because people talk about who our competition is, and maybe there's a bit of me in my head that thinks the FT, the Telegraph business desk, et cetera but it's just as much people being sent Instagram videos of golden retrievers on the commute in so how do we make our product as interesting and engaging and as valuable to our readers. That's what we're trying to do every day."

Hear more from City AM editor Andy Silvester, including about the commercial response to the newspaper's return and digital transformation, in the latest episode of Press Gazette's podcast Future of Media Explained.

Picture: City AM

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