Update: On 21 November Essex Police said it had dropped its investigation into Allison Pearson’s tweet.

The force said: “We investigate crimes reported to us without fear or favour.

“We’re sometimes faced with allegations of crime where people have strong opposing views.

“That’s why we work so hard to remain impartial and to investigate allegations, regardless of where they might lead.”

Original comment by media law expert David Banks: Before Essex Police embarked on their journey to knock on Allison Pearson’s door they might have been well-advised to check on the number of successful prosecutions of journalists for inciting racial hatred.

I am not aware of any, of what we might call mainstream journalists. Social media blowhards, sure, members of extremist organisations, yes, some of them. National newspaper columnists – I’m scratching my head very hard to find one.

And that is a good thing, because having police officers turn up at a journalist’s door for something they wrote is a bad thing in a society that values freedom of speech.

The need to protect freedom of speech means there is a high bar for prosecution under the Public Order Act for inciting racial hatred, and any such prosecution has to be authorised by the Attorney General – who must be absolutely delighted at the prospect of this hot potato heading towards his desk.

So let’s look at what Allison Pearson wrote and try to see whether or not this gets anywhere close to getting over that high bar.

Pearson was not told what post prompted the complaint to police. But The Guardian has spoken to the alleged complainant and Press Gazette has posted a screengrab of the message which appears to be at the root of the issue, taken from a website which archives web pages.

The words which appear to form the crux of the complaint are “Jew haters” which Pearson used in a post on X about a group of police officers posing with a group of demonstrators. This she compared negatively with the Met Police’s refusal to pose with a group supporting British Friends of Israel. It would seem that in doing this she had mistaken a group of people demonstrating in support of a Pakistani political party with pro-Palestinian protesters, and this is apparently why the post was deleted.

The law says an offence is committed, as the Crown Prosecution Service puts it, if “someone says or does something which is threatening, abusive or insulting, and the person either intends to stir up racial hatred, or make it likely that racial hatred will be stirred up.”

I don’t think there is the remotest possibility of showing that Pearson had any intent to stir up racial hatred, so to prove this offence the police and CPS are relying on that second phrase “make it likely that racial hatred” will be stirred up.

Let’s go back to Pearson’s words. In her post she made no reference to race, colour, nationality or ethnic origin. It would seem she thought they were pro-Palestinian protesters, and as we know from the demonstrations that have taken place across the UK concerning Gaza, the crowds have included people from many different ethnic backgrounds. It is, in my view, obvious that her tweet was not rooted in any reference to racial or ethnic identity, but that she, mistakenly it would seem, thought they were part of the pro-Palestine demonstrations and she had reportedly confused the flag they were holding with that of Hamas. Those mistakes, if she did make them, do not in any way make this a racial incident.

I think the police ought to have spent more time considering the material that had been reported to them and whether its content could bear any sort of criminal meaning. Before they turned up to knock on Allison Pearson’s door, a view should have been sought from the CPS and from the AG’s office as to the wisdom of this course of action.

The worrying thing is the chilling effect such police action can have.

Allison Pearson is a seasoned journalist and has the backing of the Telegraph, but what of those on smaller titles, without recourse to expensive lawyers and unable to muster the sort of support the Telegraph can call upon? The effect of action like this is to discourage columnists and editors from being outspoken for fear that they will open the door to the police who want to talk to them about something they wrote.

Without even bringing a prosecution the police have lowered the bar of how we define incitement, and that is something we should all worry about.

The post Essex Police drops ‘misguided and chilling’ action against Allison Pearson appeared first on Press Gazette.

I fell foul of the #metoo Generation last night.

“Excuse me,” she said, smiling sweetly as I hobbled across the ballroom floor at the Connaught. “Excuse me, but I thought what you said about diversity just now was a little rude. . .”

Well I think she said ‘rude’ but I can’t be certain. The key word and chunks of what followed were camouflaged by the eruption of sound engineered by the mobile disco’s morose DJ signalling that the formal portion of the British Journalism Awards presentations was over and that the dancing should begin.

Journalists don’t dance. The younger ones, high on the excitement of being asked to join their editor’s expensive table at the annual ‘do’, are far too busy trading boasts and gossip and seeking potential partners for a “let’s make a night of it” excursion to the nightclub next door. The middle-aged, middle class, middle executives who still nurse ambition are too busy backstabbing and buttering-up to even think of strutting whatever stuff they have left amid the forlorn debris of a Fleet Street fandango.

No. We cottonheads with our big bellies and bogus reputations as braggarts who bullied our way to the top are the only card-carrying members of the company to venture onto the bottomlit postage stamp of a ballroom space. And only then as a shortcut to the lavatories (too much wine with beer chasers over dinner followed by an hour or more of mind-numbing, bladder-challenging build-ups to “And the winner is. . .” produces a graceless stampede of the Hot Metal Generation towards the (hopefully) deserted loos on the floor below.

So that was how we met: in the middle of a deserted dance floor, she young and slim in little black cocktail number stamped ‘quality press’ with long, black and well-cut hair; me, tabloid to my core, desperate to pass her on either side, ambition fixed solely on a waiting slab of white porcelain but denied further progress as she feinted almost imperceptibly, first to left and then to right to impede my flight.

I will not attempt to chronicle her side of the conversation that followed. I picked up only fragments as some thunderous dance number echoed around the fast-emptying dinner-dance area as those more fortunate, not fixed by the Sweet One’s glittering eye, headed either for the free bar or the Gents.

“Rude?” I asked. “In what way?”

From what I understood of the perfectly polite, even friendly exchange that followed, the Young Thing felt that I had been a little flip in my brief, unscripted remarks following my arrival on stage to present the Popular Journalism award half-an-hour earlier.

I struggled to recall the moment. I had left my table fifteen minutes earlier than was necessary and hobbled, walking stick in hand, to position myself at the side of the stage in order not to delay the moment when I would be called upon.

When summoned I had struggled unsteadily up two unrailed steps and joined Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford at the rostrum, there entrusting him with my walking stick while I began to open the golden envelope wherein was contained the winner’s name, mumbling grumpily into the microphone as I did so:

“I told young Ponsford that getting an overweight, one-eyed former editor with knackered knees and a walking stick up two steps and across a stage was not a particularly sensible plan, but he waved aside my protest and told me that it would ‘illustrate Press Gazette’s commitment to diversity’.” That delivered, I duly delivered “And the winner is. . .” And thought no more of it.

Actually, no such conversation with Dominic had taken place. It was my idea of a joke. But it had obviously perturbed the young woman who accosted me.

She explained, with all seriousness, that diversity was not a subject about which to be flippant; that there might well be people at the event who suffered under the yoke of being different; and who had suffered intolerable consequences. At least, that’s what I think she said, competing as she was with Noddy Holder of Slade yelling “It’s Chr-I-I-I-I-stmas!”

I smiled, I thought apologetically, but her face stiffened and I realised she had thought I was about to be patronising. Nothing was further from my mind.

“I am different,” I said quietly and, pointing to my left eye, “In addition to being elderly, which can be a problem in itself, I am blind in this eye, meningitis left me with a poor sense of balance and I have arthritic knees, hence the walking stick.”

She was as undeterred as I would hope any journalist I ever employed would have been. “Still,” she insisted, “you should be more careful. It could be taken the wrong way.” At least, that’s what I think she said, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody permitting.

“Sorry,” I heard myself say, and immediately wondered why.

She smiled sweetly and, mission accomplished, bowed aside to let me pass. What followed, after a slow descent of stairs and a long corridor trek along the floor below, had rarely felt as sweet.

Five minutes later, back in a bar and Ubering up a cab, I surveyed the remaining group of (largely) elderly (mainly) males and decided that, needs be, this might have to be my final appearance at an awards dinner.

Diversity decrees journalism to be No Country for Old Men.

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AY-OOP! Ads are back on t’national newspaper front pages! Well, they are if the front page of the launch edition of 24, my “new national newspaper for t’North of England” was anything to go by.

Not that I could readily find a copy of what promised to be the best news for God’s Own Country since The Guardian’s messy divorce from Manchester.

A standing ovation from Guardian Media, Press Gazette and Radio 4’s Today programme – the kind of orchestrated fanfare that Classic FM Magazine might reserve for the Second Coming of Barbirolli and the Halle to the Free Trade Hall – had me racing down to the paper shop shortly after dawn.

But – pardon my French – where the bloody ’ell WAS t’bugger?

“Covering the North of England right up to the Scottish Borders,” the new northerly national’s excited spokespersons promised. Well, there were nowt doing at my village shop and we up here in Northumberland are as far north as England goes, just across the Tweed from the Scottish Borders region (which 24 also hinted it would serve).

“Haven’t heard anything about it from the wholesalers, dear,” said the (Scots) lassie in the village shop. “It was on the radio, right enough, but we’ve heard nothing.”

No sightings further south (but still terribly northern) on Tyne, Wear, Tees or Humber-sides, either.

So where WAS this “alternative to the ‘south-dominated’ national press we had been promised? What happened to our sports news “written from a northern, rather than a south-east perspective” which would focus on “the Manchester Uniteds and the Liverpools rather than the Chelseas and the Arsenals”?

In Workington and Aspatria, that’s where. On shop counters in Carlisle and Hexham; at WH Smiths’ motorway service outlets along the M6 from the north end of Preston to bonnie Lockerbie o’er the Border. And that was IT!

The 40p ‘national newspaper for the north’ produced by the Carlisle-based CN Group (regional publishers of the North West Evening Mail and Cumberland News) was little more than a Lake District Metro powered by Press Association.

This review appears by kind collusion of the editor of Press Gazette, who emailed me the complete launch edition (easily available in bloody London, of course!), probably in violation of a host of copyright regulations over which, I hope, CN will sue.

Anyway, front page ads are back if this five-days-a-week Cumberland News is anything to go by: a foot-of-page banner for the Stanwix Park Holiday Centre in Silloth, Cumbria, graces the opener. Oh, and Stanwix Park pops up on pages 5 and 7, too.

Talking of advertisers, the county’s ‘premier Citroen dealers’ (Telford’s of Carlisle) get a good show on Page Three and the best pun in the paper excruciates its way onto Page 11 in the ad for furniture shop Sofasogood (geddit?) of Barrow-in-Furness, where 24 also circulates, presumably.

The paper’s first splash reveals that a 12-year-old boy is the youngest football fan among a hundred football thugs to be banned from the nation’s terraces following a riot in Newcastle (oh dear, 24 doesn’t circulate there!) at the match with Sunderland (nope, nor there, either!).

The rest of the news is straight from Press Association a la Metro, nothing particularly northern other than a report of ‘North-West property prices’ unless you count ‘Rave police attacked’ (northern Essex) or ‘People smugglers held’ (northern Kent).

An Indy-style note from editor Mike Haworth greets “the 1.1million readers in our corner of this northern part of the UK” (a sneaky admission of the corporate CoN there, I think) but it is left to features writer Ella Walker to get down and dirty with a northern icon.

Freddie Flintoff is right oop us northerners’ backstreets, especially as he was talking about an upcoming TV series in which he drives a fish ‘n’ chip van (as northern as black pudding!) around Britain talking – and being quoted – in authentic northernese:

“It’s me breakfast,” he says, with a gobful of apple. “I still go out with me mates. . . enjoy me-self. . . still train as much for me head as me body.” Ms Walker can’t resist quoting him in northernspeak, even when he’s turning down an (un-offered) 007 role: “[Bond] don’t do owt but strut around. . .”

There’s sport a-plenty, all of the usual stuff: Euro 2016 majoring on Rooney and Albania (maybe copies of 24 will pop up there?), motor racing, cricket, the gee-gees and all. But nothing ‘specially proper’ northern.

Unless you count columnist Roger Lytollis’s review of Stone Roses’ four smash hit, 60,000-seat sellout concerts at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium.

No, he wasn’t actually AT the event (remember, 24’s version of the north only starts at Preston; Roger was at a warm-up gig at the Sands Centre, Carlisle, a fortnight earlier, along with 1,800 of the 1.1million fortunates from “our corner” of the UK.

Like 24, Stone Roses were okay that day . . . but not the real thing.

Former Daily Mirror editor David Banks now edits the website VoiceoftheNorth.net

The post Ay-oop! Berwick-based former Mirror editor David Banks reviews new ‘national’ daily for the North 24 appeared first on Press Gazette.

Here’s a wild thought: why don’t we get the hell out of the Middle East and let the murdering bastards get on with it without us?

By ‘us’ I’m not talking about the Coalition. British and American governments can continue dealing death from the air with their drones and fighter jets; troops, overt and covert, are more than welcome to carry on trying to teach the so-called bad boys a lesson and the so-called good guys how to fight.

No, I’m talking about US. The media.

Until we work out quite where we stand (crouch/hide/retreat?) in this crazy modern form of warfare in which no one knows whose side anyone is on and where an enemy’s major objective seems to be to wage jihad on English-speaking journalists, the media should do a Dunkirk.

I’m suggesting what was previously, professionally unthinkable (and probably still is to the John Simpson/ Kate Adie/ Bob Fisk breed of reporter): I’m saying the media should get out of Iraq, Syria and Gaza and declare a blackout on reporting anything more than political events and diplomatic moves in the Middle East.

Sure, they’ll call me a coward at the Frontline Club, blackball my membership application to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. . . I might even get my good eye blacked at the Coach and Horses. But I’ve ceased to believe that our presence in the wintry warscape that followed the Arab Spring has ceased to be anything but a hindrance to the prospects of peace.

The public murder-by-execution of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff are what tipped me over. Now British aid worker David Haines has been condemned to decapitation by those same cruel captors.

Prime Minister David Cameron will not accede to terrorist demands; as he made clear at the Nato summit in Wales this week, no ransom will be paid. Thus young Haines, a man inspired by his humanity to help others, is consigned to an inhuman end.

Journalists must, above all, be touched by these despicable acts. As a former Sunday Mirror consultant editor I was numbed by the 2010 battlefield death of that paper’s war correspondent, Rupert Hamer; as an admiring supporter of Marie Colvin’s 2010 Foreign Reporter of the Year award – her second – I was appalled by her murder on the orders of the Syrian government two years later.

But the Foley and Sotloff executions, filmed for YouTube and thence skilfully broadcast to a world of Twitterers, Googlers and blog-watchers convince me that journalists and media managements together should now make the decision which, rightly, a free press would not accept from any government: we should boycott the battlefields in a region that has become, in the words of Committee to Protect Journalists’ deputy director Robert Mahoney, “a killing field for journalists”.

So far in 2014, CPJ says, Syria has been the world’s deadliest country for reporters. Five journalists besides Foley and Sotloff have been killed there this year. About twenty more journalists are currently missing in Syria alone. The exact number is unknown, kept secret by relatives and news organisations who believe publicity will hamper any negotiation

Some may be held for ransom by criminal gangs – one French journalist was released recently, reportedly on payment of $450,000 by his government – but most are believed to be propaganda pawns in the clutches of the savage, internet -savvy Islamic State, which holds British and American hostages for public execution as a means of terrorising a horrified Western public.

And WE, the media – alongside the eager, mindless sensation-seekers of the anti-social media – are the conduits for the terrorists’ terrifying message. We are prolonging war and provoking atrocities by simply Being There.

So I reluctantly suggest something that is anathema to my profession; something that neither US nor British governments can decree, a strategy that only journalists and their employers can enact:

• That we stop publicising these terrorists and their sickening atrocities
• That while maintaining reporting of diplomatic and political developments we cease to report the mindless madness that is the Middle East
• That we, in effect, switch off the oxygen of publicity on which terrorism feeds.

No pictures, no film, no live reporting from the latest appalling war crime site; no newspaper coverage of the latest awful sensation spread across five blood-soaked pages. And no re-reporting of the chilling chiff-chaff that is tweeted with abandon by sensation-seeking sickos.

It is not just journalists such an action would protect; aid workers, soldiers and civilians are equally at risk from the madmen dedicated to defeating the invading Western armies of ‘crusaders’ – for that is how they see us – by terrifying an all-too-easily horrified civilian public in the West.

There is a price to be paid, for sure: massacres will be unseen, acts of appalling criminality will go unreported and brutalised indigenous civilian populations will undoubtedly suffer. But it is their country. We cannot fight their wars for ever, risking mounting death tolls and acts of horrendous cruelty committed upon soldier and civilian alike in the name of a cruel god.

Reporters are no longer accidental victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught out by roadside mines or shellfire to be mourned as truth-seeking non-combatants. We have become targets.

Jihad has been declared on journalists.

David Banks is a former editor of the Daily Mirror and former editorial director of Mirror Group Newspapers.

The post Why journalists should voluntarily withdraw oxygen of publicity from IS appeared first on Press Gazette.

I KNOW that no one in their right mind wants to buy one of THEM these days, but look at the plus points: Lots of turns around the block – you’d expect that in a model built in 1881 – but regularly serviced by mechanics and only ever gets an outing on a Sunday.

Drivers? Plenty, squire, including the legendary Hannen Swaffer and the greatest circulation getter of all time, Harry Ainsworth, whose 32 years at the helm (eat your hearts out, modern editors!) saw circulation rise from 250,000 to more than five million in the ‘50s.

Er, afraid not squire, no vicars; it was never THAT sort of paper. But it did boast a couple of – ahem! – rather carefree lady drivers in recent years. And, frankly, either Wendy Henry or Bridget Rowe would probably make the perfect chauffeuse if they could be lured back from dog-walking and running fashion shops and see eye-to-eye with the probable new owner.

Oh, didn’t I mention her? Sue Douglas has been kicking tyres and hunkering down with the money men to see if she can come up with a part-ex deal to partner Trinity Mirror who, frankly, haven’t won a race with The People since they inherited it from Odhams. Ms Douglas wouldn’t get on with Wen and Bridge, the Terrible Twins: she’s a power broker herself and would undoubtedly prefer some stubbly-chinned charmer with a magazine background to give her toy a spin every Sunday.

I’d offer to do it myself but I fear the modern editor’s chair – taxi trips instead of limos, receipts required for expenses, no hanky-panky with the PCC – is not a good fit for the likes of Banks, thanks. Especially if reports of her plans for The People are accurate. I’m told she sees it as the natural successor to the NoW, a sort of News of the People (NO!) to be achieved by adopting the old NoW racing paint job (while avoiding charges of ‘passing off’) and fuelling it with the same celebrity drivel that is losing readership at Sunday’s versions of The Sun, Star and Mirror month by month.

A better plan might be to take a leaf out of the Financial Times’ Survival Manual; no, bear with me, Banksy’s not gone completely bonkers . . .The only time I see it is at the weekend: fine paper, magazine, lots of general content and available currently over 48 hours. Nice idea: I see that wily piano player Rusbridger is trying to do the same by owning the weekend with his Guardian/Observer package.

The People can’t compete on intellectual terms with the aforementioned, nor can it hide from the fact that it appeals not to a digitally switched-on younger generation but to that fast-increasing and increasingly long-lived age group the over-50s. ‘Free for a Month with Every New Bus Pass!’ is not a slogan to be sneered at. Oldies are habitual readers and have been weaned on to papers. Twenty-five years of blinkered management and a fashion for appointing adolescent editors has shaken them loose.

How to get them back?

For Her: human interest, good reads – fictional and historical – competitions, travel and fashion offers. Looking good is important: Spain and Portugal are the holiday haunts, Matalan and Primark the fashion labels, Marks and Spencer the makeover market.

For Him: sport right across the weekend. Start selling The People on Saturday morning against the weekday red-tops. Packed front- and back-of-book with news and sports previews, the central features core would ride unchanged across the weekend into the Sunday paper where front and back would be entirely updated with breaking news and match reports.

A million buyers at a quid a time is a mite ambitious for a paper whose last ABC sale was under half that.

Maybe doubling the selling time will double your dough?l

The post A plan for The People? Take a look at the FT appeared first on Press Gazette.

Being asked to speak at the 62nd Glendale Shepherds’ Supper is – I’m not kidding – as daunting as the time I was invited to address diners at the posh Royal Automobile Club HQ in Pall Mall. “Didn’t think you’d let me in,” I joked with the penguin suits on that occasion. “I’m with the AA!”

Shepherds’ Supper at ‘The Tanky’ had been a superb but lengthy night; my best-laid plans, frayed and finally filleted by a succession of wonderful toasts, music and humour, saw your columnist, the last speaker of the night, rise to his feet minutes before midnight.

Taking the air later, outside, my new friend extended a consolatory hand and said sadly: “I was told you were going to be really funny.” Perhaps sensing my pain, he moved quickly to heal the hurt. “I mean, the Duke gave one of those toasts a few years ago and he was very good.”

It didn’t help that deep in a pocket my fingers clutched four pages of abandoned notes that had been honed, first to two sheets of A4 then shredded further to a series of scribbled headings on the back of a menu card. Or that worried glances around my intended audience as the second of two intervals came and went reinforced my determination that only brevity would preserve my reputation.

More importantly, memories from the life I left behind in Fleet Street haunted me as the night drew long and my blue pencil flew across the pages of my speedily edited remarks, excising line after line, laugh by laugh:

And hadn’t I learned, shortly before leaving for Wooler in company with the Byreman and the Lawnmower Salesman, that yet another legend from my past had shuffled off to The Great Newsroom in the Sky? Not, for me, a great night for knockabout.

You’d have laughed at the late Leslie Toulson. We all did, at first. In an era when the red top tabloid agenda ranged wider than kiss-and-tell Les was The Sun medical editor whose appearance – lopsided toupee, thick pebble glasses and protruding porcelain teeth – made him ideal for the post: the unhealthiest man on the staff!

For all that, Les was the editor’s dream: a constant supplier of ‘Hey, Mabel!’ stories, particularly on sleepy Sunday afternoons when a Monday morning splash was always going to be hard to source. You might remember some of the stories he fished out of learned medical journals and remote scientific papers and laundered through The Sun into folklore:

Sardines Make You Randy, Scientists Prove… Sperm Swims Faster in Outer Space, Astronauts Warned… Cows Give More Milk Listening to Pop Music… Radioactive Fish Breed Better; every Toulson headline demanded an exclamation mark.

They were simplified from the scientific, for sure, and were written for everyday readers to understand; but they stood the Grain of Truth Test and defied the boffins’ denials.

That’s what I miss about Fleet Street and The Smoke, even given my perfect existence up here in The Godzone: days when sensible journalism was carried out by hard-working professionals with a quiver full of pencils and a nose for news rather than cheque books and a chancer’s talent to embarrass.

The post David Banks: ‘Give me a nose for news over cheque books and chancers’ appeared first on Press Gazette.

The Racing Post is to print a full-colour French language edition on a digital press based just outside Brussels and distributed by Ladbrokes.

Initially the edition will go to half of the British bookmaker’s 400 Belgian betting shops.

If the trial, using an Océ digital printer, is successful the Racing Post will be made available throughout Belgium and, eventually, right across Europe. Unlike conventional print presses, which require expensive plates to be made, on digital presses it costs the same to print one or a thousand copies.

Donal Barron, executive in charge of the Post’s business development, told Press Gazette: ‘We’re looking to extend the breadth of the paper overseas. Our digital version goes live in the next couple of weeks and, depending on how the initial trial goes, we will expand the digital print across Europe.”

Racecards, form guides and tips for horses and dogs will be generated and translated at the Post’s offices in Canary Wharf before being sent as a PDF file to a plant just outside the Belgian capital and printed at 2am for distribution to betting shops before breakfast.

The printer, Druco, has recently invested €3m in a new Océ JetStream and advanced finishing equipment.

The post Racing Post invades Belgium with digital edition appeared first on Press Gazette.

Why the hell was I invited to review this book about Murdoch? writes David Banks.

It’s like asking Fredo to inscribe something tastefully clever and wonderfully witty on Don Corleone’s retirement card. Poor, dumb Fredo.

So was it because I like and admire KRM, the capo di tutti capi whom many of we ex-lieutenants still call “Boss” years after we have departed what biographer Michael Wolff calls “The Family”? Or because I worked for him on three continents and felt fear of him and, occasionally, won and valued his favour?

Poor, dumb Banksy…

After a dozen years working for Murdoch, most of them at his “beloveds” (The Sun, the New York Post and The Australian), I still know little more about what makes “Rosebud” Rupert tick than the average wannabe reporter thinks he knows.

Michael Wolff, however, is more than your average reporter. His credentials – columnist for Vanity Fair and New York Magazine, National Magazine Award winner and successful author –won him 50 hours all-on-tape access. That and the fact that Rupert had just pulled off the deal of his incredible life in buying the Wall Street Journal, and probably wanted to shout about it.

Mystified execs worldwide who were encouraged to permit similar access – Wolff’s credits list reads like a Who’s Who of everyone I ever knew at News Corp – must have wondered secretly: “Why is he doing this?”

Predictably, six weeks before publication after receiving an advance copy of the book (allegedly via son-in-law Matthew Freud who – allegedly again – blagged a copy offered for serialisation to a London newspaper under a non-disclosure agreement) Murdoch has complained of inaccuracies, particularly in regard to his supposed relationship with Fox News boss Roger Ailes and News Corp president Peter Chernin.

But if there is new sensation contained within this undoubtedly well-written opus of 400 A4 pages it eludes me. He is, we “learn”, grumpy, ruthless, hard of hearing, not motivated by money. His older children are “off the wall” (Prudence), “ballsy” (Elisabeth), “uncomplicated” (Lachlan), “a probable successor” (James). The younger ones are “fluent in Mandarin”.

Nevertheless, the story of a media mogul who constantly reinvents himself over 50 years as he parlays his father’s legacy of a single Australian newspaper into a $70bn international corporation is as gripping as it is familiar.

He is a traveller in time and space, a high-flying phone junkie deal-doer who never stops growing . … Adelaide to Fleet Street to Wall Street, newspapers into TV into movies. Nationalities, residences, families: he just ups sticks and sacrifices all to his restless quest for… what, exactly? The question is never really answered. This is as much How the Western Media Was Won as it is Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.

Admiringly, Wolff attributes Murdoch’s success in the battle for the WSJ to his restless transference of affections and ambitions and to his phenomenal ability to learn. He and Dow Jones, says Wolff, both enter the Eighties as publishers; Murdoch exits the decade as an international businessman and deal-meister.

As a reporter’s record of Rupert’s towering business achievement, Wolff’s is a brilliantly readable contribution. But like most of us, I think he fell for the guy.

The post Book review: The Man Who Owns the News – Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch appeared first on Press Gazette.

Their opinion on what the case meant varied from ‘no change, business as usual’to ‘the sky is falling in”, often dependent on the colour of the masthead the particular lawyer represented.

This divergence of opinions means that further battles over privacy are inevitable as claimants and defendants will not find it difficult to obtain legal views that they have a cast iron case/defence.

But with Mr Justice Eady insisting his judgment was no landmark ruling, what should journalists do now?

Privacy has been with us for some time. The right was enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and enacted in the Human Rights Act. But without an actual Privacy Act, the courts have been left to enforce that right using laws of confidentiality, which have been in existence for many years.

What the Mosley case has certainly changed is potential claimants’ awareness of the law. Because of the nature of the story, the column inches devoted to the case must mean the pool of potential privacy litigants out there just got bigger.

It is doubtful that, on the facts, this case changes the way the courts enforce privacy in any meaningful way. There is still a defence of public interest in such cases, but with their star witness unwilling to testify, and the photographic evidence failing to prove the accusation of a ‘Nazi-style’orgy, the News of the World was unable to establish that defence.

Mr Justice Eady has said the judgment does not threaten serious investigative journalism that better engages the public interest. However, if as a result of this more people go to court, or threaten to do so, on the basis of alleged breach of privacy, newspapers without the deep pockets of News International might not be willing to contest such actions, and so some stories will go uninvestigated and untold.

Furthermore, while injunctions to prevent publication are not available in libel actions, they are for breach of confidence in privacy proceedings. If, in the Mosley case and others, we are seeing a piecemeal development of the law of privacy, then such injunctions may become more frequent and possible easier to obtain.

If you are a journalist working on a story which involves the revelation of information obtained in private and confidential circumstances, you need to be sure that you have better proof that the story is in the public interest than the NoW had.

The post Time to make sure the facts really do back the story appeared first on Press Gazette.

Well, up to a point. Split 11 ways and taking into account the tabloids’ marketing budgets – £16m (The Sun), £20m (Daily Mail), £5m (NoW) – they will be not very much wiser and certainly not a great deal poorer.

Those budgets are guesswork, by the way, based on 2007 figures. When the writ hits the fan, editors always go to ground. No one will talk, much less confirm or deny what’s in the slush fund.

You can see the reason for NoW editor Colin Myler’s silence: he’s got his hands full of Max Mosley, while The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade speaks only to Rupert, and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre talks only with God.

Richard Wallace is hardly likely to take my calls, either. The last time we Mirror boys met I blagged a confidential lunch off him then spilled the beans anyway.

‘Twas ever thus. Editors who spend their lives thundering that everyone else should be accountable are very shy when it comes to accounting for themselves.

A little ferreting down Wapping’s Mahogany Row (management are often a good deal gabbier than editorial) reveals an injured smugness: ‘At least Murat only complained about one article in News of the World while he complained about dozens in the other papers,’I was twice told by faceless high-ups.

Of course, a large proportion of those ‘dozens’of complaints were made against the Screws’ sister paper, but no matter. And it’s worth pointing out that the muck-raking People and the Mail’s Sunday sister entirely escaped the litigants’ legal toothcomb, though Lord knows how.

Plenty of comment, mostly disapproving, from the previous generation of editors, of course.

Stephen Glover in The Independent castigated the ‘abominable’tabloids but warned that the broadsheets were just as culpable, only sneakier. Peter Wilby’s Guardian column attacked conditional fee arrangements meant to arm Mr and Mrs Ordinary against the big boys but are now increasingly used by celebritydom to dissuade investigative journalism.

And there, in my view, lies the greater danger: that the next headlong rush into print with an unchecked bundle of gossip from foreign parts (and thus, in the minds of scoop-junkie journalists, ‘safe’ as far as British law is concerned) will persuade another maligned innocent to make a million out of media mendacity.

Economics has long since killed real investigative journalism: the Daily Mirror’s Jeremy Thorpe inquiries in the 1970s and the Mail’s more recent pursuit of Stephen Lawrence’s killers were brilliant examples of the press’s determination to publish and be damned.

The scuttlebutt and sensation presented to a cynical public today – more publish and be doomed – is a shameful collective dereliction of duty which will be the death of real reporting and see the rise of a back-door privacy law.

Lest we forget, colleagues, all of this is a mere sideshow to the real story: Madeleine McCann was abducted 14 months ago and is still missing. Investigate that.

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