Leveson Inquiry

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

There has been a great deal of debate this evening about the rule of law and how it could have held national newspapers to account. I want to talk about what happens when the culture, ethics and standards of the media are used against a community that cannot fight back, which is what happened in Bridgend.

The ethics of the press at their worst impacted on the county borough in which I live. There was intrusion into people’s lives at the most painful and difficult of times. There was a link built between the community of the county borough of Bridgend and suicide, which meant that anyone who lived there was tainted by a threat and a risk of living with suicide. Virtually the first question that young people who went for university or job interviews were asked was, “Are you all right? Are you going to commit suicide if you move away from Bridgend?” People who were considering moving their factories to the county borough said, “I don’t know—our people aren’t very happy about moving to Bridgend. It’s not a very safe place to live.”

The dead were maligned in the most awful way and families who were trying to cope with the sudden grief caused by the death of someone they loved and whom they had no idea was struggling with life suddenly found that person traduced in the most painful and awful way.

The intrusion into people’s lives was such that friends, neighbours and family could not go to talk to those who had lost someone, because there was a mass of press outside their front door. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) finds it funny, but children who were on their way to school were being stopped and offered sweets for quotes about those who had died.

There was inaccurate reporting—a “suicide death cult” was supposed to have gripped Bridgend. I said to one of the editors who sat on the Press Complaints Commission, “You know that’s a lie. Why are you running with this story?” He replied, “That’s your fault. You didn’t come up with a better line for us and we needed a line to sell the story and the papers.” They knew it was a lie, but they still carried the story.

It was well known that the grief and the trauma caused by that reporting had the potential to have an impact on those involved in the deaths. There was a risk of social contagion and I believe that we saw that effect in Bridgend. The excessive coverage of the methods used by those who died impacted tremendously on my community.

There has been a lot of talk today about the Press Complaints Commission and how weak and ineffective it has been, but, within the bounds of its capability, it served my community well, and I will always say that. It came to Bridgend and met the people. I think it was fairly shocked at the level of anger and at the fact that nobody had even heard of the PCC and did not know that it was an option to go to it. It was shocked at how frustrated the community was that an honest and decent story about the losses they were facing was not being told. What the PCC did—I know that those people affected across Bridgend will be eternally grateful for this—was introduce desist notices, whereby people were able to say, “We do not wish to be contacted.”

A family who had lost a child were among the first people who came to my office. Their child had died some years earlier—not during the time of the so-called cluster in Bridgend—and they told me how, even then, they feared answering telephone calls late at night, because it might be one of the magazines offering them £250 for the story of the death of their child and how it had impacted on their lives. Such intrusion went on and on, but the desist notices stopped it. They would not have had that from Ofcom, because it cannot interfere until after a programme has been broadcast. My community has been devastated by letters from broadcast media that want to tell the story. They have thrown families back to 2007 and 2008 and left them deeply traumatised and fearful of those stories being aired again.

Another area of the PCC that I must commend and that we must not lose is its educational role. It has taken on a huge responsibility by going to schools of journalism and news rooms and talking about the impact of suicide reporting. Whatever regulation comes in, I would not want to lose that educational role.

With the help of the PCC, I, along with eminent professors of suicide studies, met editors to explain to them the impact of their reporting. They admitted that, often, what drove the most excessive reporting was the fact that, to sell their papers, they had to keep hyping the story and making it bigger and more dramatic. The culture, ethics and standards fall apart as a result of that desperate desire to get the extra sale and new story that will make people buy one paper and not another. We have to do something about that, so that honesty and decency return to reporting.

I am concerned about the failure to look at social networking issues. Many of the families saw photographs that they had never seen before of the people they had lost—their family members—when they went out to buy a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. There, on the front page of a national newspaper, was a photograph of their child that had been taken off Facebook. One of the most horrific stories was about the content of one person’s Facebook page. That person was maligned in the most awful way because of fantasy stuff that had been written on their Facebook page. We must do something about the ownership of the contents of Facebook pages, including photographs, so that they cannot be taken and possessed by national newspapers and reproduced.

Websites must be looked at and must be contained. The website of one national newspaper had a section that said, “Click here for slideshow of the dead”. When one clicked on it, the photographs of everyone who had died were shown on a loop. In fairness to the editor, he was horrified when I told him about it and he immediately had it taken down. He had not known about it, as there is often a split between the print editor and whoever edits the online version, and we must ensure that responsibility runs across those areas. Finally, I appreciate that Leveson did not look at YouTube, but there have been some horrific statements and stories in newspapers that have come from it.

I agree with Leveson about the conscience clause. A number of newspaper reporters contacted me privately to tell me that they were appalled at the stories that they were being pressured to write. It was a case of, “Write the story and keep your job.” They wanted an opportunity to opt out of writing those stories.

The Secretary of State, who has left the Chamber, was educated in Bridgend. I hope that when looking at this matter, she remembers the people she grew up with and what they have suffered from unregulated media.