Standards in Public Life

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Bew for putting together this report. I declare an interest as a producer at the BBC. As a journalist, I want to concentrate on what the report tells us about the public trust in the media and their ability to hold those in public office to account. In Chapter 5, the noble Lord, Lord Bew, reports on the decline in public confidence in the media to do this. It seems a small fall from 80% 10 years ago to 70% in 2012, but the decline reflects a public awareness of the ability of the media to investigate and check public figures.

Local media in particular have been devastated by the move of advertisers to alternative providers on the internet. My noble friend Lord Martin mentioned local authorities; across the country, the work of local authorities is being ignored by journalists and receives little public attention, as local newspapers close down or become freesheets. We see the same process in our national newspapers, as newsrooms are pared to the bone. Of course, there are still investigations, like the exposure by the Telegraph of the MPs’ expenses scandal, but increasingly news is filled with PR, as product placement and unchecked political spin become more prominent. The internet is an extraordinary source of news stories, as the new tools of social media make us all citizen journalists. But when there are so many voices out there and so many with hidden positions and private axes to grind, it is hard to know which voices to trust.

That brings me to the findings of Chapter 2 of the report, showing a surprising increase in trust in journalists across the board; I wonder whether that would still hold up, after the last year of phone-hacking revelations. As my noble friend Lady O’Neill of Bengarve pointed out in her TED talk, the generic question of whether we trust a particular group is flawed. We do not ask whether we trust fishmongers; we trust some fishmongers and not others. Likewise, we trust some politicians and not others, and some journalists and not others. There are some journalists and some media outlets, such as the BBC and ITN, which we do trust.

It has never been more important for us to have professional journalists whom we trust to sift through evidence, painstakingly check its reliability and present us with a report that we can believe. They need to be supported by editors, prepared to take on an investigation even when it might fail. I cite the sterling work of my former colleague, Michael Crick, on “Channel 4 News”, in getting to the bottom of the “Plebgate” scandal, as he tenaciously investigated the two competing versions of the truth offered by competing holders of public office. Eventually, he discovered the lies in the police story and the flaws in the Cabinet Office’s investigation of that story. Television, the internet and newspapers need to foster those journalists, so that audiences continue to have faith in their ability to hold those in public life to account. It is important to support the work of investigative journalists that is exercised with integrity, so that authorities can be held to account as part of a healthy democratic process.