IB: Your most recent book is called Trading Information, a practice that you suggest started with the Thatcher government. What did it do that hadn't been done previously?
NJ: What hadn't been done previously was the way in which financial public relations consultants during the era of the 1980s, during the era of privatization in Britain and of hostile company takeovers, they realized that info is like a currency, that it can be traded with journalists, and we have the development in Britain of what became known as the Friday Night Drop. This was when, once the stock market had closed on Friday, the financial PR consultants would trade exclusively with selected journalists on the Sunday newspapers. And Britain has a very big readership of Sunday newspapers. Now those stories were designed to either inflate or deflate the prices for the stocks of the various companies which were in these take-over battles and that was then designed to have an effect when the stock market opened on Monday morning.
Now because this became so blatant, the financial services authority in Brit and the stock market have had to impose very tight regulations to stop the exclusive trading of info, of sensitive commercial info, to newspapers in a way that is going to affect the share prices but those techniques, that technique, of trading information has become the corner stone of the Blair government. Alistair Campbell, when he became Tony Blair's press secretary in 1994, he understood the importance of trading info, of trading exclusive stories, in return for favourable coverage, of trading access, photos, that sort of thing, and he understood, as a former tabloid journalist, how the newspaper industry worked, and he understood how to trade info.
What was so important about the lessons which had been learned from the financial PR consultants in the 80s in Britain was that that then began to flow through into the government machine, into the civil service in the late 1990s. One of first things that Alistair Campbell did when he became the director of communications for Blair when he was elected Labour Prime Minister in 1997 was that he changed the whole direction of the government information service. Up until then if a journalist had tried to get a civil service information officer to speculate about what a minister might be announcing to parliament in 2 or 3 days time the standard response was that you couldn't get an answer from the civil servant. But under Campbell, that changed. What he understood was the state has to also set the agenda, it has to trail announcements and we saw and we still see in Britain this process of civil servants doing something which I think is reprehensible, which is trading information with journalists in return for exclusive stories.
Now, Campbell and other government information officers and other Labour Party spin doctors, they defend this, they say they are faced by an irresponsible press in Britain and that the one power they have, the one control they have is over the release of info. So why shouldn't they give that info to those journalists whom they believe are most likely to use it in the most positive way. But of course the criticism I would make as a journalist working, for example, for 30 years for the BBC, was that this is a selective way of trading information. We know that this information is being given to those newspapers which are most supportive of Blair. For example, which are most supportive of Blair and George Bush and the war against Iraq. And when we see a system under which information is traded exclusively in that way, it undermines the confidence of journalists. It makes us realize that we're somehow outside the loop. If you're on a rival newspaper, it's probably going to tempt you to write a knocking story, to try to demolish what's been said. And this generates this air of cynicism, this air that perhaps there's too much collusion between political journalists and the political elite. So we have a problem in Great Britain, there is a crisis in confidence in the level of political reporting in this country. It's reflected in a fold in the turnout at general elections and a general cynicism and the phrase that's abroad is that people can't believe what the government is saying.
IB: And they can't believe what's in the press because it seems like the press and the government are part of the same group.
NJ: That's right. It leads to a general level of cynicism within the public, within the public mind, and that has had very dire consequences. It's led to a reduction, significant falling off in the turn out at British elections and more importantly, this way in which information is traded exclusively with certain newspapers, with those which are most likely to give favourable coverage, of course undermines parliamentary democracy. Because a lot of these statement should've been made first to parliament-that is where the minister should be giving the info. But what we see in Britain, for example, we've just had the annual budget, and the chancellor, he's an expert at this-most of his important decisions have been trailed in the newspapers, they've been reported with great precision by the newspapers which are supportive of Blair and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, days before he made the budget announcement.
Now, that way in which parliament is undermined, that way in which the democracy of Britain has been cut away, that causes great concern because there is less accountability if it's not possible to force the minister to first make the statement in the commons if the state can trade info exclusively in that way, what can be done about it? Well, we know what can be done about it in the stock market in London. There it is now an offense to trade info exclusively with journalists. Which is the favourite trick of the political spin doctors. And the point is that if someone like Campbell or the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer is subjected to the same rules which apply in the stock market when it comes to sensitive financial information, if political information couldn't be traded in the same way, well, we'd see quite a few people in the British political establishment locked up in prison.
Now, clearly, that isn't going to happen. Clearly, they know that the system is working in their favour. My point is that what has changed now, and I think this is very significant, is the development of the internet, the fact that it is now possible electronically for all journalists to get the same info at the same time. And the point that I make is that why doesn't the state recognize that. And I'm not making a party point, for one political party or another, why don't states recognize that the way they should circulate info is to circulate it to all journalists at the same time. If you get the position that we've got here in Britain and this has been the hallmark in my opinion of the Blair government, where exclusive information is traded to the government's advantage just with a select number of newspapers in the hope of setting the agenda-that has undermined the credibility and the trustworthiness of the Blair government and if you look at the way in which the opinion polls are going in Britain, you can see why that lack of trust in Blair is now one of the most important issues-and I think it's the way in which, the cynical way in which they've traded info with the newspapers which they've undermined the parliament, is one of the root causes of what's been going on.
IB: Why do journalists participate in this sort of thing?
NJ: What's happened, and this is my great criticism of people like Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, two of Britain's most famous spin docs, is that they understood what was happening in the media. The journalists of today are increasingly judged not on their reliability, for ex, on their judgment, but on their ability to deliver exclusive stories. I think that the spin doctors in Britain, because we have here in Britain this particularly market-media driven society, they've understood how the media works, they've understood that the journalists need exclusive stories and they've traded on that. They've understood that if they trade exclusive information to journalists, that's one way of helping the journalists, of making the journalists dependent on those sources of information and that has also helped the party spin doctors. Now, what I find is so reprehensible about it is that there has been quite a deterioration in editorial standards. You can pick up, for example, a copy of the London Times now or any of the other quality newspapers in Britain, and you'll see the front page story based almost entirely on unattributed sources. It'll say "an insider said this," "a cabinet source said that," "a friend of the minister's said this."
Now, unfortunately, and this is one of the great failures of the British tabloid newspapers is that a generation of journalists have grown up who are quite prepared to embellish quotes, even manufacture stories, and that has seeped in to the quality press, into the established newspapers, and they're prepared to print these stories when there isn't any proper attribution.
And the danger is that this has also, in my opinion, infected broadcasting. Now, when I started as a radio journalist 30 years ago, 90% of what I said on air had been scripted. Now, I would say that 90% of what I said on air in my final years with the BBC was conversational journalism. And of course, conversational journalism suits the spin docs, there's not the same need for attribution, it's easy for the journalists to exaggerate. I can say, "Well, I've spoken to cabinet ministers." I might have spoken to one junior ministerial aid or I'll say the rebel members of parliament are going to vote this way or that way, I might've spoken to one of the them but certainly not as many as I was suggesting in my answer. And this is one of the dangers of conversational journalism. Another danger is that because of the way in which information is traded by the spin doctors, lots of BBC programs, for example, will be given exclusive information. And you hear that tell-tale intro by the BBC news reader, "The BBC has learnt exclusively…" Now, I know when I hear those words that it's more than likely to be the result of a plant, a tip-off by the government, rather than real investigative journalism. And that is the danger, the danger is that the spin docs have understood the pressures that are there within the news media, how desperate we are for exclusives and new stories and they've learned how to trade and exploit and manipulate that.
IB: And the vast majority of these leaks are planted. These are not envelopes shoved under the door like in Watergate.
NJ: That's right. There's no doubt that British newspapers and radio and TV journalists still have a strong tradition of investigative journalism and yes there's no doubt, for example, now that Tony Blair is facing so much unpopularity over the continued presence of British troops in Iraq, that the numbers of hostile leaks against the government, leaks from within the government machine, from civil servants or members of the security services, are increasing. And there's no doubt that many of these leaks that we see, certainly when it relates to the action in Iraq are genuine.
But you're right, many of the leaks that we see in the newspapers are plants. They're handed over by spin docs, spin docs who are quite ready to play the game, they are only to happy for the journalists to suggest that perhaps this is the result of investigative journalism when really the journalists have been handed the story on a plate. And it's that knowledge of the spin docs that they know how to manipulate the journalist, which is one of the worrying trends. If you just look around at politics and commerce, if we see the vast increase that there's been in the PR consultants and public affairs consultants, we know as journalists that the balance has tipped against us, that it's the PR and commercial public affairs officers who perhaps hold the reigns, they control the info and they are exercising much more power of journalists and it's the journalists who've got fewer resources, who've become increasingly dependent on the PR consultants and one way in which we can see and hear and read that is when the journalist tries to present something as an exclusive, sometimes as some result of investigative journalism, when if you read between the lines it's almost certainly come as a plant, from a PR consultant, from a spin doctor, who's only too happy for that line to be pushed because it's a line that the company or the government hopes will be favourable to them.
IB: After the tragic incident with the BBC and Dr. Kelly and the Hutton report, the BBC changed its code of ethics, saying accuracy is more important than speed. Is that a positive thing? Is manipulation finally being paid attention to?
NJ: What the BBC is saying and I would defend them, although it has led, in many people's view, to a certain hesitation on the part of the BBC, a sort of standing back and waiting for stories to develop. But on the positive side, what we have seen is a realization that stories must be checked through. That the BBC mustn't go just on one source for a story, that other inquiries must be made. And I think that hesitation, if you like, does have positive benefits. The line is that the BBC mustn't just join the race for breaking news because therein lies a trap. We know that many of the breaking news stories aren't perhaps solid, reliable stories. Therefore it's important that journalists should stand back for a moment and just check the thing through. What I think was the lesson that was learnt from the whole of the Hutton affair, what I think was the lesson that was learnt from the whole affair of Dr. David Kelly, the government weapons inspector in Britain who committed suicide, was that the BBC was left having to think through what had happened, how was it that one reporter, Andrew Gilligan, was allowed to go ahead with his story and put out that hurried first story that he thought the PM had taken the country to war on the basis of a lie because of the dodgy dossier on Iraq's WMD; how was it that one journalist went out with the story when in actual fact, three BBC journalists had spoken to Dr. Kelly in the weeks leading up to that story. And what I think has now emerged is that undoubtedly Dr. Kelly, the weapons inspector, was the most significant deep throat that the BBC journalists have had contact with in recent years.
Yet I think the BBC failed him, what the BBC failed to do was nurture someone deep within the government machine who was prepared to give off-the-record info to journalists. And what the BBC failed to do was follow through in the same methodical way that you could say, for ex, that Woodward and Bernstein did when they got their tip-offs from Mark Felt when he was giving them info about the Watergate. Now what I think was to the credit of the Washington Post, that it did the story bit by bit, step by step, now that didn't happen in the BBC. The BBC rushed out with its exclusive and that I think is the lesson of the Kelly affair. And just look at it this way, if the BBC, bearing in mind that much of what Dr. Kelly said has since been proved to be correct and accurate about the WMD in Iraq, if the BBC had put out that story in a cold, slow, calculated way, bit by bit, who knows what could have happened. It could have led to the downfall of Tony Blair, just as the Watergate led to the downfall of Richard Nixon. That I think is the lesson to journalists that when you have exclusive, real exclusive info from a genuine whistleblower, that's got to be looked after most carefully, that contact has got to be nurtured and that I'm afraid was something, looking back on what happened 3 years ago, which didn't happen to Dr. David Kelly.
IB: Let's talk about the definition of spin.
NJ: How do I define spin? Well, I think of spin really as that tennis ball that's just been whacked at someone and of course the aim of the tennis player is to get a bit of twist on the ball to catch their opponent by surprise. So, how do I define spin? Well, I define a spin as that ball that's coming towards you and you're not quite sure of the direction that it's coming. That's spin. And how spin has been developed is that we're not quite sure of the message, we can see the message, we think we can understand the message, but there's often been hidden manipulation, often been a hidden twist to the story, that we're not quite clear about, we think perhaps something is wrong but we don't know. I think that what has happened and has happened increasingly in recent years with the great exposure that we've had through the increase in TV, radio, entertainment, advertising, I think there's a growing realization among the people, among the public, about how things can be spun, about the way the media can be manipulated. And it's that 21st C genome that we've got, that we can understand much better now, how the media works, and that, I think, is something which everyone who works in the media should clock, that the public out there are perhaps smarter than we think.
IB: If there's greater understanding of spin, does that mean we can look forward to a time when spin will be less effective? A time when there's more honesty and truth?
NJ: I would like to think that the more that spin is exposed, the higher the standards would be, that there would be less attempt to manipulate the media. If you ask me the question, is spin dead? I would say, no, it isn't dead, it isn't resting, it's just morphed into something else. I think there is this understanding now by the spin docs that they can trade info exclusively, there is also a greater understanding by the spin docs about how they can control access to info, how they can dictate terms for interviews, for photographs. All the sorts of access that journalists depend on and I think the balance has swung too far in the direction of PR and the public affairs consultants. They're the well paid, high paid, execs of the future; it's the journalists who, I believe at the moment, have suffered quite considerably from the loss of ad revenue for their newspapers and broadcasting stations, there are fewer journalists now, there is less resource for investigative reporting, and that's why we get what's called this info subsidy, this claim by the PR consultants that 70% of what you see, hear and read, has been provided by PR consultants. That it's their info that journalists are using. And that's a pretty chilling statistic when you think, because it indicates that if you apply, as I think the PR consultants are applying, all of the techniques that they know about how to supply info, how to control the flow of info, well it does put the media at a disadvantage.
IB: And there's increasingly more of them and fewer of us.
NJ: Yes, the figures are sort of double, aren't they? From my understanding, in many European countries, the number of people in PR and public affairs and associated jobs, is easily equal to the number of journalists, double in some cases, if you think of the journalists who are actually doing investigative work, who are actually out there reporting. No, the balance has swung very much in favour of PR, in favour of the spin docs, they control the access and they dictate the flow of info. That's why I think there is so much now responsibility on governments to understand that one way forward is to understand that there should be this basic requirement on the state, that info should be released to all journalists at the same time. That if you get a state, as we have seen in Britain, that tries to play the media market place, long term, that is only going to lead to an undermining of trust and confidence in the government of the day and to increase the level of public cynicism, which is certainly what we've seen in Britain over the way the Blair government in Britain has used the newspapers and manipulated them to put across stories.
