IT’S an old joke that the collective noun for a group of editors is an “arrogance” and indeed it took many slow years of regulatory evolution to get to the point where admissions of fallibility in the press were not seen as potentially fatal.
The reasons were pretty straightforward, because there was a common belief that running corrections would undermine a publication’s credibility and result in loss of sale, never mind loss of face. There was also the fear, not without foundation, that admitting a mistake would make any subsequent legal action impossible to defend. So editors, often thin-skinned to criticism at the best of times, would get into all sorts of knots to avoid saying sorry.
Attitudes began to change after the Press Complaints Commission replaced the Press Council in 1991, or more specifically the introduction of a written Editors’ Code of Conduct, and also the emergence of corrections and clarifications columns following the lead of The Guardian. These days corrections are just part and parcel of a break-neck business in which errors are bound to happen and such is the expectation that acknowledgements can no longer be seen as a badge of responsibility.
But the truth is, as frequently as it happens, editors still hate admitting they’ve got things wrong. As much as I hated it too, once a blunder had been identified I couldn’t see the point of continuing to argue the toss and if a bit of pride-swallowing was the only price to pay for sorting out a cock-up then that was preferable to wasting time on a long drawn-out dispute which ultimately most readers would either not care about or not notice. They probably did notice the front page apology to the late Robin Cook over an Evening News splash about his mysterious dash back to the UK in the middle of a controversial Royal visit to India in 1997 (to see his soon-to-be second wife, as it turned out), but whether they remembered 24 hours later was another matter. This is not to say I wouldn’t robustly defend the paper when there was something to defend and disputes could go on for weeks, like the allegation that a picture taken of an arrest at the G8 demonstration at Gleneagles in 2005 was a montage manipulated to falsify evidence of trouble. The ping-pong correspondence even resulted in a request for us to send the negatives for a picture taken with a digital camera.
Journalists are of course used to being accused of all manner of crimes; apparently we all hack phones and we make up all our stories, which is in itself ironic because stories based on phone-hacking had the advantage of being true. Allegations of manipulation, misrepresentation and lies are, as President Trump so ably illustrates, an easy way to throw up a smoke screen when the media isn’t playing your game.
Blaming the media is the easiest game in town, which is not to say it can be left unchallenged. Take for example a Scottish Government report into sectarianism which among other things stated that the Scottish media had stoked “flames of sectarianism” ahead of the 2015 Rangers v Celtic League Cup semi-final which had “intensified feeling and anxiety”.
Written by Ulster University’s Dr Duncan Morrow, this must surely be true? Except it’s not fact, but opinion unsupported by evidence and when I raised it with him he was unable to substantiate the claim. Now Dr Morrow has published a review, but rather than produce the proof to justify the claim or accept it was unfair, he just notes we asked for the evidence and then goes on to talk about newspapers’ views on regulation as if that has got anything to do with a study of sectarianism. I do hope the irony of publishing claims without evidence while discussing press controls is not lost on Dr Morrow. That’s the problem with academics, sometimes they find it hard to admit they get things wrong.
John McLellan is the Director of the Scottish Newspaper Society,
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