Video: Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the NUJ, explains how the union’s News Recovery Plan can help revive newsgathering – and how the tech giants must play their part. © SWE NUJ
“I THOUGHT it could be the tip of an iceberg of a certain size – but not the size it has turned out to be!”
Richard Brook, reporter on Private Eye, was giving the inside story of how the Post Office scandal was dragged to public attention in the years before it became one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in British history.
Brook was talking to an invited audience of journalists, politicians, trade unionists and journalism academics at an event to showcase the immense importance of journalism to society, organised by the South West England branch of the National Union of Journalists.
Entitled The State We’re In, the evening on May 21st also highlighted the dire state to which journalism in the South West has been reduced by two decades of cuts. It was the latest in a series of events named after veteran Labour MP and journalist Tony Benn, hosted for almost 20 years by the Bristol branch and now the South West branch.
SWE branch chair Paul Breeden read out a statement by a union rep from Reach, where years of redundancies have left news teams across the South West pared to the bone. There are just two reporters left dedicated to Bristol news, it was revealed.
“The impact of this means long hours, extra work, extra pressure and a huge amount of negativity from communities who recognise that their local paper and website is no longer able to be their voice as much as before,” the rep said. Ironically, they were unable to be at the event because of staff shortages.
Some of the first indications of the Post Office scandal came when local newspapers highlighted cases of postmasters who had been prosecuted, Richard Brooks told the meeting.
But it took the determination of Private Eye, the trade publication Computer Weekly and the BBC journalist Nick Wallis to draw the individual stories together and weave the strands into a picture of unjust prosecutions that fined and imprisoned hundreds of sub postmasters.
It was a difficult process, Richard explained, when the Eye took up the story from 2011: “There was a big hurdle there – miscarriages of justice are quite hard to take up. The details of each case had been buried in criminal trials, people had not been able to afford expensive appeal processes, they didn’t have huge amounts of documentary evidence for us to work with – they just had their stories, and there was a pattern of them.
“And of course as soon as we reported it we got the answer from the Post Office that, no, no, the system is completely robust. In the next issue we printed a letter from the PO stating that it’s never been found at fault in a trial. We printed it under a couple of other letters from sub postmasters saying, thank God you have taken this up, because I have been got by this system as well!”
On why it was that the Eye stuck at the story when hardly any other outlets were paying interest, Richard said, “We take up stories that some others may be reluctant to, there is a certain editorial boldness, there’s time available – not a lot of time, but time to examine the evidence carefully, and the ability to look at the case carefully without having to think, this might be difficult, we might get some pushback here. We get over those hurdles, and print when we think it’s right.”
SWE branch chair Paul Breeden praised the Eye for its determination – often under-appreciated – to take on stories about hard-done-by groups, often including unionised workers. He asked Richard: “Do you think that other media, perhaps where journalists had less time [to investigate] were intimidated by the years and years of rebuttals that the Post Office gave? You can imagine some journalists thinking, there is nothing to see here, and perhaps some others thinking there is something to see, but not being able to persuade their editors or perhaps their proprietors?”
Richard responded that several local papers did carry stories about individual sub postmasters, especially prior to about 2007, when widespread job cuts began eating into the newspaper industry. But for the nationals, the story “wasn’t getting over the line” because what now appear to be sensational disclosures, such as the revelation that in 2013 the PO board was told there were bugs in Horizon and nothing happened, at the time “looked a bit like internal process issues, and you couldn’t establish exactly who knew what and when”.
“We were all in a way guilty of not taking these people’s stories seriously enough,” Richard added. “These were everyday modest people, trying to do a job, serve the community in an unglamorous role, and newspapers aren’t really turned on by that. A minor tiff between a coupIe of oligarchs will get you three pages, but an ordinary person doing an honest day’s work and getting turned over by a dodgy computer system is not quite as sexy. I think there was a failure of empathy, certainly in the PO and the Government, but also in the media.”
Add in the complexity of the story and the detail needed to understand it, and there were half a dozen reasons for media not to pursue it, Richard said.
“It does come down to resources in the press – if you have only two reporters in Bristol they are not going to have two or three days to really understand a postmaster’s story, and it does take that amount of time.”
But pursue the story the Eye did, and when Alan Bates and others won their day in court and forced damaging disclosures from the Post Office, the true size of the iceberg became apparent.
Was it nevertheless galling, though, Paul asked, for impact of the reporting by the Eye and other outlets to be overshadowed by the reception to the ITV drama, Mr Bates and the Post Office, which represented a tipping point that meant the scandal simply could not be ignored?
Richard agreed that the TV drama was a tipping point – but said it couldn’t have happened without all the journalism which came before it: “If you talk to the ITV drama people, [they say] they couldn’t have done the story at all without the journalism.”
By 2019, when court action had exposed the Post Office’s culpability, there was much good journalism being produced about the scandal, he said. But by then every outlet had to be covering the story because it had grown so big.
“You have got to be telling stories because they are important, not because they are already stories. That is a difficulty – it goes right back to the shallowness of journalism that we now have with the lack of people. You need the people and you need the time to tell these stories properly.
“On the positive side … it’s a great advertisement for the importance of journalism; and the years where there wasn’t enough coverage is an indictment of journalism.”
Questioners to Richard Brook included a call from retired journalist and lecturer Mike Jempson, who asked what was being done to expose the role of software provider Fujitsu? More coverage was to follow, Richard promised.
Branch member Kate Pearce asked whether there was mileage in researching connections between various national scandals? Yes, especially where IT firms are involved, said Richard, but tracking the connections is a time consuming job – “you need teams of journalists and there aren’t many teams of journalists!”
This showed the importance of improving protection for whistleblowers, said Richard, suggesting they should be rewarded for revealing wrongdoing. Only one came forward from Fujitsu when there must have been many people who knew there were bugs in the system.
Priyanka Raval of the Bristol Cable, the city’s independent investigative news outlet, asked what could be done to improve the impact of stories when journalists uncover something major. Get to know an ITV drama producer, was Richard’s first suggestion – adding more seriously that “it’s really frustrating when stories don’t go anywhere”. The Eye doesn’t enlist support from politicians, he said, but it does put its findings in front of organisations which ought to care, such as parliamentary committees. “I think it’s about getting your story into the political systems, which can generate its own stories,” he added.
On the same theme, James Garrett, former TV journalist, recounted his first story on the Bristol heart surgery scandal for ITV and Channel 4. “It will be the best piece of work that I have ever done”, he said, “and I would love to say that it set the world alight – it did, for about a day and a half.” A public inquiry came to all the right conclusions – but none of them were implemented, he noted. Fifteen years later there was another paediatric cardiac scandal in the city. “I think what that tells me is that we always have to be vigilant and not make any assumptions, we have to then keep up the pressure, keep on at the buggers … to make sure that they deliver.”
Pau Breeden then gave the audience a reminder of how bleak things are at a local level, where some predict that commercial news outlets such as Reach will become so poorly staffed that the BBC will be left as the repository of local news. With tech companies such as Google taking the lion’s share of advertising revenue, people are left with a poor diet of news from the remaining operators, he said.
In response Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the NUJ, outlining the union’s News Recovery Plan, said that the industry is far too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.
Any public funding given to new providers must not be propping up the status quo. The tech companies should be made to pay their way, she said, and money from their vast profits could be used for things such as tax credits for employing journalists. This could be directed from a windfall tax on their profits or perhaps an ongoing digital service tax, she said.
There could be tax perks for taking out news subscriptions, said Michelle, and schemes to encourage children to learn about reliable news sources should be encouraged. Local papers could be given “community asset” status to protect them, as some local pubs or shops are now, and funding given to news start-ups.
The tech funds could be used to promote diversity and pluralism in newsrooms, while the tech giants should not be allowed to destabilise news organisations with opaque changes to their algorithms which can deprive news sites of huge amounts of traffic at a stroke.
The NUJ will continue to lobby for support for public service broadcasting and a BBC free of political interference. Whether the licence fee is replaced or not, the BBC must be guaranteed a universal service, and be made sustainable, she said.
People and journalists need protection from the impacts of AI, where “governments are not grasping the pace of change”, Michelle said. There should be transparence on how AI is used, or it could be existential for the news and creative industries.
Questioning Michelle, branch member Ray Tostevin asked about the role of unpaid journalism – such as in his town of Yeovil, where it has fallen to volunteers to expose the impact of an NHS plan to impose cuts on its stroke unit.
Acknowledging the role of dedicated volunteers, Michelle said that unpaid journalism can never replicate what paid journalists can do.
Those present also discussed the disastrous effect of last year’s cuts at BBC local radio. BBC Radio Bristol has the unfortunate distinction of suffering the worst fall in listenership of any BBC local station – down more than 58 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 compared to a year earlier, against an average fall of 7.4 per cent for other BBC local stations.
The cuts had also resulted in reduced news provision across BBC local radio, including pooled bulletins for wider areas, said Michelle.
Paul pointed out that at BBC Bristol and also at the BBC station in Devon almost all the stations’ existing presenters had been culled in the cuts. The impact will be the subject of continued focus by the SWE branch, he said.
The union’s blueprint for supporting journalism, the News Recovery Plan, can be found on the union website in the format in which it was launched in 2020. An updated version is being prepared and will be released soon.