Journalists hold a unique position in a democracy. They are the only people with the time, energy and hopefully a decent salary to investigate matters of public interest that the rest of people are too busy or exhausted to have the time and space to devote to it.

Their no hold bars investigations of dodgy politicians, the Royals, the entertainment industry, and business scandals fill our screens, print pages and social media every day. Undercover investigations expose malpractice and bad treatment of vulnerable people. The only caveat to that is some of the media spend loads of money pursuing celebrity gossip and tittle tattle that they believe the public are interested in rather than devoting cash to expose scandals from whistleblowers in the public interest .

But there is one area where there is a wall of silence and that is the media itself. Unlike everything else which is fair game, journalist practices are off limits.

Leveson’s second inquiry should not have been stopped

Now I am not one who wants huge regulation of the press by the state but I supported the Leveson inquiry and it was a mistake not to have the second part of the inquiry which would have examined in detail what happened over the phone hacking scandal that affected more than one national media organisation. Why couldn’t the media be put under the microscope in a judge led inquiry just like we are doing over the Covid 19 inquiry and the Post Office Horizon scandal.

In this column I have no intention of going into the detail of the Dan Wotton case – you can follow that by reading Byline Times – and his reaction to the stories on GB News and Twitter. I am upholding the right of journalists to investigate other media if people come to them with allegations of malpractice just like they would with any other area. And sadly most mainstream media avoids doing so.

Not only is malpractice not reported but the BBC tried for years to avoid scrutiny on how well it spends its money and protect its household name journalists and commentators from revealing their salaries.

You may have noticed in the last few weeks that the salaries of top BBC presenters have been highlighted in the news.

BBC’s attempt to avoid scrutiny

The only reason this has happened is because two successive auditor generals took on the BBC which claimed that it was a special case and could not be scrutinised by the National Audit Office or have to reveal the salaries of top people unlike other publicly funded bodies. The NAO was interested in both whether major capital projects like the setting up of Salford Quays and revamping Broadcasting House were value for money. The BBC sought to try and control what the NAO could investigate and even argued that its editorial independence was in jeopardy if the NAO had powers to investigate what it chooses. The defence was rubbish. Is the present auditor general going to spend time investigating whether the latest Panorama was value for money or whether the current BBC political editor, Chris Mason, has made biased reports? I don’t think so..

Misrepresentation of Byline Times by Dan Wootton

One issue over the present furore between Dan Wootton and Byline Times is the misrepresentation of what Byline Times is about by Wootton

At a recent Press Gallery reception in the Commons I had an interesting discussion about this with a Tory MP I have known for a long time. He asked what Byline Times was and was told by other journalists that it was a left wing publication. When I explained to him as a freelance journalist who regularly writes for them on Westminster and Whitehall that the editor, Hardeep Matharu, rightly expected me to get a response from whatever department was facing a highly critical report he was amazed. He had assumed that articles would be left wing polemics, not based on hard fact.

Dan Wootton has claimed Byline Times is a hard left blog. It is nothing of the sort. It is a growing multimedia publication , on line, in print and on TV.

Its determination to get the facts right and collect real evidence was tested when six years ago it took on the powerful Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail exposing journalistic malpractice. Here again there were dire threats to sue. But they came to nothing. Not a good precedent for the present media furore.

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