Crime reporters face specific criticisms and risks, so it is essential they keep their rights to protect sources, says Duncan Campbell
Criminal practice H
e was called the “gentleman highwayman” in the press when, in 1749, he carried out an armed robbery in Hyde Park of Horace Walpole, son of the former prime minister. He was James Maclaine, an upper-class Irishman
who had spent half a dozen years as a highwayman before being hanged at Tyburn in 1750. Maclaine had a reputation for being polite to his victims and, after he was arrested, Walpole complained that “malefactors” received more respect in the press than, say, a distinguished general.
Plus ça change. In January, at the end of the trial of the men convicted of carrying out the £14 million burglary in Hatton Garden last year, many a disgruntled columnist noted they were described as likeable rogues rather than greedy thugs. Crime reporters have been criticised over the centuries for two main sins: first, for glamorising the perpetrators of crime, from Dick Turpin through to the Krays, the great train robbers and the Hatton Garden “diamond wheezers”; and, second, for creating a fear of crime out of all proportion with reality. Apart from this, crime reporters have faced punishment in
the criminal and civil courts. The arrests of journalists resulting from Operations Elveden, Weeting and Tuleta are reminders of the rocky relationship that has long existed between the law and crime reporters, although over very different issues. Back in 1885, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, WT Stead, found himself in court as a result of an issue still very much in
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When people object to sensations, they object to the very material of life. Sensationalism is a means to an end
the news in 2016: the exploitation of underage girls. In a series of articles, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, Stead exposed the sale of girls as prostitutes by adopting the strategy of purchasing one himself. “I have been exploring the London Inferno,” wrote Stead and he had found “all the vices of Gomorrah, daring the vengeance of long-suffering Heaven ... But the sojourn in this hell has not been fruitless. My purpose was not to secure the punishment of criminals but to lay bare the working of a great organisation of crime.” Stead was jailed for three months under the Offences Against the Person Act for purchasing a 13-year-old girl called Eliza Armstrong to expose the scandal and the fact that the age of consent was then still only 13. He wore his sentence as a badge of honour. Then, as now, the jailing of a journalist provoked mixed reactions from rival publications. While the Methodist Times argued that Stead’s actions were what “Christ Himself would have done”, The Times dismissed him as a “self-elected guardian of morals” and cartoonists mocked him as “the man with the muck-rake”.
Stead protected his sources on the grounds that he had promised them secrecy and acknowledged that he had been “drinking champagne with the mistress of that brothel, and telling her lies about what I wanted, as I had to, otherwise I would have been summarily ejected; I felt, after getting her confidence in that way, I could not go and expose her personally.” Stead also felt the future of the newspaper was as a moral guardian and defended “sensationalism”, of which he had been accused, on the grounds that “when people object to sensations they object to the very material of life. Sensationalism is a means to an end … For the great public, the journalist must print in great capitals, or his warning is unheard.” The age of consent was duly raised to 16. That issue of protecting sources also came very much to a head during the post-hacking cases when it emerged News International, as it was, had cooperated with the police and handed over details of its reporters’ contacts and sources. In one of the subsequent trials, in 2014, defence counsel Nigel Rumfitt QC told jurors that the police had been “spoon fed”
TRINITY MIRROR / MIRRORPIX / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
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