censorship PA IMAGES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


Invisible stories


Conrad Landin looks at why stories of public interest are hidden away


W


hen former Reform UK – now independent – MP Rupert Lowe made an antisemitic comment in a meeting


this year, he was caught on camera. But, as the Guardian reported in May,


“the person filming appeared to reassure him the video would be edited”. Private Eye then revealed this person was a journalist for the Daily Express. Keeping its word, the Express published the footage with the remark cut out. Thanks to news priorities, preconceptions and resource limitations, plenty of stories of genuine public interest never see the light of day. In a packed hall at the Belfast Book


Festival in June, two journalists who know a thing or two about big reveals grappled with why conspiracy and cover-up can win out over disclosure. Sam McAllister, the former TV


producer who secured Newsnight’s show-stopping Prince Andrew interview, spoke about Scoops, an account of her time at the BBC. Lucia Osborne-Crowley wrote The Lasting Harms about the trial of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, which she attended in New York in 2021. Both women emphasised the


importance of reporting ‘without fear or favour’ – but neither seemed convinced this prevails in modern journalism. McAllister’s most famous scalp saw


Prince Andrew say he did not regret his relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and that he could not have had sex with trafficked minor Virginia Giuffre because he had been at Pizza Express in Woking. Several days later,


08 | theJournalist


Buckingham Palace announced the prince’s public duties had been suspended ‘for the foreseeable future’. Yet the interview had


originally been proposed as a “puff piece with Prince Andrew where he talks about how incredible and amazing he is”, McAllister said. “We do not do interviews like that at Newsnight – sometimes at the BBC but definitely not at Newsnight – so I turned it down.” Many months later, the palace got


back in touch and eventually accepted a no holds barred approach. McAllister believes “the pernicious effect of class” meant she was happy to tread where others did not dare. “Because I don’t belong in that world, I had nothing to lose. I didn’t care about garden parties or dinner events or getting an OBE, CBE or any of that – because I sure as hell ain’t going to get them. Those were not things that resonated with me as important, so I had a beautiful obliviousness in a sense to the peril that other people might have contemplated.” For Osborne-Crowley, herself a


survivor of child sexual abuse, ‘trauma-informed journalism’ was crucial to telling the story of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims. “It really means understanding what it feels like to live this life, and to really like to empathise with people,” she said. “And traditional journalists don’t like that idea.” In the New York courtroom, she found that other journalists reporting the trial were hampered by their own prejudice. “They were all kinds of men


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in their 40s, a lot of them from the British tabloids, and we would see the same evidence from the same women who were groomed and abused as girls, and they would come out with what we call rape myths,” she explains. On one occasion, victim Annie


Farmer testified that Maxwell had given her a pair of cowboy boots. “There was something like 72 mentions of her boots in the mainstream papers,” said Osborne-Crowley. “This is a woman who got up and told a jury about the worst things that had ever happened to her. And the only thing that any journalist wrote about that night were the boots and how they discredited her.” For McAllister, “deference does not


“


We love to read a story about a baddy – and baddies may well be baddies – but we don’t like a story about a goody


get you across the line when it comes to journalism” but “in newsrooms, there’s a lot of deference”. Stories also get repressed, because of the ‘goody-baddy syndrome’ in the media. At Newsnight, she had convinced Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged Bill Clinton had raped her in 1978, to give an interview. “For reasons we don’t need to go into, that interview wasn’t run or done. However, somebody else said that President Trump had pinched her bum, and that was run. We love to read a story about a baddy, and baddies may well be baddies, but we don’t like a story about a goody.” Both men deny the allegations. Challenging deference and


assumptions will take radical action over newsroom management, under- resourced teams and, yes, media ownership. Until then, disclosure will too often rely on individuals willing to risk a lot – working within a system stacked against them.


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