on media


Keeping the rubbish out of Brexit coverage


Conscience clause would protect journalists, says Raymond Snoddy The Daily Telegraph told press


P


eter Oborne, the Daily Mail’s political columnist, has done a couple of remarkable things in his career,


apart from making decent Dispatches programmes for Channel 4. In 2015, he resigned from the Daily


Telegraph in protest against the paper’s coverage – or lack of coverage – of HSBC, calling this ‘a fraud on its readers’. His recent conversion from ardent Brexiteer to Remainer, announced on the OpenDemocracy website but amplified in personal appearances across the broadcast media, was even more remarkable. Oborne pulled no punches, arguing


that the economic case for Brexit had been destroyed, the UK had been turned into a laughing stock and it was time for a rethink. Future generations would ‘damn us’


for what we were now doing. Oborne is a famous and powerful


columnist and has the luxury and freedom to be able to take strong public positions.


Whether such opinions can be combined permanently with his post on the pro-Brexit Daily Mail is less than clear. For Oborne, it hardly matters. He could quickly find a new perch on a more compatible newspaper or earn lots of money as a freelance. But what does the average journalist with a mortgage and family do when faced with having to create or process information that is demonstrably false involving the Brexit debate, one of the most important peacetime turning points for generations? Boris Johnson, as often happens, provides the perfect example.


regulator Ipso that Johnson’s columns were ‘comically polemical’ and could not be read as in-depth analysis of factual matters. In short, the Johnson claim that a


majority of the population were perfectly happy with a no-deal Brexit was complete rubbish. But what of the journalists who had to turn this rubbish into the paper’s front page splash, almost certainly perfectly aware that the claim was nonsense? The NUJ has been campaigning for a


conscience clause to protect journalists who refuse to do anything that breaks its code of ethics. It would enable journalists to resist


threats or any inducements to influence, distort or suppress information or use unethical methods to pursue a story. In all likelihood, we will soon be


entering a highly divisive European election campaign, with the possibility of further months of disruption to come, perhaps culminating in either a second referendum or a confirmatory vote. There is an urgent need for the


conscience clause campaign to be restated in the context of Brexit and reinvigorated in advance of the coming storm. Whatever your position in the referendum debate, such an important matter should not be decided on the basis of distorted or false information, or campaigns against immigrants, and journalists on the more committed papers will inevitably find themselves once more in the line of fire and deserve greater protection. They should not be forced to lie or


mislead in what could easily become the ultimate fraud on their readers. Whatever your starting position, it is an undeniable fact that in the referendum campaign the pro-Brexit press sold their readers an almost comically naive version of the likely joys of Brexit. We were told that the UK held all the


cards in the negotiations with the EU and nothing would be more simple than negotiating wonderful trade deals with the rest of the world. Those who warned that the Northern Ireland issue was politically insoluble were accused of scaremongering. In a European election held in a state of political paralysis, what are those papers now going to tell their readers? It would be nice to think that they,


18 | theJournalist


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like Oborne, could have a rethink and admit, for goodness sake, that they might just have got it wrong. This is very unlikely to happen. There is not going to be one of Kelvin MacKenzie’s reverse ferrets. So they will probably sail on peddling the same line whether it fits the facts or not, with serious consequences not just for journalists but for the papers themselves. If they continue to mislead and


Journalists should not be forced to lie or mislead in what could easily become the ultimate fraud on their readers


suppress inconvenient facts, they will effectively make themselves utterly irrelevant to a younger generation who are disproportionately pro-European and already difficult to sell newspapers to at the best of times. For journalists, arguing the case for a Brexit conscience clause is a matter of the greatest urgency particularly if there is to be a second vote in some form – one that could be even more bitter and divisive than the first.


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