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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— village April – May 2013
environment
We need ethical journalists like
Superman/Clark Kent
J
OURNALISTS are good at dishing it out,
less good at taking it. We demand from
others standards we would never dream of
applying to ourselves. Tabloid newsrooms
fuelled by cocaine excoriate celebrity drug-
takers. Hacks who have made a lifetime’s study
of abusing expense accounts lambast MPs for
fiddling theirs. Columnists demand account-
ability, but demonstrate none themselves.
Should we be surprised that the public place us
somewhere on the narrow spectrum between
derivatives traders and sewer rats?
No one will be shocked to discover hypoc-
risy among hacks, but there’s also a more
substantial issue here. A good deal of reporting
looks almost indistinguishable from corporate
press releases. Often that’s because it is cor-
porate press releases, mindlessly recycled by
overstretched staff: a process referred to as
churnalism. Or it could be because the report-
ers work for people who see themselves, as Max
Hastings said of his employer Conrad Black, as
“members of the rich men’s trade union”, whose
mission is to defend the proprietorial class to
which they belong.
But there are sometimes other influences
at play, which are even less visible to the pub-
lic. From time to time a payola scandal surfaces,
in which journalists are shown to have received
money from people whose interests they write
or talk about. For example, two columnists in
the US, Doug Bandow and Peter Ferrara, were
exposed for taking undisclosed payments from
the disgraced corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
On top of the payments he received from the
newspapers he worked for, Bandow was given
$, for every column he wrote which
favoured Abramoff’s clients.
Armstrong Williams, a TV host, secretly
signed a $, contract with George W
Bush’s Department of Education to promote
Bush’s education bill and ensure that the
education secretary was offered slots on his
programme. In the UK, a leaked email revealed
that Professor Roger Scruton, a columnist for
the Financial Times and a contributor to other
newspapers, was being paid £, a month
by Japan Tobacco International to
write on “major topics of current
concern” to the industry.
These revelations were acci-
dental. For all we know, such deals
could be commonplace. While
journalists are not subject to the
accountability they demand of
others, their powerful position –
helping to shape public opinion
– is wide open to abuse.
The question of who pays
for public advocacy has become
an obsession of mine. I’ve seen how groups
purporting to be spontaneous gatherings of
grassroots activists, fighting the regulation of
tobacco or demanding that governments should
take no action on climate change, have in fact
been created and paid for by corporations:
a practice known as astroturfing. I’ve asked
the bodies which call themselves free-market
thinktanks, yet spend much of their time pro-
moting corporate talking-points, to tell me who
funds them. All but one have refused.
But if I’m to subject other people to this scru-
tiny, I should also be prepared to expose myself
to it. So I have done something which might
be foolhardy, but which I feel is necessary: I’ve
opened a registry of my interests on my website,
in which I will detail all the payments, gifts and
hospitality (except from family and friends) I
receive, as well as the investments I’ve made. I
hope it will encourage other journalists to do
the same. In fact I urge you, their readers, to
demand it of them.
Like many British people, I feel embar-
rassed talking about money, and publishing the
amounts I receive from the Guardian
and other employers makes me feel
naked. I fear I will be attacked by
some people for earning so much and
mocked by others for earning so little.
Even so, the more I think about it, the
more I wonder why it didn’t occur to
me to do this before.
A voluntary register is a small step
towards transparency. What I would
really like to see is a mandatory list of
journalists’ financial interests, similar
to the House of Commons registry. I
believe that everyone who steps into public life
should be obliged to show who is paying them,
and how much. Publishing this register could be
one of the duties of whatever replaces the dis-
credited Press Complaints Commission.
Journalists would still wield influence with-
out responsibility. That’s written into the job
description. But at least we would then have
some idea of whether it’s the organ-grinder
talking or his monkey.
This article first appeared in the Guardian
newspaper; a fully referenced version can be found
on www.monbiot.com
I’ve opened a
registry of my
interests on
my website
I declare, dear reader
For everyone in public life, including me, there should be a mandatory public
registry of interests, by George Monbiot
