Vince Cable might be out of a job soon – despite the decision to keep him on as Business Secretary for now. His injudicious remarks to posing-as-constituents undercover journalists from the Telegraph might well be enough to get him the push eventually. You can’t afford to tell the truth in politics, after all – even if you think you have the power to bring a government down and win a ‘war on Murdoch’.
Clearly, the revelation of Cable’s ‘war on Murdoch’ makes it difficult for him to claim impartiality in making the ultimate judgement on News Corp’s take-over of BSkyB. So, it is right that this judgement has been removed from him. But, it should not be inferred from this that Murdoch’s bid is somehow validated – or that it should now get an easier ride – despite the cries of righteous indignation that will (inevitably and justifiably) emanate from the Empire. The bid is questionable on a number of grounds and needs to be examined on impartial grounds if the eventual judgement is to have the credibility that really matters in the fast-changing media environment.
But, the ethics of journalists pretending to be constituents and secretly recording Cable are also questionable (at the very least). The same people who complain about dissembling politicians seem not to be able to understand why public figures feel compelled to dissemble in the first place. We create a vicious and unedifying circle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thinking aloud for a moment, what are the alternatives? Would we applaud a government in which every individual Minister said publicly what they really think about every issue? Or would we deride such a government for being ill-disciplined, ego-driven and hopelessly inept? We (the media and the public who love the drama of scandal and the schadenfreude of seeig th mighty fall) seem to want it both ways.
Cable got it badly wrong. But, he wasn’t the only one who should be questioning his ethics.
Postscript 22 December: If Vince Cable is compromised in being the adjudicator of the Murdoch bid by the partisan comments he has made, why is Jeremy Hunt not compromised by the same? http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/22/jeremy-hunt-news-corp-bskyb?CMP=twt_fd
December 21, 2010 at 6:34 pm
So Vince Cable is a little bit indiscreet in the company of people he thought that he was able to trust. So what? If we were all sacked for injudicious things we had said, there would be nobody in employment.
As the the Torygraph, if the believe that entrapment is honest journalism, then there is something missing in their judgement.
But then, what can we expect from a Paper, which is as right wing as the Daily Wail, but likes to portray itself as respectable.
December 21, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Someone had the habit of calling this supposedly respectable newspaper The Daily Bubblegraph.
Supposedly respectable. What does it respect?
December 22, 2010 at 10:01 am
Hang on a bit! Don’t shoot the messenger just ‘cos you don’t like the message – and please get it right: it was the lefty BBC, not the righty Telegraph, that revealed what Cable said about Murdoch. The Telegraph suppressed this info, perhaps because they fear the rival that Murdoch is to them. Newspapers are slowly dying in the e-age (few young people read them now), but they will go down fighting. In a world of i-pads, who is going to bother buying a newspaper? And if it hadn’t been for The Telegraph, would Britain have known about the scandal of its greedy and dishonest MPs milking expenses? They did Britain a great public service, revealing information that belonged to the public.
As for Cable being ‘indiscreet’, that is too kind by half. As a minister he has a *judicial duty in this matter. Can you imagine a judge saying casually (even in confidence to a friend) about a defendant in a case he was judging: ‘I don’t like him. I’m at war with him’? Of course not. Cable should have recused himself long ago. As it is, he is increasingly appearing as the crazy uncle of British politics, and revealing (in company with Clegg and others) the Liberal Democrats as the dupes and patsies of the Conservatives. But the Liberals have always been like that; as we know from marginal constituencies, they will say or do anything to get elected, including the politics of personal destruction. Always the bridemaid, never the bride, they jumped at Cameron’s offer to be the mistress. And they wonder why mistresses don’t get respect!
As for the ethics of dissimulation: well, it makes for more interesting and truthful journalism than the tedious habit of just printing party press releases. I recall reading once that the US Army had broken the Japanese code in the 1930s, but the Secretary of State refused to use this on the grounds that ‘gentlemen don’t read other gnetlemen’s letters’. Hmm. Might have come in handy in December 41. But neither politicians not journalists are gentlemen, or ladies, in The Telegraph’s case.
December 22, 2010 at 10:18 am
Smart comment by Nick Ropbinson on R4 this morning that journalistic freedom itself could be undermined by underhand tactics like these. If the free flow of information is a sign of a healthy democracy then subterfuge simply drives the truth undergound and the people who might tell it (that is, as far as they are able).
December 22, 2010 at 11:09 am
#3: so where did the BBC get its info from? And has the BBC never done the same, e.g. by infiltrating and secretly filming the BNP in a private meeting in a pub? What about Channel 4 secretly filming in a Brimingham mosque and getting a jihadi imam to shoot off his mouth? (If only it stopped there.) Remember how the West Midlands police reacted! It’s easy to get righteous when one’s own pet cause is shown in a bad light, but to praise subterfuge when it helps you. Secret filming is all part of the BBC’s stock in trade.
Maybe you should praise The Telegraph for exposing Cable’s prejudice.
December 22, 2010 at 11:09 am
That should be #4.
December 22, 2010 at 11:20 am
Steve,
Did I shoot the messenger? Read what I said and not what you would like me to have said. Cable was wrong – but that doesn’t mean the Telegraph was right. And, of course, it begs the further question about why the ‘moral high ground’ Telegraph withheld that bit of the transcript that wasn’t convenient to their own case against Murdoch. That isn’t to defend the BBC – but it is to say that the Telegraph’s dissembling changed the story into not only Cable’s problem, but also the Telegraph’s own integrity. Or do you think that is beyond question… because it is ‘righty’ rather than ‘lefty’ (whihc is an absurd categorisation for the BBC)?
They are clearly going to drip the stories from their undercover meetings with ministers – as they did with the expenses last year. But let’s have no illusions that this is about truth, democracy and political integrity – it is about selling papers. That’s OK so long as they don’t pretend otherwise.
My point is that the lack of integrity of one party (the politicians) does not let the journalists off their own integrity hook.
December 22, 2010 at 11:40 am
I agree that the tactics of so-called undercover reporting are somewhat tarnished by this episode. The question that should always be asked of such methods is whether they are in the public interest. In fact, in my opinion the only grounds on which they could be shown to be in the public interest is Vince Cable’s remarks about the Murdoch/BSkyB shares – and that was the element which the Telegraph ‘suppressed’ and in contrast the BBC rightly reported.
December 22, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Nick, I was responding to comments 1 & 2.
I’m not a partisan of any newspapers, and rarely if ever read them now. That’s why I’m so much better informed!
The ethics of The Telegraph don’t concern me much, since I don’t work fro them or buy their product.
But all TV watchers in the UK have to pay £146 a year to the BBC or face imprisonment! Now there’s a moral issue! It isn’t absurd to categorise the BBC as ‘lefty’ – DG Mark Thomson has admitted as much recently in a kind of ‘mea culpa’, while Robert Peston is from a Labour family, Kirsty Wark has lots of Scottish Labour Party connections, Mariella Frostrup is Gordon Brown’s #1 (and only?) fan, Jane Garvie and Victoria Derbyshire are clear in their sympathies, and ‘luvvies’ like Stephen Fry and Marcus Brigstocke are hardly flaming rightists, are they? 90% of BBC advertising for recruiting is done through the Guardian, as a FOI release recently showed.
None of this is a secret, or in the slightest surprising, and I don’t think you can deny this with a straight face. Seriously, NOBODY ever accuses the BBC of being rightwing or supporting Israel or being anti-Muslim!
Nearly ALL publicly-financed broadcasting in the western world has a left-liberal bias, whether it’s PBS radio in the US, CBC in Canada or ABC in Australia. It’s merely a reflection of the kind of journalists who end up working in public broadcasting. Of course there are exceptions – Andrew Neil in his unwatched politics programme – but the tenor is well known.
And if you have followed the JournoList story (hint: you’ll never read about it in the papers), you will know that in the rampantly capitalist USA, the great majority of journalists are open Democrat supporters (Maddow, Matthews, Olbermann etc).
My point about the BBC using subterfuge for its own purposes remains true. It secretly filmed BNP leaders in 2004, leading to the fiasco of a court case in 2006. Would you accuse them of dissembling?
December 22, 2010 at 4:15 pm
The tension between consistent and with absolute honesty, and judicious dissembling/ hypocrisy is nothing new.
Some time ago I came across an interesting remark from William Wilberforce who asked which man better promoted the public good – the honest man who pointed the way to perdition or the hypocrite who pointed the way to virtue?
I am sure that all Government have their internal tensions and in a way, it would be rather worrying if they were not all some form of “coalition”; I am sure a Government of clones, completely of one mind, might be a rather worrying prospect whatever complexion of politics they might espouse.
As it is, I am sure that although he remains in office, Vince Cable will be very weakened. All football fans forgive their player if he makes a single mad last ditch tackle and gets sent off, but if he makes a mad tackle – gets away with it, follows it up with as bad a one and escapes with a yellow card, we all get on his back if he’s then daft enough to leave the team weakened with a third offence that sees him leaving the field.
If VC does end up being sacked for another indiscretion, his own side are similarly likely to be very unsympathetic. He no longer has the boasted ” nuclear option”. When he goes he is likely to go, not with a bang, but a whimper.
I found it worth the contemplation
December 22, 2010 at 4:24 pm
The Telegraph has descended to the level of the tabloids and Wikileaks by this stunt. In so doing it has undermined democracy. Who, in any office can now speak freely. We need to be able to speak freely with our politicians, bishops etc.
To peddle the fact that it was good journalism because it exposed differences in the coalition is absolute rubbish. We need there to be differences of opinion, how else can there be debate and can decisions be worked at. The good thing about the coalition is that it is people with different prejudices sitting down together and working at a concensus. we see that so rarely in politics and now the telegraph has squashed it. If theyn didn’t do such good crosswords I would cancel my subscription.
In this case Vince is right, Murdoch needs containing. The sad thing is that by indiscretion borne of inexperience he has lost his chance to do us all a favour and i doubt the Tories have the backbone to do it for him. we need people like Vince to ask the questions we don’t like so we are forced to debate them.
Politics is about debate and compromise, or it should be. Sadly Cameron hasn’t delivered on this.
December 22, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Re: Steve Adeyemo’s points.
Steve, you raise interesting points re: what’s the difference between under cover reporting against the crazy imam/ the BNP/ whatever, and undercover reporting vs Vince Cable. It made me stop and think, as a good post should do.
However, I think Nick Robinson’s blog: 22 December, “Something’s bugging me”, answers your questions.
Basically, at the BBC, before undercover reporting, you need serious authorisation AND prior proof of wrong doing by the person you’re investigating. In this case, Cable had done nothing wrong, save thought about government. The people stumbled on the story, (which they then covered up, which Peston then revealed).
I think the Telegraph was underhand here. And it wasn’t in the broader public interest.
Of course, we’re interested. I was interested that Jeffrey John had been on the short list for Bishop of Southwark. But was it in the interest of the broader public to know that, in the sense of ‘benefitting’ us? Did I need to know that? No, someone just fancied leaking it and it made a good story. Playing to my (and others’) baser instinct rather than our better instinct.
Here, it’s kind of interesting, but the ends don’t justify the means.
December 22, 2010 at 10:01 pm
At the last college I worked in, a debate began about whether staff and students should all use the same toilet facilities. Progressives couldn’t see any problem with it. Traditionalists frowned. It wasn’t just the proximity, the stepping over of boundaries, it was the fear that students might overhear conversations – the type of conversation that teachers are often forced to have in the only real breaks they get during the day i.e. standing at the urinal or sitting on granny’s doughnut. The response from senior management was that, if students shouldn’t be hearing the conversation then it must be the type of conversation that shouldn’t be had anywhere. Well, they had a point, but generally ‘indiscretions’ are accepted [within reason] aren’t they, between fellow professionals – teacher to teacher, doctor to doctor, bishop to bishop? It’s when the ‘status’ lines are crossed that extreme caution has to be exercised – teacher to student, doctor to patient, bishop to diocesan clergy (?) and presumably politician to constituency member. Members of senior management teams [despite their pious stance on this occasion] are notoriously rowdy when they go off on their jollies and probably outrageously indiscreet.
So, Vince Cable broke a professional code not an ethical one. It would be naive to expect him to actually *be* impartial – that’s not what politics is about.
December 23, 2010 at 10:07 am
#12: Robert, thanks for your comments. You state:
“Basically, at the BBC, before undercover reporting, you need serious authorisation AND prior proof of wrong doing by the person you’re investigating.”
No, that’s not so. The BBC is not a criminal or fraud investigation agency, it’s a public broadcaster. It doesn’t need any “authorisation”, nor does anyone else, to ascertain “facts”; it just has to stay within the law.
“In this case, Cable had done nothing wrong, save thought about government. The people stumbled on the story, (which they then covered up, which Peston then revealed).”
No, you (and dearsoeur) are missing the point that as a Minister of the UK government with a *duty to be impartial* in a huge decision he was charged with making, Cable revealed that he was literally prejudiced (his mind made up in advance) against a party. How would you feel about a judge being secretly filmed making derogataory comments about n*****s, ch***s, p***s? Would you complain about the deception? cable isn’t a private individual and this wasn’t (strictly speaking) a private conversation.
Maybe the Telegraph planned to drip-drip this story as they did with parliamentary expenses, to cause maximum damage an to drive up sales – I don’t know. Under its current leadership it isn’t the “reliably conservative” paper it was years ago. It does see Murdoch as its greatest threat.
“I think the Telegraph was underhand here. And it wasn’t in the broader public interest.”
Yes, it was underhand – like all espionage is, and a lot of counterespionage too. (Remember Ehud in the Book of Judges!) But newspapers, despite their pomposity, don’t represent “the public interest”, they represent their employers (and maybe their advertisers and – just perhaps – their readership base). It is *Vince Cable* as the elected MP and Minister who was supposed to represent the public interest.
I heard of a school once where a kid smashed a lot of ceiling panels. It was terrible vandalism, but it revealed a massive amount of asbestos which had to be removed. Was the kid a villain or a hero – or both? I think Catholics called this a ‘felix culpa’.
December 23, 2010 at 2:39 pm
[...] Bishop Nick also queries what the media got up to on his blog. [...]
December 23, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Wow, Christmas has come early for Murdoch: first Vince Cable, and now the conviction of Scottish Socialist Tommy Sheridan for perjury – thanks to a concealed camera on a “comrade”!
Now who can untangle the ethics of this can of worms?
December 30, 2010 at 4:25 pm
But he’s a good dancer (Strictly Come Dancing), though a bit grim. Perhaps a change of career is coming at just the right time.