Roy Greenslade: The end does not justify the means in Brooks Newmark’s shaming

Tory MP Brooks Newmark sent explicit pictures of himself to a person he thought was a woman

1 October 2014

Of the many difficult decisions faced by editors when publishing a sensitive story, none is more acute than judging whether it is in the public interest.

Although non-journalists, especially politicians, like to think that editors simply do as they like, nothing could be further from the truth. Some of them might have been cavalier before they created an ethical code in 1991. Now editors, in consultation with their in-house lawyers, are much more careful.

It is important to keep this in mind in assessing whether the Sunday Mirror was right to publish the article which revealed that a Tory MP, Brooks Newmark, had sent explicit pictures of himself to a person he thought was a woman.

In fact, Newmark had been caught in a sting operation. The woman who approached him on Twitter did not exist. “Sophie Wittams” had been invented by a male freelance reporter, Alex Wickham. Before the Mirror published the story Newmark resigned as minister for civil society and confessed he had been a fool.

But his resignation was not, of itself, proof of the article’s validity. It remained important for the paper to justify having run it.

When Wickham offered the story to the Sunday Mirror, it having been rejected previously by the Sun on Sunday and Mail on Sunday, the paper’s two most senior executives, editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley, and weekend editor, Alison Phillips, spent hours mulling over the pros and cons of publication.

They eventually became convinced of the significance of Newmark’s special role as a recruiter of female Tory MPs, notably through a Conservative organisation he co-founded called Women2Win. In the editors’ view, there was the justification. To quote Embley, the public interest was “nailed on”.

Several high-profile non-Mirror female journalists have since made it clear that they whole-heartedly agree with the Sunday Mirror’s exposure of Newmark’s activities.

I have also detected a measure of sympathy for Embley and Phillips among rival male editors and senior journalists, probably because they know all about making knife-edge decisions over the public interest.

They are, however, altogether less convinced about the subterfuge employed by Wickham. Baiting the trap by using pictures of two women without their permission, for which the Mirror has had to apologise, was an obvious no-no.

They, like me, also think there were strong elements of the whole exercise being a “fishing expedition” because Newmark was but one of eight Tory MPs approached by “Sophie”. So the net had been spread wide in the hope of a juicy catch.

Previous rulings by the old regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, outlawed that approach and Wickham would needed to have had prima facie evidence of misbehaviour by every one of the MPs in order to warrant his trawl.

It is impossible to disentangle the public interest from the methodology. Given that we have a code of practice, we cannot argue that the end justifies the means.

As that grand old man of American broadcasting journalism, Ed Murrow, once observed: “We cannot make good news out of bad practice.” Now we shall see if the new regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, agrees with Murrow, with me, and with those editors who thought Wickham’s tale too hot to handle.

Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London, and writes a blog for the Guardian

Roy Greenslade: The end does not justify the means in Brooks Newmark’s shaming

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