20.05.09
Journalists will increasingly have to rely on campaign groups to use the freedom
of information act for them as publishers come under financial pressure.
That is the prediction made in a report published today by the Reuters
institute for the study of journalism at the university of Oxford, “A
shock to the system: journalism, government and the freedom of information
act 2000,” written by Jeremy Hayes, an output editor on BBC Radio 4’s
The World Tonight.
He says that although journalists are likely to be the most systematic
users of FOIA for the next few years, pressure groups and political parties
are increasingly using it to research and generate stories to feed to the
media.
“On the evidence of the growing use of FOIA by pressure groups
and voluntary organisations, it is not impossible to imagine a future, in
an age of reducing newsrooms, in which the predominant use of FOIA for journalistic
purposes is via research originating from campaigners,” he writes.
He says that while journalists might be expected to exercise a law
that gives the public a “right to know”, they are typically “sceptical”
of the value of FOIA research, not least “because of the hours of reporter
resources they can consume.” In contrast, campaigning organisations,
political parties and single-interest groups are prepared to invest the resources
in FOIA inquiries “in the hope of interesting journalists”.
The FOIA Centre has long worked, not only for the media industry, but
also for a wide range of campaign groups, extracting information using FOIA
and other open-access laws, enabling them to supply stories to the press and
broadcasters.
The study says: “These researches have been linked to campaigns,
but the importance of publicising them has led organisations to share their
discoveries with journalists. Since FOIA has been introduced, the volume of
these ‘exclusives’ has noticeably increased.”
Last year, for example, Greenpeace obtained documents showing that
the government had attempted to water down or delay a European air-quality
directive to avoid creating difficulties for the proposed third runway at
Heathrow airport.
Greenpeace offered the documents to a journalist with a strong FOIA
reputation who wrote the story for London’s Evening Standard,
where it appeared on the front page.
“Essentially, the journalist had been offered a ‘free lunch’,
in that none of the time taken to unearth the information had been his. Greenpeace
had effect-ively acted as unpaid researchers.”
The taxpayers’ alliance has made use of FOIA to identify examples
of wasteful expenditure by public bodies. “The discoveries… have
invariably found their way in to the newspapers through an aggressive use
of press releases coupled with research findings.”
Its chief executive, Matthew Elliot, said: “We have tried to
give news stories to journalists on a plate.” The group uses FOIA to
obtain “fresh figures from government and local councils, which we package
up into brief, media-friendly research papers, complete with eye-catching
headline figures to give reporters a ready-made top line.”
Political parties are also using FOIA to feed stor-ies to the press.
FOIA enables them to obtain results that are often more comprehensive, factual
and authoritative than answers to parliamentary questions.
In one example, David Howarth, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge and
the party’s justice spokes-man, used FOIA to discredit claims made by
a home office minister that 70 police officers had been injured by environmental
protestors at the Kingsnorth power station in July 2008.
The response to a FOIA request showed that the police reported only
12 injuries, none of which resulted from contract with protestors. They includ-ed
a wasp sting and the effects of the summer heat.
The information was offered to a journalist on The Guardian,
which published it as a news story.
The study says: “In an age of cutbacks in news-rooms, the offer
of new, original material on a plate is proving very hard to resist.”
One investigative reporter, Paul Lashmar, formerly of The Independent,
The Observer, and ITV’s World in Action, told the
study: “Journalists are often now so over-stretched that a lot of work
that used to be carried out in the newsroom is carried out by groups such
as the taxpayers’ alliance.
“What you see now is journalists who are grateful for news that
is almost perfectly packaged to go into the paper with a ready top line. In
that sense, journalism is becoming very passive.”
The study continues: “Are journalists who feed off exclusives
from activists and politicians relinquish-ing the use of FOIA to third parties
when they should be asking the questions themselves?
“Plainly, the conflicts of interest which arise from journalists
retailing these kinds of ‘scoops’, for which they are not the
originators, are not new. Correspondents traditionally rely on inside information
from sources who divulge it, often for their own ends.
“Arguably, a story that comes from a political party or pressure
group and originates from FOIA research is less immune to being used for ‘spin’
since the facts involved have a documentary basis independent of the source.
“Given the financial pressures that are becoming ever more a
feature of British journalism, comment and reactive news reporting are likely
to become ever more dominant in terms of coverage, while investigation and
pursuit of the inconvenient truth may become ever more specialized.”
The report also examines problems with the way in which “freedom
of information” is working in the UK, such as “obstruction”
to FOIA requests by public bodies.
It says: “One particularly blatant case concerns efforts by the
housing corporation… to ensure that potentially embarrassing information
about an IT modernization programme would not be revealed to journalists or
other inquirers.”
This was exposed two years ago by the FOIA Centre and Computer
Weekly.
Comment on this article
Revealed: strategy to prevent
FOIA disclosure
Headlines
Links
“A
shock to the system: journalism, government
and the freedom of information act 2000” by Jeremy Hayes for
the Reuters institute for the study of
journalism.
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