journalism
Assange Extradition Case Moves Forward While The CIA Covers Its Tracks
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/8d572432e8f27bc3c5db22c0e53e896a/href
So they’re really doing it. The Biden administration is really ignoring Australia’s request to end the case against Julian Assange, and they’re proceeding with their campaign to extradite a journalist for telling the truth about US war crimes.
In order to move the extradition case forward, per a British high court ruling US prosecutors needed to provide “assurances” that the US would not seek the death penalty and would not deprive Assange of his human right to free speech because of his nationality. The US provided the assurance against the death penalty (which they’d previously opposed doing), and for the free speech assurance they said only that Assange will be able to “raise and seek to rely upon” US First Amendment rights, adding, “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.”
Which is basically just saying “I mean, you’re welcome to TRY to have free speech protections?”
Consortium News on Twitter: "US Issues Assurances on Assange https://t.co/6a7osJoc82 UPDATED WITH TEXT OF DIPLOMATIC NOTE: The U.S. Tuesday filed assurances on the death penalty and the 1st Amendment, the latter of which Stella Assange called a "non-assurance." pic.twitter.com/KQNNeIQNYD / Twitter"
US Issues Assurances on Assange https://t.co/6a7osJoc82 UPDATED WITH TEXT OF DIPLOMATIC NOTE: The U.S. Tuesday filed assurances on the death penalty and the 1st Amendment, the latter of which Stella Assange called a "non-assurance." pic.twitter.com/KQNNeIQNYD
At the same time, CIA Director William Burns has filed a State Secrets Privilege demand to withhold information in a lawsuit against the agency by four American journalists and attorneys who were spied on during their visits to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. State secrets privilege is a US evidentiary rule designed to prevent courts from revealing state secrets during civil litigation; the CIA began invoking it with the Assange lawsuit earlier this year.
Burns argues:
“I am asserting the state secrets and statutory privileges in this case as I have determined that either admitting or denying that CIA has information implicated by the remaining allegations in the Amended Complaint reasonably could be expected to cause serious — and in some cases, exceptionally grave — damage to the national security of the United States. After deliberation and personal consideration, I have determined that the complete factual bases for my privilege assertions cannot be set forth on the public record without confirming or denying whether CIA has information relating to this matter and therefore risking the very harm to U.S. national security that I seek to protect.”
Which is obviously a load of horse shit. As Assange himself tweeted in 2017, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.” Burns isn’t worried about damaging “the national security of the United States,” he’s worried about the potential political fallout from information about the CIA spying on American lawyers and journalists while visiting a journalist who was being actively targeted by the legal arm of the US government.
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "https://t.co/n1yfRuA8xy pic.twitter.com/COz405MbrJ / Twitter"
https://t.co/n1yfRuA8xy pic.twitter.com/COz405MbrJ
Political security is also why the US is working to punish Julian Assange for publishing inconvenient facts about US war crimes. The Pentagon already acknowledged years ago that the Chelsea Manning leaks for which Assange is being prosecuted didn’t get anyone killed and had no strategic impact on US war efforts, so plainly this isn’t about national security. It’s just politically damaging for the criminality of the US government to be made public for all to see.
They’re just squeezing and squeezing this man as hard as they can for as long as they can get away with to keep him silent and make an example of him to show what happens when journalists reveal unauthorized information about the empire. Just like Gaza, the persecution of Julian Assange makes a lie of everything the US and its western allies claim to stand for, and reveals the cruel face of tyranny beneath the mask of liberal democracy.
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Caroline Flack’s Lawyer Suggests Decision to Charge her May Have Been ‘Driven by Desire’ to Appease Media as Met Police Probe Case
Caroline Flack's lawyer suggested this week that a decision by the Metropolitan Police to charge the late TV presenter may have been "driven by a desire" to appease the media, as he spoke out after the force confirmed that it will partly reinvestigate its decision to prosecute as "new evidence may be available".
The development comes after a Byline Times special investigation into the case, 'Closure For Caroline Flack: Her Family's Four-Year Search for the Truth', uncovered fresh information. It is the cover story for the April edition, out now.
The Crown Prosecution Service recommended that the former Love Island host be cautioned after an incident with her then boyfriend, Lewis Burton, in December 2019. This was overturned after an appeal from the Met, which resulted in the 40-year-old charged with assault by beating.
Caroline was found dead at her home in Stoke Newington, north London, in February 2020 with a coroner later ruling that she killed herself after learning of the impending prosecution and fearing the publicity a trial would attract.
Her mother, Christine Flack, has been critical of the police's handling of her daughter's case from the outset, and is fighting to uncover the truth about how decisions around charging her unfolded.
She told Byline Times: “It is a big gap in our understanding of one of the most important moments in the whole thing. It has left us as a family in a terrible, stressful position. It is time he cleared it up, so we can get some justice for Carrie.”
The cover of the April edition of the Byline Times featuring the special investigation into Caroline Flack's case
Christine has made a fresh complaint to the Met because her family has been left with "important unanswered questions".
Questioned about the decision to re-examine the case, Flack's lawyer, Jonathan Coad, suggested that the Met Police's relationship with the media may not be "entirely as it should be", telling Sky News: "One suspects the reason why police made this decision was to appease the press pressure, which I remember being there... that she should be charged to rebut suggestions, 'oh, well she's had special treatment because she's a celebrity'."
He continued: "So, it may be that this decision, which indeed is unusual to appeal it, was driven by a desire not to fall foul of the press, and be criticised by the press, in which case is an entirely wrong reason for the appeal to be made."
Following Caroline's death, police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), conducted a review of the Met's decision to charge her, but did not find any misconduct. It did, however, ask the Met to apologise to Caroline's family for not recording the reason it appealed against the original CPS decision to only issue the presenter with a caution.
The force apologised in February last year, but Christine Flack rejected this, the BBC reported at the time.
The Met confirmed on 11 April that a new complaint was made by Flack's family last week which it referred to the IOPC.
In a statement to the Press Association, the Met said that the IOPC decided that "the majority of the matters had previously been dealt with and no further action was required" but "one aspect" of the complaint had been returned to the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) for further consideration.
That, the Met said, relates to the "actions of officers in appealing an initial decision by the CPS not to charge Ms Flack, and because new witness evidence may be available". DPS officers are now making "further enquiries in relation to this".
The IOPC issued a statement confirming this.
Christine told the Mirror that she made the complaint to try to "compel" the officer who was at her daughter's arrest "to give the statement we think he should have given four years ago".
"We won't stop until we get the truth," she told the publication.
As Byline Times’ investigation spread across the British press, the journalists behind the exclusive, Dan Evans and Tom Latchem, spoke about how they went about investigating the case and uncovering fresh evidence.
Evans explained that, after the pair broke the Dan Wootton story for this newspaper, they approached Caroline Flack's family "to see if we could help her get those answers" and through "forensic investigative reporting" discovered that an arresting officer who had played a role in reversing the charging decision – but who had never been named publicly – had left the Met before the inquest took place in 2020, but returned to the force last year.
"This meant he had never given a statement about his role, leaving a gap in Christine's knowledge of what happened on the night of Caroline's arrest," Evans said.
"Tom and I were thrilled that Christine was able to use our findings to lobby the Met, which has announced its Directorate of Professional Standards is seeking to now bridge this gap in the evidence. It’s a breakthrough in the Flack family’s understanding of Caroline's arrest and subsequent charge."
Latchem added: "Christine is a grieving mother and deserves to know the full truth about what happened in the lead up to her daughter's death. We’re happy to have contributed even in a small way, and we will continue to ensure no stone goes unturned.
"At a time when media outlets are cutting funding for investigative journalism to the bone, our ongoing work with Byline Times seeking justice for Caroline, along with the Dan Wootton investigation, and all our other investigative work, shows how important public interest journalism can be for holding power to account."
British singer Olly Murs will headline the Flackstock festival, when it returns for its third year on 22 July. Money raised will be split equally between charities Choose Love, Mind, the Samaritans, and the Charlie Waller Trust.
‘Media Attacks on NHS Translation and Diversity Spending Completely Miss the Point of the Health Service’
This week, the Express published an article headlined 'taxpayers billed £100 million for NHS translators – could pay for 3,000 nurses'. The story completely missed the point of what the health service does.
The standfirst went on to explain that taxpayers "pick up the bill" for translation and interpretation" to ensure that the NHS can be "accessed in languages other than English”.
Given health and healthcare access inequalities, surely spending money to ensure people get the right care they need is a good thing – not to mention a legal requirement.
The Express article published on 2 April about NHS spending on translators
The Express packaged the story to suggest that it had uncovered a scandal. It included data revealed through Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) to 251 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards, which “routinely convert standard hospital and health literature into languages including Romanian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi”.
The article included comments from a Reform Party spokesman, claiming that translation and interpretation services "were simply not necessary" and that artificial intelligence apps, such as Google Translate, could do the job – or that patients could use family members to translate for them.
The Express article followed the Mail’s report last week on National Trust cafés selling “woke scones” (made with margarine and not butter). It was another example of 'stories’ aimed at stirring up problems, rather than solving them.
The Mail article published on 31 March on 'woke scones'
Helping those in need be heard appears to be a bizarre issue to weaponise in manufactured 'culture wars’.
For starters, the total NHS spend in England for the last financial year was more than £180 billion, with a further £20 billion in local government spending on social care. So £100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.
Citizens or legal residents who don’t speak fluent or even basic English are, just like people with hearing loss, learning disabilities or cognitive impairment, as entitled to NHS care as the rest of the population. And there is already considerable evidence that they are not getting it, with health and healthcare access inequalities between different ethnic communities.
Denying people written information in their own language will only make matters worse.
When people who are sick, scared, vulnerable, distressed or have symptoms to discuss, treatments to understand, or complex psychosocial factors to explain, how can the quality and safety of the care they receive be improved if they can neither express nor understand key information?
There are also legal considerations. To provide valid consent to treatment in common law, patients must have sufficient information about the details, risks, potential harms and benefits of a proposed treatment (which could in some cases involve major surgery, powerful drugs or admission to intensive care). Language barriers must be overcome to make this a reality.
The Mental Capacity Act states that all reasonable efforts must be made to establish decision-specific capacity for treatment or care – which may include overcoming language barriers.
If patients lack capacity, then speaking to those closest to them is a key part of establishing their best interests for further decision-making. Again, this may require translators or clear written information in their first language. We do this for people with hearing loss via written communication or sign language.
Regulatory codes of practice for healthcare professionals are also clear that we must treat people equally, irrespective of characteristics including race, religion or nationality.
Using AI translation apps of variable reliability has its limits in a time-critical or emotionally-charged and challenging situation. And relying on family or friends to translate isn't always possible as not every patient is accompanied. If they are discussing personally sensitive or intimate information, they may be inhibited from doing so. If there are safeguarding concerns regarding abuse or neglect one could suspect the person translating of being coercive when doing so.
The thinly-veiled xenophobia and racism being whipped up by the Express (even against people who pay tax and National Insurance contributions and have precisely the same entitlement to care as native and confident English speakers) is part of a wider set of 'wedge issues’ being pushed by right-wing media outlets and sections of the Conservative and Reform parties.
They share a similar fixation with 'woke’ diversity managers or diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the NHS or other public services. Several Government ministers have lined up to call for a 'war on waste’ to remove such posts and policies.
Steve Barclay, when Health Secretary in 2023, wrote to integrated care boards in England instructing them to stop recruiting staff as dedicated EDI managers, arguing that the money should be spent on “frontline staff” instead.
The Express has published a number of articles lamenting 'wokery’ in the NHS – including, in January in a story headlined 'NHS spends £40 million on woke non-jobs that could pay for 1,150 nurses'.
Last year, the Spectator ran a FOI-based story showing that, out of an NHS workforce of around 1.5 million people, there were only 800 employees in dedicated EDI roles – yet called for those roles to be abolished.
Again, those employed in such posts account for a small fraction of 1% of the entire NHS workforce or spend. Their presence is de facto required due to the Equality Act and Equality Duty on public organisations and protections in employment law.
NHS organisations do have a very diverse workforce, yet there is clear evidence of ongoing and endemic discrimination towards minorities within it. There is also consistent evidence of discrimination and care inequalities between different ethnic and socio-economic groups the NHS serves.
The idea that a focus on EDI is somehow a bad thing and a distraction from real work, or that organisations should not employ a small number of people to oversee it, is not so much a dog-whistle as a wolf-klaxon. It is a classic distraction from the real issue – the 14 years of Conservative-led mismanagement of health and social care and of wider public health.
This decline has been well-documented by the Institute for Government think tank; as well former King’s Fund chief executive Professor Sir Chris Ham, who set out in expert detail the rise and decline of the service from the late 1990s through to the 2010 election and the current crisis in performance and public satisfaction.
Blaming our NHS crisis on the cost of translation and interpretation services, and diversity and inclusion managers, foments hostility against people from ethnic minorities, white people with poor English skills, and even those with full entitlement to use our public services and who contribute towards their costs.
They aren’t all rich enough to pay for their own personal translator or digitally equipped enough to auto-translate NHS information documents into their own languages.
I don’t see commentators on the right arguing against hospitals in France or Spain finding translations for ill white British expats or embassies around the world employing translators to help British citizens who have found themselves in a spot of bother with the local law. I wonder why.
Princess Diana ‘Phone Pest’ Story Links Both Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan to the ‘Criminal-Media Nexus’ of Police Corruption
A newly pleaded document submitted by Prince Harry’s legal team last month as part of his ongoing case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers for privacy intrusion sheds more light on what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the "criminal-media nexus” of journalists, private investigators and corrupt cops during the heyday of the tabloids.
In an amended claim over alleged unlawful information gathering in the case of HRH Duke of Sussex v News Group Newspapers, the claimants have lodged a notorious News of the World front page, dated 21 August 1994, carrying an exclusive story alleging that Princess Diana was a ‘phone pest’.
The story can only have come from police sources and so implicates both the then Editor of the now defunct News of the World, Piers Morgan, his then Chief Crime Reporter (now Editor of the Express) Gary Jones, and the proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself in the roaring trade between the tabloids and corrupt police officers.
At the centre of it all – and at the centre of many of the ongoing civil claims against both Murdoch’s newspapers, Mirror Group, and the Mail titles – is the role of the infamous detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the murder of its co-founder Daniel Morgan.
Police and Tabloid Corruption
Daniel Morgan was alleged to have been investigating police corruption when he was axed to death in a south London pub car park in March 1987.
His business partner, Jonathan Rees, was the prime suspect. Rees was arrested a few weeks later, along with one of the lead detectives on the initial murder inquiry, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
At the inquest into Morgan's death in 1988, evidence emerged that Rees and Fillery had colluded in covering up the murder. By this point, Fillery had retired from the Metropolitan Police and taken Morgan’s place at the detective agency.
Southern Investigations was now on its way to becoming a one-stop-shop for the ‘dark arts’ of unlawful newsgathering for the tabloids.
Alastair Morgan, his partner Kirsteen Knight, and solicitor Raju Bhatt at the 2021 publication of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report. Photo: Kirsty O'Connor/PA/Alamy
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Southern Investigations became the main hub for selling confidential personal and financial information to the press obtained by phone-tapping, burglary, covert surveillance, and computer hacking.
Its major purchaser was Alex Marunchak, News Editor of the News of the World.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in training up a raft of Fleet Street journalists in subterfuge and surveillance – the most notable of which was Mazher Mahmood, the Sunday tabloid’s famous ‘fake sheikh’.
One of the main sources of both this illicit information, and the techniques for gathering it, was a network of corrupt police officers in south-east London. The trade was so extensive the CID in the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’.
Rees and Fillery’s close relationship with organised crime, and the ‘firm within a firm’ of corrupt Met Police officers, saw them engaged in a roaring trade with News International. But, even if the amounts of money siphoned-off to Southern Investigations didn’t attract the attention of the company’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, the political dimensions of their dark arts surely would have.
When the then Culture Secretary David Mellor suggested in 1991 that the “popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon”, Southern Investigations set up the surveillance and bugging devices to expose him in an extramarital affair.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in the brokering of letters stolen from Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor, showing that the Liberal Democrat Leader had also once had an extramarital affair. The information was revealed just before the 1992 General Election.
In effect, Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak were becoming masters of politically targeted kompromat – years before the Russian term was well-known. But where do Piers Morgan and Express Editor Gary Jones fit in? And what did Rupert Murdoch know?
The Phone Pest Story
The following is an edited extract from 'Who Killed Daniel Morgan?’, which I co-authored with Daniel Morgan's brother Alastair Morgan
Piers Morgan took over the Editorship of the News of the World at the age of 28 in February 1994, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around the break-up of the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Morgan's only journalistic experience to date was penning the ‘Bizarre’ celebrity column at The Sun. He appointed an even younger Rebekah Brooks to become Features Editor that spring.
Given his inexperience with reporting, Morgan relied heavily on the older guard at the newspaper, especially his then News Editor, Alex Marunchak, whom he described as having a “deadpan, half-Ukrainian, moustachioed visage”.
Marunchak’s police sources would soon land Morgan in trouble.
Piers Morgan, who went on to become Editor of the Mirror, after the High Court ruled there was "extensive" phone-hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers from 2006 to 2011. Photo: PA Images/Alamy
In his autobiography The Insider, Morgan explains how, in August 1994, Marunchak and Chief Crime Reporter Gary Jones walked into the Editor’s office in Wapping and explained: “Got rather a big one here, boss. Diana’s a phone pest.” Marunchak went on to elaborate: “The cops are investigating hundreds of calls she has made to a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare.”
Jones backed up his News Editor with “a read-out from the police report" which he then quoted verbatim.
Hoare had received hundreds of silent, anonymous phone calls and reported them to the police. With the help of British Telecom, the police had traced the calls to Kensington Palace, the home of Princess Diana.
When Hoare was informed of the source of the calls, he told police officers that he and his wife were friends of Charles and Diana and he had been – according to the police report – “consoling her and becoming quite close to her” after her separation from the then heir to the throne.
The News of the World called the antique dealer for comment. Hoare did not deny there had been a police investigation. Under the bylines of Gary Jones and Royal Reporter Clive Goodman, the News of the World splashed the story over the front and four inside pages.
The details in the exclusive could only have come from the police documents: the date of Hoare’s first complaint, the involvement of BT’s specialist Nuisance Calls Bureau, the special code BT was given to trace the calls, the activation of the code on 13 January 1994, transcripts of six silent calls, and then the tracing equipment which linked the calls to a private number used by Prince Charles.
All of this detailed information could only have been sourced from the police.
The next day, in a long interview in the Daily Mail, Princess Diana denied the story.
Piers Morgan began to worry that he had made a huge career blunder. There were calls for him to resign. Marunchak tried to reassure the News of the World Editor by telling him: “We’ve had the report read to us, she’s lying." But Morgan still feared that the document could be a forgery.
“I felt sick to the pit of my stomach,” Morgan recalled in The Insider. “I couldn’t eat or even drink a cup of tea, it was hellish.”
What Murdoch Knew
The only thing that finally put Morgan's mind at rest was a call from his proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.
“Hi Piers,” Murdoch said. “I can’t really talk for long but I just wanted you to know that your story is 100% bang on. Can’t tell you how I know, but I just know.”
He then instructed his Editor to get on TV and tell the world that Princess Diana is "a liar", and to promise more material in the Sunday tabloid the following week.
Though relieved, Morgan couldn’t help admitting to Murdoch that he didn’t have any more material. Murdoch replied: “Oh, you will have by Sunday, don’t worry. Gotta go. Good luck.”
How had Murdoch independently verified the story? It was Alex Marunchak who had seen the police report. Would the proprietor have checked with his veteran News Editor?
At the Leveson Inquiry into the practices, culture and ethics of the press in 2012 – following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal the year before – Murdoch explicitly denied even remembering meeting Marunchak. But, in careful legal language guarding against any surviving photos, he added: "I might have shaken hands, walking through the office."
By that point, Marunchak had served in a number of senior roles at the News of the World from his first days in the Wapping dispute, attending parties with the News International CEO and senior police officers, to being made Editor of the Irish edition two decades later.
Steve Grayson, a freelance photographer who worked at the Sunday tabloid in the late 1990s, recalls Marunchak explicitly saying that he had a direct call from Murdoch on one occasion.
Despite his growing global influence, there is also no doubt that, during this era, Murdoch himself still called senior management at the newspaper most Friday or Saturday nights to check what stories were coming up. And there’s more evidence that Murdoch was well aware of the existence of Marunchak, who had served his company for more than 25 years.
Prince Harry with his lawyer David Sherborne at the High Court during his recent trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. Photo: PA/Alamy
In correspondence from September 1997, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, wrote personally to Murdoch to thank him for the News of the World’s coverage of the country's General Election. He said he particularly “appreciated the very professional approach of your Associate Editor Alex Marunchak”. Ahern even asked Murdoch to pass on “my thanks and best wishes to Alex”.
Murdoch replied on 30 September 1997: “I shall be delighted to pass on your comments.”
Whatever Murdoch’s uncertain memories of Alex Marunchak, the ultimate source of Piers Morgan’s scoop was a confidential police file. Later, Morgan was careful to say that the source wasn’t a ‘serving police officer’ – partly because that would have opened him, and any police officer, up to criminal charges.
Nobody was censured or sanctioned for the phone pest story. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
Gary Jones went on to win the Press Gazette’s Reporter of the Year Award, partly due to his News of the World exclusive about Diana’s anonymous calls.
Criticised by the then Press Complaints Council for another intrusive royal splash, Morgan would leave the Murdoch Sunday tabloid in 1995 and take up an even more senior position editing its rival, the Daily Mirror.
He would soon bring over Jones and, with him, the dark arts of Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees.
Ongoing Trials
While the judge has not ruled whether Prince Harry’s claims can date back to 1994 and the targeting of his mother, the evidence of Gary Jones’ relationship with Southern Investigations has already been heard in the case of the Duke of Sussex and other claimants against Mirror Group Newspapers.
The judge in that case, Justice Fancourt, concluded that Piers Morgan, as Editor of the Mirror newspapers, must have known about phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering.
Meanwhile, similar evidence is due to be heard in the pending claims by Prince Harry and others (including Baroness Doreen Lawrence) in claims against the publishers of the Mail and Mail on Sunday.
According to the particulars of claim issued so far, Associated Newspapers also procured the services of private investigators involved in illicit information, including allegations that Southern Investigations were involved in targeting the family of Stephen Lawrence, murdered by a racist gang connected to the south-east London underworld in 1993.
Like the tabloids used to say, this story will run and run.
‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
Many years ago, I was a junior business reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. It had been decided that I was to write that weekend’s main editorial based on an official report castigating Mohamed Al Fayed over the purchase of House of Fraser which included Harrods.
Fayed, it seems, had been deliberately opaque about the true origins of his funding. We were having an editorial meeting, me and the paper’s much more senior executives, about what the leader should say, when who should walk in but Murdoch. We all leapt to attention. He made a gesture for everyone to sit down, and then asked what we were discussing. They said that I was just explaining the importance of the report and that it was going to be the paper’s leader and I was going to write it. Murdoch turned to me, inquisitively. Thanks guys.
Murdoch fixed me a stare. “Son, who cares? Why does it matter?” he inquired softly and slowly. Nobody else said anything. I was on my own. I was sweating but the room felt chilly. Gulp. I blathered about how we could never be too careful, how it was vital that people didn’t lie about the source of their wealth, how we had anti-money laundering rules to prevent this sort of thing, how organised crime was a growing problem and we had to be more on top of it, and drugs and terrorism…
Murdoch looked blank. I could feel the ground opening beneath my feet. Then, a man who was accompanying the press mogul – a tall American in black, shiny, crocodile shoes – said: “Hey, Rupe you remember that Fayed took us for 100 million, down in Texas?” Murdoch turned to him, and said, “You’re right, he did.” He wheeled round to me and added: “Son, write it as hard as you like”. With that, he and his pal walked off.
Rupert Murdoch, pictured at his annual party at Spencer House, St James' Place in London, June 2023
The Sunday Times was my first national newspaper and this was my first introduction to how proprietors secure a product that is to their taste and beliefs.
This was an overt example, where the man himself was present. Most of the time he did not need to be. It occurred subliminally – self-censorship, reporting a story in such a manner that you knew would please the bosses, would stick to an unwritten agenda and earn you an approving nod from on high.
It occurred in the same way at every newspaper where I’ve worked: Sunday Express, Daily Express, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Independent, Evening Standard. Really, it happens everywhere, in every job: you know what the chief thinks and unless you’re desperate to leave you toe the party line. Which is why it is perplexing to read so much guff about the proposed takeover of the Telegraph by a consortium backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.
The Sheikh also owns Manchester City and, in that regard, his being a member of the UAE government is rarely mentioned; references to him in the football press tend to dwell on his fabulous wealth.
A football club is very different from a major newspaper. But, honestly, reading the howls of protest from some journalistic quarters you could be forgiven for thinking they are allowed a free hand in everything they write, that they’ve never been told to temper an argument or as I say, have done it themselves, without being instructed?
Perhaps they are, in which case, I must be an oppressed rare species – on my own, wandering through the media landscape, subject to the inability to express myself. I am not, because most articles do not touch the management floor.
There have been occasions, though, when I’ve been encouraged to pursue a subject in which the owner has a ‘special interest’. Again, I ask, has anyone else not experienced the same, and provided what I write is true, is it that bad?
To that list of titles, I could have added another, The National. That’s right, for the last four years I’ve written a weekly column for the UAE newspaper owned by one Sheikh Mansour. Ah, I hear you cry: "he’s told you to write this, you’re under orders." Not a bit of it. In that period, I’ve had no contact with the Sheikh or his official representatives. I do speak to the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Mina Al-Oraibi – that’s right a woman in charge of a newspaper, a concept still unfamiliar to those main critics of the Mansour deal, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times.
One piece I submitted was rejected; post-COVID, a firm of consultants produced a study saying that luxury goods were over, that the outbreak had made us turn our backs on excess. I thought this would be a suitable column topic.
Colleagues at the paper disagreed; they had plenty of evidence to show the claim was wrong, that bling was very much alive. I said I would choose another subject. As it was, they were right, the consultancy was wrong. Another piece, on Al Fayed, I quoted him using a profanity against Prince Philip. It had to come out, they said, as, to be fair, it probably would have done in any British-based title.
It may hurt the anti-Mansour investment (and it is an investment, his people are insisting, saying he will only be a ‘passive partner’ in a US-run vehicle) brigade to learn this but in my experience, The National is run along professional lines. It has a newsroom of the sort they would recognise. To my knowledge there is not a UAE commissar sitting alongside Al-Oraibi and her senior team.
It's staffed too by journalists from across Fleet Street, from the Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mail and others. Its editorial offices in UAE, London and Washington DC are fully manned and well-resourced. I deal regularly with the London bureau and as far as I am aware, the editor, Damien McElroy (ex-Telegraph) is free to cover whatever he likes.
Because it’s not so tightly constrained and prone to the cycles of advertising as others, The National can keep its website open to all – a breath of fresh air in this age of paywalls and subscriptions. The paper has as its mission ‘The Middle East. Explained’.
That’s its USP, writing about the Middle East, and yes, often providing a UAE slant. Is that awful? It’s where the title hails from, it’s home. It’s no different from London newspapers seeing things through British eyes. No different either from pro-Conservative newspapers seeing things through a pro-Conservative prism. Perish the thought.
Assange: justice denied again as court declines to admit new evidence of US murder plots
Wikileaks founder will remain in Belmarsh prison while judges seek further meaningless ‘assurances’ from US
The High Court has this morning again denied justice to persecuted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Despite admitting that the US is denying Assange’s rights to free speech and is pursuing him in a way that it would not pursue one of its own citizens, judges have decided to keep Assange in Belmarsh prison while it asks for further ‘assurances’ that the US will not kill him – even though there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Shamefully, the court has also declined to admit fresh evidence of US plots to assassinate him, claiming that the evidence is irrelevant because the US’s incentive to murder Assange would not apply if it had him in custody, as Declassified UK has pointed out:
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The extradition case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century in US retaliation for Wikileaks exposing its war crimes in Iraq and as a deterrent to other journalists who might expose its crimes in future.
Shame on the UK and its travesty of justice and democracy. Free Julian Assange. Protect real journalism.
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‘The Royal Family’s Sustainability In Its Current Form Can No Longer Be Guaranteed’
In the end, months of conspiracy theories were silenced by a two-minute video.
After a strict media embargo, on Friday at 6pm, Kensington Palace released the statement recorded personally by Catherine, Princess of Wales.
In it, she revealed that, following her abdominal surgery in January, doctors had discovered cancer, and she was now being treated with preventative chemotherapy. She explained how she had sought to share this news appropriately with her young children, reassured the public that she was growing stronger, and finished with a moving message of hope to others undergoing treatment for the disease.
It would once have been unthinkable for members of the Royal Family to share details of their medical conditions, and yet, this seemed like the least extraordinary aspect of the video.
The closest comparison is perhaps 1997, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when public and media disquiet effectively forced the Queen to address the nation.
Commentators have been divided on whether Kensington Palace was similarly forced into the statement as a result of mounting public pressure or if Kate would always have explained the details of her condition and was choosing a moment (the beginning of her children’s Easter holidays) that suited her.
Either way, the intense public and media pressure was undeniable. That tells its own story.
In 1997, the ‘public’ could only make its views known through opinion polls, mass gatherings, direct interventions (such as vox pops or letters) and, ultimately, through its arbiters in the press. Social media has upended that framework.
Newspapers now follow the internet’s lead. For weeks, conspiracy theories around Kate's absence from public life dominated the conversation on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), and ranged from light-hearted nonsense to poisonous defamation.
In two clear ways, that leaked into the mainstream ecosystem.
The first surrounded the Mother’s Day photograph on 10 March, presumably released by Kensington Palace to reassure people that Kate was happy and well, surrounded by her family. UK media outlets published the image as issued and only began discussing the edits made to it after analyses began to trend on social media.
That was followed by ‘kill notices’ issued by multiple international press agencies, effectively declaring the photograph unfit to be used – a damaging rebuke to Kensington Palace and its credibility. That, in turn, led to a highly unusual tweet signed by Kate herself, in which she apologised and claimed responsibility for editing the picture as an "amateur photographer".
The second involved another type of photography: an amateur video at a Windsor farm store, purportedly showing Prince William and Kate in good spirits carrying shopping. Crucially, this video was published by the Sun – providing a key contrast with an earlier paparazzo photograph of Kate and her mother Carole Middleton in a car, which was only published abroad.
Some commentators questioned whether Kensington Palace had tacitly approved the video’s publication. Even more significantly, however, some mainstream journalists – notably Rachel Johnson in the Evening Standard – questioned or openly doubted whether the woman was really Kate at all. This might, once again, have demonstrated an example of social media conspiracy spilling into the mainstream – or, more troubling for Kensington Palace, a new dent in the armour of deference which still pertains to William and Kate in a manner that long ago escaped Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
This notion of deference is important.
In some ways things, have not significantly changed since 1936 when American newspapers openly discussed King Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and the British media remained entirely silent.
Foreign media has aired theories about Kate that would not have been touched here. There still exists in Britain a culture either of widely-known open secrets or of journalists hoarding information about the Royal Family – and either dropping small public breadcrumbs or remaining entirely silent.
In some ways, that is legitimate: members of the Royal Family are human beings with the right to a private life. But they are also public figures with, crucially, public and constitutional roles.
This feeds into the most fundamental tension in our modern monarchy: the codependence of members of the Royal Family and the royal press pack.
William and Kate are considered positive assets by both the tabloid media and the monarchy itself – the press’ treatment of them is a far cry from the hounding of both William’s parents in the 1990s. That is a product of multiple factors: a change in tabloid and paparazzi culture, the fact William and Kate have not yet been publicly linked to a tabloid-friendly scandal, and because the couple cooperates.
The media knows that the Royal Family sells newspapers and seeks access. The Royal Family knows that the media sustains both public support for the monarchy and people’s appetite for information about it, and seeks positive coverage. Underlying both anxious institutions is the British public, on whose patronage both depend.
Ordinary people were concerned about Kate’s welfare, but they also wanted information as they would about any other high-profile celebrity. Kate, in turn, was entitled to privacy as an ordinary human being, but will also one day be Queen. Such is the woozy confluence of soap opera and constitution. These people function both as fodder for national entertainment and as instruments of the state.
During the past three months, the media has performed a strange dance, balancing a mostly justifiable interest in a public figure with a mostly unjustifiable interest in a private one – sometimes, it appears, with the cooperation of Kensington Palace, and sometimes, it appears, without.
The media wanted to push, but not too hard. The Palace attempted to manage the coverage and, in the end, through Kate’s video, resolved to produce its own. This appears to have been a power struggle that ended in stalemate.
Once this story dies down, the most important soul-searching will probably take place not in Fleet Street but Kensington Palace. Insofar as the monarchy is a political institution, it relies on trust, both from the media and public. Credibility is not easily replaced and the photograph incident will have damaged faith in its communications machine. Now Kate has revealed her diagnosis, more questions arise about why the princess was thrown into the centre of a PR storm while receiving treatment for cancer.
And yet perhaps the greatest question centres on Kate herself.
The monarchy is a barer institution than a few years ago, and a weaker one. While the King and Queen are liked and respected, they do not attract either the deference of the late Elizabeth II or the rock-star appeal of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Only William and Kate come close to embodying both the stability and glamour that the institution needs – and Kate above all. She is the most popular member of the family, and so indispensable that the modern monarchy can scarcely be imagined without her.
That, in turn, reflects the vulnerability of the institution: it can only ever be as strong as its cast. It cannot, constitutionally, just disappear – but it can fade into irrelevance or embarrassment. Its sustainability, in current form, can no longer be guaranteed.
‘Why We Will Apply to Take Ofcom to Court Unless It Explains Its Approach to GB News’
Readers of Byline Times are likely to have been among the many who have complained to Ofcom about GB News and its partisan political stance.
Byline Times itself has repeatedly scrutinised the broadcast regulator’s unwillingness to enforce the impartiality requirements of its Broadcasting Code, other than administering a few slaps on the wrist for breaches so glaring and egregious that they could not be ignored or excused.
It has also attempted to establish the reasons for Ofcom’s forbearance.
We may be about to find out a bit more about what’s going on at Ofcom’s Riverside House HQ as I have teamed up with the Good Law Project to take the first step in a legal process, putting the regulator on notice that we intend to apply for a judicial review of its approach to GB News if Ofcom does not make it clear that it has not changed its policy in the case of smaller or non-public service broadcasters.
In particular, holding them to different standards from those governing the public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned – something which the Code does not appear to permit.
What finally prompted this action were remarks by Ofcom's CEO Dame Melanie Dawes in an interview with Sky News on 13 March. In it, she stated that its requirement for due impartiality was not "an absolute test of equal balance" but has to be achieved "in a way that’s appropriate for the audience expectation, in a way that’s appropriate for the subject matter. We expect a range of views to be brought to bear, rather than just one single view or small cluster of views". This, she explained, "can be done… in lots and lots of different ways".
But, crucially, she then added: "The standard for someone like the BBC, which reaches still, 70% of the TV viewing audience for news is a different one from that of a channel that has an audience of maybe 4% or 5% of a of the viewing public. We expect different things and I think that's appropriate."
She then went on to make a distinction between different kinds of broadcasters.
On the one hand, there are the public service broadcasters and Sky News, with their "pretty scrupulous approach to impartially", their "high standards… underpinned by the Broadcasting Code", and the "high levels of trust" that people have in them.
On the other, there are now channels "that can present the news from a particular perspective. It’s not about the overall output of a channel, as long as for each programme there is a sufficient range of views brought to bear. And I think that that allows a level of diversity and plurality in provision to be brought to the viewing public".
It is our case that Dame Melanie is proposing that channels with relatively low audience figures (although it should be pointed out that GB News still reaches millions of citizens) are held to a different standard of impartiality from that applying to the public service broadcasters.
We also argue that, judging by Dame Melanie’s interview, ‘different’ here means less ‘scrupulous’ than the ‘high standards’ underpinned by the Code.
In our letter to Ofcom, we refer to this as the “lower standards for small or non-public service broadcasters approach”.
We are contending that this amounts to a revision of the due impartiality requirements of the Code, that this revision has been undertaken by Ofcom without any form of consultation, and that this runs counter to the 2003 Communications Act.
Among other things, this Act created Ofcom and required it to establish a standards code. Section 319(1) states: "It shall be the duty of Ofcom to set, and from time to time to review and revise, such standards for the content of programmes to be included in television and radio services as appear to them best calculated to secure the standards objectives."
No public consultation on the specific subject of impartiality has taken place since 2007, when Ofcom published the discussion document 'New News, Future News’, which did indeed suggest relaxing the impartiality rules for smaller channels. However, the suggestions were badly received (except, all too predictably, by newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, who at that time was itching to turn Sky News into Fox News UK) and the idea was quietly dropped.
But, as Stewart Purvis, former Ofcom content and standards partner, and Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founder director of standards, have pointed out: "It is not for Ofcom but Parliament to decide whether impartiality rules should be weakened, changed or abandoned. If, after public and parliamentary debate, there’s a view that perhaps impartiality should only apply to public service broadcasters, then so be it. But, at the moment, the rules are being changed by the back door."
We are also asking for clarification of the meaning (if any) of Dame Melanie’s statement that due impartiality "is not about the overall output of a channel".
As Ofcom is always at great pains to point out, the Code requires that news programmes in whatever form are presented with 'due’ impartiality – and both the Communications Act and the Code stress that "special impartiality requirements" apply to news and other programmes dealing with "matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy". These are, of course, GB News’ stock-in-trade.
But, although the word ‘due’ is made to do a great deal of heavy lifting in the Code and in its accompanying guidance notes – indeed, threatening to qualify the very notion of impartiality out of existence – nowhere is it suggested that due impartiality turns on the audience share that a particular channel enjoys.
When fining RT £200,000 in July 2019 for breaches of its impartiality rules, Ofcom explicitly stated that, although RT had a relatively small audience of, on average, 2,300 viewers, amounting to a share of total viewing in the UK of 0.03%, "in this context, the extent of a channel’s audience cannot sensibly dictate the gravity of the breach, not least because the due impartiality regime could easily be circumvented and undermined if smaller broadcasters were allowed an effective exemption from generally applied standards".
When RT appealed against the fine, the Court of Appeal stated that "the number of viewers affected by the partial broadcasting is not the point, because Parliament has determined that such broadcasting shall be duly impartial". It also pointed out that the harm caused by partial broadcasting "is not limited to the harm caused to viewers but extends to the harm indirectly caused to members of society generally by the provision of broadcast news and current affairs that lacks due impartiality".
When fining talkSPORT in February 2020 for impartiality breaches in three episodes of a programme presented by George Galloway, Ofcom announced that although it "recognised that the audience for the programmes in question was small when compared to some other radio services", it considered that the three repeated breaches of certain of the impartiality rules in its Code "had the potential to adversely affect those listeners who chose to listen to the relevant programmes and who were therefore presented with coverage of important policy and political matters which denied them an appropriately wide range of viewpoints".
Our case rests largely on the question of whether GB News, as a smaller broadcaster, is being held to different standards from those governing public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned. However, there are also other aspects of Ofcom’s approach which are troubling and are in need of investigation.
Firstly, there is the matter of freedom of expression.
In her oral evidence to the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee last March, Dame Melanie stated that "the phrase 'freedom of expression’ is a very important part of this debate – one that perhaps should be a little bit more prominent".
In the wake of the furore following then Conservative Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson interviewing then Home Secretary Suella Braverman in September 2023 on GB News, in answer to a question about whether the Code was fit for purpose, she was quoted in the Guardian as stating that: "The rules are flexible, they require us to prioritise freedom of expression, which is missing a bit in this conversation, and we feel we’ve got plenty of flexibility."
The only problem here, however, is that the rules do not require Ofcom to ‘prioritise’ freedom of expression – they merely require it to take into consideration Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights when making their judgments. In point of fact, however, they should be compliant with these articles.
In any case, the idea of freedom of expression championed by Dame Melanie, and also by Ofcom Chair Lord Michael Grade, seems to echo that of Elon Musk and his fellow ‘free speech fundamentalists’ – namely that rules governing any speech on any platform should be at the very least relaxed, regardless of its provenance and the damage it might inflict on others, or on public and democratic life in general.
Second, there is the idea that what Ofcom really wants is that viewers should be able to access views other than those that they encounter on the public service broadcasting channels. So, for example, in her appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Dame Melanie said that "we are always thinking about freedom of expression here and do not want to see just a single, monocultural – a mono-representation of views on British TV. When you compare what you get in the UK with what you see in America, which is unregulated, it is very, very different".
Similarly, in her Sky News interview, she remarked that "it’s very important that we uphold freedom of expression. And that’s the freedom of the broadcaster to broadcast and to express, if you like, their creativity in their journalistic skill in multiple different ways. But it’s also the freedom of the viewer to receive a range of different formats and opinions".
Subtextual it may be, but lurking behind these pronouncements there seems to be the highly questionable assumption that the public service broadcasters are beaming at their viewers a particular view of the world. And, in the current 'culture war’ climate, one strongly suspects that the ‘view’ that Ofcom has in its sights is that of the dread ‘metropolitan liberal elite’.
It’s almost as if the real problems are seen as lying with the allegedly out-of-touch public service broadcasters, and particularly the BBC (which Ofcom now regulates), while GB News has brought a welcome blast of fresh air to a stale and staid broadcasting environment.
Dame Melanie’s evocation of the variety of representations which are broadcast in the US is a worrying reminder that Fox News was launched there on the back of the canard that it was going to be ‘fair and balanced’ by providing an alternative to the ‘liberal bias’ of the existing news networks. But the truth of the matter is that the latter appear to display such a bias only when viewed from a vertiginously conservative perspective, whereas Fox and the various other populist channels are about as unfair and unbalanced politically and ideologically as it is possible to imagine.
Nonetheless, the Foxification of news and current affairs on British television could well be the result of Ofcom’s apparent rewriting of the impartiality regulations in its Broadcasting Code. Unless, that is, this process can be halted and then thrown into reverse.
Julian Petley is a Honorary Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London
‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’
What is the word for a politician who will do anything to get hold of power?
The question arises thanks to the front page of Friday's Sun newspaper, on which, beneath a banner reading "Labour leader at Sun HQ", we were told that "Keir joins revolt over 3 Lions shirt – he blasts woke flag and high price".
There are only two possibilities here. Either the Leader of the Labour Party sincerely believes that the design of the England football shirt is a matter that should properly engage the attention of a leader of the Opposition. Or – surely much more likely – he just doesn’t care what he says so long as it gets him nice coverage in the Sun, in which case he provides an answer to the question above.
It is actually worse than that, because this is only the latest evidence that Starmer is selling his soul to Murdoch.
He has already attended the media baron's summer party, paying personal homage to the old man and drinking his champagne. And now he is happy to visit the Sun’s offices and play rent-a-quote in support of a vacuous anti-woke jibe.
In terms of displaying lack of principle, this obviously does not compete with refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and failing to acknowledge the economic disaster that is Brexit, but it is amoral in its own way.
For the Murdoch press is not only responsible, over decades, for demeaning everything that could be described as decent about Britain and for wrecking the lives of countless innocent people – it is also responsible for wholesale, proven law-breaking.
And remarkably, Starmer’s visit to ‘Sun HQ’ took place just a day after we were presented with a new and shocking picture of the scale of that criminality – some of it well established as fact, some in the form of fresh and very detailed accusations.
It comes in a series of monster documents revealed in court, some of which can be accessed here.
These latest legal claims allege that law-breaking at the Murdoch tabloids has been even more widespread and systematic, has persisted for much longer and has implicated even more staff and senior executives than previously acknowledged.
The allegations extend far beyond phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering to include, for example, perjury and the deliberate destruction of evidence of criminality – matters which, you might think, would be of concern to a former Director of Public Prosecutions such as Starmer.
And though – yes, this needs to be placed on record – the company continues to deny a good deal of it, the Labour leadership should ask itself why the company systematically chooses to avoid confronting the charges in open court and instead pays off the claimants, thus far at a cost of £1.2 billion.
Quite a few of Labour's new chums are named in the documents.
There is an awful lot, for example, about Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s longstanding CEO in the UK and a former Editor of the Sun. She knew more and earlier about criminal activities than previously admitted, the documents allege, and they suggest directly that she participated in the cover-up. Again, she has denied these things and was cleared of similar criminal charges back in 2014, but the new claims draw on a wealth of evidence not available back then, including evidence relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.
The name of the Sun’s current Editor, Victoria Newton, also keeps turning up in the court documents in very dark contexts. How, for example, will she account for the email she sent Brooks in 2006 saying "just blagged the bill from the Dorchester now – 11 grand – v expensive?"
And there is veteran Sun reporter Nick Parker who, phone records show, phoned a specialist blagger of medical records 1,763 times between 2005 and 2010 – more than once every working day.
The catalogue of names and worse-than-doubtful alleged behaviour is very long – and the allegations relate to events up to 2011, including during the Leveson Inquiry into the press, when Murdoch witnesses swore blind they had never done anything dodgy.
Ancient history, people will say. Hardly.
These are people Keir Starmer is associating himself with right now. And remember that Murdoch is also still the owner of Fox, a channel that encouraged an insurrection in the US in 2020.
People will also say there is nothing new in it all, because Tony Blair sucked up to Murdoch before the 1997 election and Gordon Brown was pally with Brooks before 2010. Well, we now know that Murdoch people hacked Labour phones behind those leaders’ backs – shouldn’t Starmer and his people see that as a warning?
And, of course, people will also say that you need to do unpleasant things to win power, which brings us back to the question we started with. Surely there is a line you don’t cross? And, surely, given all we know about his methods, Murdoch must be on the far side of that line.
As News Deserts Expand, Student Journalists Step Up
On the drizzly first Tuesday in March, voters crammed into a historic white clapboard meeting house on a hill in Stockbridge, Vermont. It was Town Meeting Day, when Vermonters across the state gather to debate and vote on local government. And the election for the next member of Stockbridge’s three-person select board, the main governing body of this town of just over 700 people, had drawn record turnout.
As voters waited to cast handwritten ballots in a long queue that snaked around wooden benches, University of Vermont sophomore Sarah Andrews approached locals, notebook in hand. Andrews and two classmates were not just there for course work: They were there as part of UVM’s Community News Service, reporting for the White River Valley Herald, the weekly newspaper that covers 16 towns in this rural region.
Small newspapers like the Herald have long been the main way of recording and distributing information about community happenings. But local news outlets are disappearing. The 2023 State of Local News report found that about half of all counties across the country have only one local news outlet, and more than 200 counties have none.
UVM student reporters covered an unusually busy Town Meeting Day in the small town of Stockbridge. Credit: Elizabeth Hewitt
As local news deserts grow, universities are stepping in. With initiatives ranging from student-staffed statehouse bureaus to newspapers run by journalism schools, these academic-media partnerships are bolstering local news.
“It’s a short-term win and it’s a long-term win,” says Penny Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and co-author of the local news report.
University-media partnerships provide reliable local news coverage in communities where it is needed. In the process, students get hands-on experience with community decision-making in a way that shapes their careers and worldviews going forward.
Credit: Elizabeth Hewitt
Sarah Andrews and two of her classmates covered Town Meeting Day for the White River Valley Herald, the weekly newspaper that covers 16 communities in Vermont’s rural Upper Valley region.
“Too often over the last 20 years, we’ve tended to focus on teaching students what we assume are professional digital skills for the digital age, when in fact journalism at its core teaches not only the journalist but the citizen how to employ critical thinking and make wise decisions,” says Abernathy.
Closures of smaller news outlets over the last several decades have left many regions without reliable media coverage. Since 2005, the number of newspapers in the US has dropped by a third, and the number of journalists has declined by 60 percent. The erosion of local news makes it harder for community members to be aware of the issues in their regions.
“Most of the decisions that affect our immediate everyday life occur at the local level,” says Abernathy.
Through university-led journalism programs, students — under the tutelage and editorial supervision of faculty members — are stepping in to fill in some of those gaps. The model isn’t new: The University of Missouri has been practicing a “teaching hospital” approach that involves students in community news coverage since 1908. Now, in the current media landscape, higher education institutions are looking at how they can both offer students enriching experiences and contribute to communities, according to Richard Watts, who heads the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News.
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“Students like to do things that are real,” he says. “There’s a sense of agency about writing real stories that real people read and make a real difference.”
There are about 120 such programs at colleges and universities across the country, according to Watts. The Center for Community News found in 2023 that over the last year, more than 2,000 student journalists across the US had produced more than 10,000 news stories that were published in community outlets. The stories were estimated to reach more than 14 million people.
Often offered to students in the forms of classes, the programs require a high level of commitment from faculty members — editing stories for publication is more intensive than typical grading. Across different regions, the scope and focus of programs varies, says Watts.
Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication has taken advantage of its location a few miles away from the State Capitol to bolster coverage of the legislature.
News coverage of state policy-making is among the casualties of the erosion of local news. Across the country, the number of reporters covering statehouses full-time declined by 34 percent between 2014 and 2022.
Claire Sullivan has been an LSU Manship School Statehouse reporter for both the 2023 and the 2024 sessions. Credit: Ria Salway
As press coverage of the Louisiana legislature diminished, LSU launched a statehouse bureau in 2016. Through a high-level journalism class, student reporters cover committee meetings and floor proceedings. Grant funding allows the program to keep students on as interns to cover the weeks of the legislative session after the semester ends. Christopher Drew, a former New York Times investigative reporter and editor who heads the bureau program, edits the stories. Then they’re made available for any news outlet to publish for free.
Ninety-five outlets have run LSU student statehouse stories, ranging from some of the state’s largest newspapers to small weekly and bi-weekly papers, many of which Drew says wouldn’t have another option to get stories about news from the statehouse.“Our students never have any problem getting taken seriously by lawmakers because we often are the hometown reporter for the lawmakers,” says Drew. “A lot of them come from places [where] the only thing that constituents could read about what they do comes from what the LSU students do.”
The idea is spreading; 20 states have some form of university-led statehouse bureau, and Drew is involved in conversations with schools interested in launching programs in additional states. LSU also offers an investigative journalism course, focused on civil rights era cold cases, which similarly distributes stories to outlets. Drew is working on a new project that would create a network of universities and colleges around Louisiana, partnering journalism programs with small local news outlets.
LSU senior Claire Sullivan is taking the statehouse course for the second time this spring. She sees the community news model as mutually beneficial for students like herself who want experience and local news outlets that want coverage.
“It’s the best kind of motivator,” says Sullivan. “You want to do your best job for the local outlets.”
Devon Sanders, an LSU Manship School Statehouse reporter, interviewed State Representative Katrina Jackson in 2018. Credit: Katherine Seghers / LSU
The Oglethorpe Echo has been covering the issues of Oglethorpe County in northeastern Georgia since 1874. The weekly was poised to shut down in 2021, when the long-time publisher was ready to retire. Instead, a community member hatched a plan for the local paper to be taken over by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Over the last two and a half years, students have reported the stories that fill the Echo’s pages. During fall and spring semesters, the newspaper is staffed by students in a senior capstone class. Over summer and winter breaks, students are hired as interns, so there’s no break in news coverage. The paper was converted to a nonprofit, and Andy Johnston, a longtime sports journalist who had been an adjunct professor, came on as the paper’s editor.
Student journalists have dug into issues related to limited rural broadband access, and use of a particular form of fertilizer on local farms. In its first full year of operating under the university, the paper won nine awards from the Georgia Press Association.
Courtesy of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
The Oglethorpe Echo nearly shut down in 2021. Instead, the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication took over the paper. Now, student stories fill its pages.
One difference between university-led media and traditional local outlets is that student reporters turn over frequently, so they don’t have the long-term knowledge and relationships that a professional reporter would. But editors — both employed by universities and with community news outlets — help provide that expertise. In Vermont, when the White River Valley Herald picks up stories written by UVM students, editor Tim Calabro says he occasionally adds in local context that students don’t know.
When the University of Georgia took over the Echo, Johnston says there was an adjustment period of building trust with the community. The university is located about 25 miles west of Oglethorpe County, so students don’t live locally. But the feedback he gets is generally positive. Readers appreciate having a local news source, and they particularly like slice-of-life stories that feature their friends and family members.
“We’re writing to tell the stories of the community, tell the stories of the county,” he says.
Current Echo students Michael Johnson (left) and Izzy Wagner read through a copy of The Oglethorpe Echo. Courtesy of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
Back in Vermont, on Town Meeting Day, a total of 139 people voted in the election for Stockbridge’s new select board member. Two days later, Andrews’ story about the election ran in the White River Valley Herald.
For the Herald’s editor, Tim Calabro, UVM students’ stories helped his limited staff cover news around the region on the biggest single day for local government of the year. But Calabro says there are broader benefits of the program beyond filling the paper with news.
“Of all the dangers that newspapers, news organizations of any stripe are facing, the biggest worry is that people just won’t care about what’s going on in their communities,” Calabro says.
Not every student who goes through a university-led news program will go on to a career in journalism, he says. But even for those without ambitions in journalism, he sees this kind of program as valuable for engaging young people in communities: “Being a human being in society,” as Calabro puts it, “it’s good to care about society.”
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