The Lords Communications Committee report, “The Future of Investigative Journalism”, (HL: 263 – pdf) was published 16 February and I’ve written an article in response for House magazine.

Report Review
March 1, 2012, The House

‘The starting point for this inquiry, as already mentioned, has been that responsible investigative journalism should be protected and encouraged, given its important role in our democracy.’

I am glad to see these words in the Lords communications committee report, The Future of Investigative Journalism, published 16th February, but the reality is that the law, the costs, the lack of public records, and an elitist political structure, obstruct public interest investigative journalism.

When journalism was profitable, these costs could be borne. Now they cannot. By all means prosecute those who break the law, but the press needs support, not obstruction. The journalism of verification and truth is resource-intensive. The best way to encourage it is to lower the resources needed to do it.

Firstly, it must be made easier to conduct public interest investigations. It should not take five years of a person’s life to find out the most basic facts of how public officials spend the public’s money (MPs’ expenses). And here we find in the UK, the crucial ingredient necessary for responsible journalism missing: easily accessible public records. The most important of these are:

• Court records – including full court lists with full, real names (no abbreviations); all documents referenced in bundles, full judgement and sentencing (current and historical).
• Police records – incident reports and arrest bookings.
• Identification records (vehicle ownership records, reverse telephone directories, electoral registers).
• Regulatory inspections, complaints, violations, prosecutions
• Detailed ‘line-item’ budgets
• Land ownership
• Company registrations and accounts.

In the USA where I trained as a reporter, these records were the basic building blocks for all journalism: used for accurate identification, verification and investigation. Privilege attached to their content so that if I reported that X had been charged with fraud, I was protected from libel if I had quoted accurately from the police charge sheet or the court record.

In the UK, only the last two items are easily accessible. Reporters still have the same requirements, however, so they must get information elsewhere: hearsay, anonymous sources or illicitly obtained either for money or favour. This is not good for democracy. It would be better for these civically important records be available to all, regardless of favour or resources.

The second way to encourage public interest investigation is to reform the libel law. The committee rightly points out that ‘investigative journalism is especially resource-intensive, requires long-term investment with no guaranteed return, involves some risk of litigation’, but it understates the problem: ‘the working of the libel laws in the UK can, on occasion, have a discouraging effect on responsible investigative journalism…’ No, not on occasion – always.

Any journalist thinking about investigating the powerful (corporate or government) must be prepared for bankruptcy. Everyone I know who has written a non-fiction, current affairs book published in the UK (myself included) had to go through an expensive libel reading. The exact same books published in the USA do not have these costs. The committee praises the creation of the the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, yet one of the biggest obstacles it faced was finding reasonable libel insurance. This legal nightmare halts small or online cooperative journalism sites in their tracks. Helpmeinvestigate.com, for example, was hobbled because of the UK’s libel law.

We do not need more obstacles put in the way of investigative journalism. The net result will be to make it harder for journalists acting in the public interest. People like me will be priced out of the market. Instead, we will have ill-informed online propaganda and public relations circulated instantly across the globe.

http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/47677/?edition_id=991

In its punitive treatment of accused leaker Bradley Manning, the US government has missed an opportunity to live up to its values of freedom, says Heather Brooke

After 18 months, accused leaker gets a day in court
Index on Censorship, 16 Dec 2011

After nearly 18 months’ incarceration and punitive treatment described as “torture” by human rights activists, accused leaker and former US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning will finally get a day in court.

This is not a trial, but an “Article 32″ hearing, the US military equivalent to a civilian pre-trial hearing, where the defence can evaluate the government’s case and obtain facts through pre-trial discovery. It begins on 16 December at Fort Meade, Maryland and is expected to run right through the weekend for approximately five days. Despite press interest, only a small number of seats are available for the public and reporting restrictions are in place to prevent live coverage.

Saturday will mark Manning’s 24th birthday, the second birthday he has spent in custody since his arrest in May 2010 for allegedly leaking a US Army video that showed soldiers gunning down Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists. He was later charged with 22 violations of military law for allegedly leaking records and transmitting defence information. He faces life in prison if convicted. The hearing will determine whether or not he goes ahead for a full court-martial.

The length of time Manning has been in pre-trial confinement is controversial, but more so has been his treatment while confined — seeming more like punishment than justice. While in the military brig in Quantico, Virginia he was in maximum custody and controversially placed on prevention of injury (POI) watch, which meant he was in solitary confinement, forced to spend 23 hours in a cell six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

His lawyer David Coombs reported Manning was woken at 5am weekdays and 7am on weekends and was not allowed to sleep any time between then and 8pm. If he attempted to sleep during those hours, he was made to sit up or stand by the guards. Guards checked on him every five minutes by asking him if he was okay. He had to surrender his clothes at night apart from boxer shorts. He was not allowed a pillow or sheets, nor any personal items in his cell, and was prevented from exercising apart from one hour when he would walk in a figure of eight motion.

The harsh conditions were denounced by human rights groups, including (more…)

As Lord Justice Leveson prepares to investigate newspaper conduct, I joined three other writers to discuss ‘How far can the press go in the public interest?’

The press will die if it fails in its duty to serve the public interest
The Times, 27 September 2011

The ethics of what should or shouldn’t be published can be distilled down to a simple rule: is it in the public interest? Put simply, the public interest is not the tittle-tattle that interests the public but anything that informs and enlightens society.

The pursuit of this high-minded ideal is not exclusive to reporters: a lot of academic and scientific research fits that bill. But journalism is different because as a rough trade it deals with the ugly realities of human nature: sex, scandal, crime, corruption – all the emotional vagaries that make up the “crooked timber of humanity”. It’s not about peddling pretty pictures; that’s public relations or propaganda. Because of those ugly realities journalists have to use subterfuge or deception to dig out the truth. Where activity is not in the public interest and criminal then let it be prosecuted, but we should be wary of prosecuting speech or regulating the press.

First, it is impractical to introduce national regulations on the press as information now flows globally. What people can’t read in the newspaper they will get from Twitter, which, as a US company, is governed by the more tolerant First Amendment.

Second, we should note that the greatest abuses in history were never a result of too much speech but rather too little. It is only through free speech that we have any hope of tackling the real enemy of the people: the concentration of power.

Where speech is false, then the best way to tackle it is with more, not less, speech. Jemima Khan showed this when she put paid to rumours that she had sought a superinjunction not by bringing a court case against Twitter, but by tweeting the truth herself. Public figures may be more accountable in the internet age but they equally have more opportunity to get out their side of the story.

Journalists, too, have come under more scrutiny than ever before, thanks to the internet.

Rather than a race to the bottom, this explosion of speech creates a renewed need for public interest journalism. In the age of information overload, when everyone can tweet or blog, how can we know what is important or true? We look to reputation.

Journalists are, or ought to be, the public’s hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distilit to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It’s also the reason why anyone would choose a well-known newspaper’s website over an unknown blog.

The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its one unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.

An abbreviated version of this article appeared in today’s (London) Times.

The WikiLeaks ‘hero’ is actually morally bankrupt
The Times, 23 September 2011

One question I’m often asked about my long investigation into MPs’ expenses is whether I was ever threatened with retribution. The answer is no. The closest I came was John Prescott getting snarly on Newsnight and an angry letter from a former MP staffer.

Strangely enough, it was investigating Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks frontman, for a book about the digital revolution that put me in the crosshairs of an angry online mob. At first I was impressed by this seeming warrior for transparency, democracy and accountability. In his “unauthorised autobiography”, published this week, we hear the old war stories of his early hacking days when he used the handle Mendax, from Horace’s Splendide Mendax – nobly untruthful. Yet I came to discover there was little that was noble about Assange’s mendacity.

He may have started WikiLeaks with the best of intentions, but to lead a campaign for openness while acting like an authoritarian patriarch with little respect for the truth does not bode well.

He looked upon WikiLeaks donations in the same way some politicians look upon the taxpayer, as a funding source for personal needs. This first became apparent after he was accused of sexual assault by two women in Sweden and he tried to use donations to fund his personal legal defence. Other WikiLeaks volunteers opposed this, and for this they were deemed traitors. Assange’s method throughout has been to conflate the cause with the man and by so doing try to make himself above question.

In his world, those who challenge him for his dubious behaviour aren’t holding him to account but part of a dark conspiracy. I witnessed many Wikileaks volunteers who dared question Assange, denounced by him as either stooges of intelligence agencies or spurned lovers (men or women, it didn’t matter). Online whispering campaigns would start up seeding these ideas. People who gave Assange their time and money would find themselves suddenly sidelined and briefed against for daring to question an immoral action by the founder. Long before Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote his book, Assange was telling people that his former partner was a paranoid schizophrenic and an intelligence agent. When Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir voiced her disapproval of Assange’s decision to publish informers’ names in the Afghan war logs, he told reporters it was because ‘she’s in love with me’. It was the same with all those who worked with Assange whether at the Guardian, New York Times, Norway’s Aftenposten or most recently Canongate. What could never be countenanced was that Assange was responsible by his own actions.

When I got hold of the full set of US diplomatic cables, I discovered first-hand Assange’s capacity for dissembling, spin, threats and blatant untruths*. While Assange showed bravery, the way the Afghan logs were published with informers’ names left in was ethically irresponsible. He claimed I’d obtained the leak of his leaks through “criminal deception”, which was an utter untruth*. He told another reporter that he “knew where I lived” and the insinuation was that I’d better watch out. He threatened to sue me for depriving him of his “financial assets” (no writ yet). I heard from hacker friends that he’d been smearing my reputation, and his tiny army of cultish Assangistas launched a hate campaign online.

These people wanted their hero and they could not countenance the truth: that the man they’d chosen as their saviour was morally bankrupt. His fight for freedom of information wasn’t based on any moral principle but rather from a barely understood psychological compulsion.

So I, for one, want to separate the man from the cause. If one is going to be a campaigner for truth then telling it occasionally wouldn’t go amiss.

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* Due to English libel law, newspapers in the UK are loathe to ever use the word ‘lie’ and so you will see that ‘lies’ and ‘utter lie’ are published as ‘untruths’ and ‘utterly untrue’. These two words may seem indistinguishable to the reader but in English libel law they matter. A lie is: to speak untruthfully with intent to mislead or deceive whereas an untruth is: the state or quality of being untrue; a statement or fact that is untrue. The key difference is that a lie is an untruth told with deliberate intent to mislead. In this article, ‘lie’ is actually more accurate. However, English libel law is one of the most restrictive of free speech in the world. It puts the burden of guilt on the defendant (the writer) who is presumed guilty and must prove innocence. It is for this reason that England is favoured by the rich and powerful as the place to bring libel actions as a means to stifle and suppress criticism. Assange was initially a great campaigner against England’s libel law, at least until he became powerful and then began threatening libel actions of his own against those who criticised him.

Writing In The Digital Revolution
The Huffington Post, 12 August 2011
By Heather Brooke

As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant. Seismic events race by at almost weekly intervals: phone hacking gives way to the Norwegian terror atrocity, which is replaced by stories about the London riots and the world in economic meltdown.

The hyper acceleration of news is a result of the digital age in which we now live. No sooner will an author begin a book then the story will begin to mutate before her very eyes. This happened to me while I was working on “The Revolution Will Be Digitised,” which will be published in the UK on August 18th. When I began my research for this book in February 2010, few had heard of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The speed with which WikiLeaks went from niche interest to global prominence was a real-time example of the revolutionizing power of the digital age in which information can spread instantly across the globe through networked individuals.

But how can an author of current affairs keep up with such a fast-changing landscape? Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three. In these months, everything can change. To try and get on top of the news agenda, publishers can pull forward the publication date but they still require at least six weeks from the date the book comes off the presses to the date it is in book shops. In only a few exceptional circumstances can this time be reduced.

The digitization of information has revolutionized all sorts of industries from music and movies to shopping and finance. It has fundamentally changed the media landscape, so why not publishing? It seemed appropriate that as the author of a book about the digital revolution, I should look into publishing in new digital formats, so when RosettaBooks’ CEO Arthur Klebanoff pitched the idea of a Kindle Single, I was intrigued. He wanted to take the narrative section of the book and edit it into a 24,000-word, stand-alone piece. Unlike traditional publishing where the author is advanced funds from prospective royalties, digital deals are done without an advance but with a higher percentage of royalties going to the writer. We agreed to try out this new digital experiment.

The real surprise was the speed with which it all happened. In less than two weeks from the time Mr. Klebanoff and I spoke, “Assange Agonistes” was proofed, laid out and available to download on Kindle. Of course, the timely work of writing and editing had taken place with the help of a traditional publisher but for a timely news story, I can’t see how a writer of current affairs could beat the efficiency of e-publishing. It will certainly be my first port of call for future investigations.

The book trade may be in transition, but it is far from dead. Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things whether that’s in publishing or politics. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.