Former tabloid editors, a media analyst, editors and journalists have addressed members of the Leveson Inquiry panel at its first seminars held on Thursday.On the first seminar, ‘The Competitive Pressures on the Press and the Impact on Journalism’, there were presentations by media analyst Claire Enders, former editor of the News of the World, and former Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt.The afternoon session, on ‘The Rights and Responsibilities of the Press’, had presentations by editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger, former political editor of The Sun Trevor Kavanagh, and Professor Brian Cathcart, from the Hacked Off campaign.Competitive pressuresMedia analyst Claire Enders started the seminars with a presentation on ‘Competitive Pressures on the Press’, where she analysed the decline in circulation of national and local newspapers, and revenue from 2005 to 2010.During her talk, Enders explained how circulation decline has accelerated since 2005 and smart phones have encouraged appetite for online media. She mentioned 39 million unique users in the UK visited news and information sites in August, spending average of 2m20s per day.According to Enders, digital news supply is a further burden on the press operating model, considering costs of digital news supply are on top of costs of print, leading to dual costs in the print-to-digital transition.She also explained breaking exclusive news stories, such as the phone hacking scandal, did increase circulation of newspapers like the Guardian and engagement of newspapers with the public.Former editor of the News of the World Phil Hall said there were competitive pressures to produce great newspapers, but other considerable challenges as well.He said: “There are great competitive pressures, of course, to produce the best possible newspapers but there are also significant challenges to getting it right because of the libel laws, being fair because of the PCC code of conduct and justifying publication because of the human rights/privacy rulings.“The ‘publish and be damned’ attitude has long been confined to the history books of Fleet Street.”Hall said he was fortunate to, during his editorship, have published many “ground-breaking stories with investigations into subjects as far ranging and gun-running, paedophilia, drug racketeers and illegal immigration gangs”.He said: “Many of them ended with jail sentences. We campaigned over miscarriages of justice and solved an unsolved murder.”According to Hall, there is a belief that big stories deliver big circulation increases and thus editors are under pressure to deliver a major scoop on a weekly if not daily basis.He said: “That is a simplistic view and is not the case. Some of our biggest stories – the Jeffery Archer case for example – delivered no increase in sales.“In my opinion what sold the News of the World was the strength of the package – the sport, the columnists, the features and more than anything understanding its market and delivering what that readership demanded. Yes we broke big stories, but it was not the be all and end all of our operation.”Hall then spoke of demanding high standards of his journalists.He said: “But as an editor I did demand high standards and I did expect journalists to produce agenda setting stories, but is that any different to a business leader in any other industry?“I don’t think so and those who suggest and imply that phone hacking has arisen because of the pressures to deliver big stories are in my view wrong.“It has happened because a group of people have indulged in illegal activity and the checks and balances that should be in place in any news-room – or any business for that matter – have failed. I sincerely hope we will discover why by the end of the Lord Leveson inquiry.”Following Hall’s address to members of the Leveson Inquiry panel, former Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt spoke of his two years working as a tabloid journalist.The subject of his talk was ‘What is the day-to-day effect of competitive pressures on working journalists?’He started by saying one thing he had learnt early on his career was that “the truth and not lying are distinct concepts – you can make true statements about events and issues without ever orbiting near a true account of what’s occurred”.He said: “In approximately 900 newspaper bylines I can probably count on fingers and toes the times I felt I was genuinely telling the truth, yet only a similar number could be classed as outright lies.“This is because as much as the skill of a journalist today is about finding facts, it is also, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, about knowing what facts to ignore. The job is about making the facts fit the story, because the story is almost pre-defined. Laid out before you is a canon of ideologically and commercially driven narratives that must be adhered to.”He went on to explain how the newspaper appoints itself “moral arbiter”, and it is the reporter’s job to stamp their worldview on all the journalism they do.He added: “News editors, keen to appease their superiors with eye-catching news lists, dump the onus on reporters to stand-up their fantastical hunches and ill-informed assertions. The question is not: ‘Do you have a story on X?’ It is ‘Today we are saying this has happened to X – make it appear so’.”According to Peppiatt, if the PCC claim they have reigned in the many excesses committed by tabloid newspapers, “they must have been watching over the wrong Fleet Street”.He said: “If editors really had no idea that the life-wrecking stories about the likes of Robert Murat and Chris Jefferies they printed were grossly defamatory then reporters’ heads would roll. They don’t because there exists an unspoken contract between tabloid newspaper and reporter; you tell us what we want to hear, and we won’t enquire too much of veracity or methods.“If there’s any come back, we’ll protect you. It is a code of omerta, and if you want to get on, you abide by it.”Peppiatt said tabloid newsrooms are often bullying and aggressive environments, in which dissent was “simply not tolerated”.He said: “It is difficult to stand up and walk out the door with a mortgage to pay, knowing another opportunity is unlikely to be waiting beyond.”He added: “I am not attempting to absolve myself, or others, of personal responsibility for our actions, only to contextualise them. Journalists aren’t, for the most part, bad people. But, like all humans, they adjust to their environment, and, like in all competitive industries, those who adjust best, go furthest.“Do it long enough you’ll even start to forget that the framework in which you operate is intrinsically corrupted and dishonest.”On commercial pressures, Peppiatt said: “It makes no commercial sense to have your reporters writing about someone else’s products, or TV shows, when you can get free advertising from them writing about your own.“It makes no commercial sense not to use your journalists to dig up dirt on people you don’t like and to promote the people you do. But the people caught in the crossfire of this cynical approach are the millions of readers who buy tabloid newspapers every day in good faith, unaware of the commercial and ideological agendas which are shaping what they read.”Rights and responsibilities of the PressOn the second seminar of the day, on the ‘Rights and Responsibilities of the Press’, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, addressed the invited audience and Leveson Inquiry panel. Rusbridger spoke about ‘The importance of a free Press’.He said: “Anyone wanting to know why a free press matters could do worse than study the story of how the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World was uncovered – looking both at the dogs that barked, and those that didn’t.“It took almost exactly two years for the story to unravel. For the first 18 months not very much happened. The police added two more cursory investigations to their original inadequate probe in 2006.“Parliament did its best, and some individual MPs did very well indeed. But it struggled to flush out the truth. Politicians, from prime ministers down, have since admitted to everything from pragmatism to fear as an explanation for their inaction or general complicity.“The regulator produced a lamentable report which betrayed an inability, or lack of will, in getting at the truth. And, with some notable exceptions, much of the media showed little initial inclination to shine a bright light on a particularly glaring abuse of power. The normal checks and balances in civil society didn’t work.”He went on to say those 18 months were telling – because the only reason the full story came out at all was down to a free press.He praised Nick Davies and the Guardian as the single most important force in ensuring that the scandal was eventually uncovered.Rusbridger questioned how free the British press is and said, many journalists and lawyers would argue that the press in the UK is “relatively, but only relatively”, free.He said: “It is not clear that the situation has improved notably since Harold Evans, unable to publish the full truth about the Thalidomide scandal, bemoaned what he called Britain’s “half-free press” in the mid 1970s.“A 2009 Index/PEN commission into our defamation laws concluded: ‘The law as it stands is hindering the free exchange of ideas and information.’ The 2011 Global Press Freedom Rankings placed the UK in joint 26th place.”According to Rusbridger, since Watergate journalists often like to cite big campaigning investigations to demonstrate why what they do matters.He said: “It’s we, the free press, who exposed phone-hacking, MPs expenses, illegal rendition, the truth about the death of Ian Tomlinson, match-fixing in sport, world cup votes for sale, chicanery in the arms trade, cash for questions and so on.“This work of investigation is, indeed, vital evidence of the importance of the free press. As vital is the institutional muscle of the press that stands behind a reporter engaged in this kind of work. Reporters need to know that they will be protected from the threats and immense costs that are often involved when people seek to stop daylight being thrown on their affairs.“Our Moscow correspondent, for example, could not be free to work in Russia without the solidity of the Guardian behind him. The widespread defence of the sanctity of journalistic sources when our reporter, Amelia Hill, was recently threatened with the Official Secrets Act was an example of the institutional strength of the press as a whole.Second to speak was former political editor of The Sun, Trevor Kavanagh. His subject was, ‘Is there a difference between the public interest and the interest of the public? What questions does this raise in relation to a single set of journalistic ethics?’Kavanagh said: “My starting point is that everything under the sun is of interest to the public, from a local fete to a sex-and-lies political scandal or the secret location of a nuclear device.“One may be simply interesting, while the others bump up against the sometimes contentious definition of ‘the public interest’.“Frequently, the latter are stories someone wants to conceal but are too big to hide.“The distinction in any case is subjective. All news should – with certain exceptions to which I will return in a moment – be judged on the public’s all-encompassing right to know.”The former political editor called it “censorship” whenever the two definitions collide and a story is deemed not to be in the public interest and “not for the eyes of the ordinary folk”.He said: “Freedom of speech is a hard-won, centuries-old legal principle which did not arrive in the last shower with the Human Rights Act. It is, by its nature, in the public interest.“It is a freedom that, on occasions, has been abused and misused – sometimes, but not always, by the media. It remains one of the foundation stones of democracy and is enshrined as such in the American Constitution.”Kavanagh said the PCC has clear rules on stories involving infidelity, impropriety and invasion of privacy, but it is surely in the public interest that everyone should have access to the information available to assess the character of national figures.He said: “If people seeking our votes – or our cash for, say, personalised football shirts – it is surely right that we should know if they are masquerading as something they are not.“Editors, sub-editors and reporters know the PCC rules by heart and do everything possible to observe them, while getting as close as possible to a story that deserves to be told.“Sometimes, they make mistakes. But, considering the number of stories and the number of editions, not that many. We have a come a long way since those 1980s frontier days when caution was sometimes thrown to the wind.”Having been with The Sun for 30 years, 23 of them as political editor, Kavanagh said he wished to record his admiration for the “sheer professionalism of gifted colleagues both at Wapping and among our rivals on other tabloids”.He said: “They include the finest creative professionals in the business, reporters, sub-editors and editors, men and women who could adapt just as successfully to any other paper. The reverse is not always the case.”Finally, Professor Brian Cathcart, one of the founders of the Hacked Off campaign, took to the stage to speak on the same subject as Kavanagh.He said: “Two distinct meanings of the word ‘interest’ are at issue: in one we give our attention to something because it has the potential to do us good or harm; in the other we are merely curious. (The distinction is explicit in the difference between the negatives: ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’.)“For journalists there are subjects which are in the public interest but which the public doesn’t find interesting. Much of the running of the European Union falls into this category. And equally there are stories which interest the public but have no potential to make the reader better or worse off in any meaningful way. I think here of the activities of Jedward.”Cathcart said most news stories have a bit of both, but they were concerned there not with most cases but with hard cases, that minority of stories which involve journalists in bending or breaking rules, or in being accused of doing so.He said: “As journalists we can only break laws or breach our codes if we expect to deliver to society something more than the fleeting gratification of curiosity or emotion, something that outweighs the offence. We have to show real gain. In other words we have to serve the public interest.“It is a sorry reflection on the state of journalism that many practitioners say they are uncertain about the public interest. As a teacher I am inclined to wonder about the education and training that led to this. But it also seems to me that very often the real confusion is not between the public interest and the interest of the public, but between public interest and commercial interest.“Proprietors, editors and newsdesks have been putting sales before scruples in a way that they would not excuse in any other part of society.”The professor went on to say the the existence of this inquiry is proof of a failure of public trust in journalism — not just a failure of trust in one newspaper but in large parts of the industry, and in its ethical standards and the mechanisms which exist to uphold them.He said: “This failure did not occur overnight last July. It has been coming for a long time and is associated recently with scandals including those of Robert Murat, Kate and Gerry McCann and Christopher Jefferies.“We cannot restore trust with denial or with a cover-up. No doubt regulation of some sort has a part to play, but I am convinced that nothing will make a greater difference now than a change in the mindset and habits of journalists themselves, a change which acknowledges the primacy of the public interest.“I’m sure that a majority of journalists, in their hearts, are fundamentally motivated by the public interest, but having it in our hearts is not enough. As journalists we do not accept that it is enough for MPs or doctors or railway operators to mean well. We need to know that they operate in ethical and socially responsible ways and that they are accountable for what they do.”The next Leveson Inquiry seminars will happen this Wednesday, October 12, at Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, from 9.30am. More information here.