by Alice WatkinsComedian Russell Brand has dominated the front pages following a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into alleged sexual assaults in his early career. But these newly awakened tabloids seem to have forgotten the part they played in elevating the outspoken comic to the position of power he holds today. We should question why these newspapers - who claim to condemn criminal activity against women - were complicit in an atmosphere that encouraged and profited from it? Can they really expect us to believe anything has changed?Serious allegations against BrandThe Channel 4 documentary airing these allegations pointed to a toxic media culture, rife with sexism, which allowed Brand to allegedly wield his celebrity status to manipulate women and ‘hide in plain sight.’ Brand denies the allegations and since the documentary aired, has been using his platform to attack legacy or mainstream media, leading to complaints of a ‘witch hunt’ against the comedian. But is it any wonder his followers are confused?For a decade Brand’s hypersexualised caricature was glorified by the legacy press, with tabloids profiting from printing stories which celebrated his sex life, the Sun newspaper even naming him their ‘shagger of the year’ four times. The investigation highlighted how Brand was able to navigate multiple professional scandals with ease and without any real accountability. In 2008, during a pre-recorded episode of his Radio 2 programme, Brand, alongside Jonathan Ross made a series of prank calls to actor Andrew Sachs - the crude messages included comments about Brand’s relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie. The BBC received a record number of complaints and an Ofcom investigation led to the corporation being fined £150,000. Following Sachsgate, Brand went on to earn millions, using the incident as material for his stand up. For the press, the impact of coverage on Georgina Baillie, the woman at the centre of the story, was never something worth questioning seriously. Brand’s behaviour was described as 'an open secret in the entertainment industry. With some employers revealing to have known he was 'problematic' with women and not to be trusted alone with female staff.During this same period, some newspapers were aggressively hacking the phones of soap actors and other celebrities without a shred of public interest justification. If Brand’s behaviour was reportedly an open secret. Why weren’t newspapers investigating him?“Troubled Gail”During that same period, TV presenter Gail Porter was a regular on our screens throughout the 1990’s and early noughties, fronting popular shows like Top of the Pops. At the height of her fame she was championed by the newspapers, but when she developed alopecia, and following a period of poor mental health, she was swiftly rejected from presenting opportunities on mainstream television - with the press re-labelling her as ‘broken and unstable’.Hacked Off board member Emma Jones, interviewing Porter for Byline Times, says her story is perhaps one of the most visceral examples of the way in which the press builds up and then tears down successful women especially when they are no longer considered sexually titillating to readers.

Jones writes, “I was 'troubled Gail’ for a long time. Now, they are like ‘oh, we are so proud of you’. I’m like ‘are you really?” says Gail Her sceptical attitude is not surprising, unbeknown to her at the time, at the height of her fame, Gail was having her phone hacked by the tabloids. When she was sectioned, following a mental health crisis, the press arrived outside the hospital before she did. She described a sense of relief when she found out about the hacking ‘horrible’ though it was, it gave her some clarity. “Because I just wasn’t sure where it was coming from.”

Has anything changed?Since the airing of Channel 4’s investigation, a wave of press coverage and commentary online has leaned towards condemning a toxic sexist ‘culture of the past’. When we reflect on noughties media it’s important to remember that many of the dominant structures and biases which informed a sexist culture within the industry back then, still exist today. Media plurality and ownership remains largely unchanged, diversity figures for newsrooms remain poor and last year a report found that women still feel excluded from having power in the UK news media industry. This year, Lily Allen revealed that she believed she had been a target of the former Sun and Mail journalist and sacked GB News presenter Dan Wootton. In the midst of her marriage breakdown in 2015, she described ‘relentless bullying and constant surveillance and scrutiny’ - the same Dan Wootton whom, it now emerges, has been accused of serious wrongdoing by former colleagues.And The Sun continues intrusive conduct - In 2021 published an hourly live blog about Meghan Markle. The actress said the relentless press coverage, left her feeling suicidal. Despite this The Sun published a column, by Jeremy Clarkson where he made calls for her to be attacked in the street and described hating Meghan ‘on a cellular level’. The Sun also published an article on a possible suicide attempt by Caroline Flack in 2018, before relentlessly pursuing her just before her death in 2020 in the knowledge that she was vulnerable and struggling with her mental health. Six months later, following thousands of complaints and with Meghan Markle at the centre of the story, IPSO did the bare minimum within their powers and upheld a complaint of sexism, the first in its history, against The Sun over the Clarkson article. The treatment of these women shows that nothing has changed. The way some newspapers have finally begun to scrutinise Brand is a good thing, undoubtedly, but it’s not evidence of a change in press culture. Building a better pressWithout regulatory reform, there’s little prospect of the culture change in the press, which is desperately needed. How can we trust newspapers to regulate themselves when we know the newspapers who propelled stars like Brand and others like him then willfully distance themselves and exclude themselves from blame when it suits them. Newspapers aren’t really motivated by a genuine desire to bring Brand to justice; the same executives are in charge as were then, the motives remain the same.The editor's code is unfit for purpose. Most of the country’s most powerful newspapers are under the industry-controlled and ineffective regulatory body “IPSO”, whereby editors enforce a code written by editors themselves - in effect it’s the press marking its own homework. The code says that the press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religions, sex, gender identity and other protected characteristics. Buried in the small print, it states this clause ‘does not cover generalised remarks about groups or categories of people’. As a result, newspapers and journalists can express sexist, racist and discriminatory views, even where those views are likely to cause harm to those already at risk of marginalisation in our society. Some newspapers continue to defend intrusive reporting as something that comes with the territory for the famous. And of course, journalists don’t have a duty to write nice things about people in the public eye. But they should have a duty to observe professional standards, and not subject individuals to intrusion and abuse - not in the public interest.The impacts of misogynistic coverage of women in the public eye do not begin and end with the women themselves. They infect our culture and affect women everywhere.For the first time, in surveys about social attitudes ‘the youngest cohort surveyed have significantly more extreme misogynistic attitudes than the oldest’.And the context we live in - an epidemic of male violence against women and girls - makes journalists’ responsibilities in this area particularly important. Fundamentally, the lack of regulation feeds into the agendas of those who have something to fear from legitimate press reporting. If newspapers were properly regulated and journalists followed professional standards, and did not routinely make false accusations against people, then it would be much easier to counter those kinds of conspiracy theories such as those Russell Brand amplifies. Independent regulation is protection to ordinary people and a threat to the corrupt and powerful. And without it, the industry has no real incentive to tackle its misogyny problem and continues to benefit from the cycle it perpetuates.