The Leveson Inquiry

Former Daily Mirror and News of the World editor Piers Morgan admitted to the Leveson Inquiry that he listened to the tape of a celebrity couple's voicemail.

Morgan, giving evidence via videolink from Los Angeles, admitted after some questioning from Robert Jay QC, the Inquiry counsel, that he was played a tape of a voicemail message exchange between Heather Mills and Sir Paul McCartney from the time of their divorce proceedings.

Morgan admitted listening to the tape, but refused to answer more questions as he wanted to protect the identity of his source.

Jay asked: "Have you listened to recordings of what you knew to be illegally obtained voicemail messages?"

Morgan replied he had not, but went on to admit he had listened to the tape containing Mills' messages.

He said: "I can't discuss where I was played that tape or who played it because to do so would be to compromise a source."

When asked whether he thought that was unethical, Morgan said it didn't "necessarily follow that listening to somebody speaking to somebody else is unethical".

Lord Justice Leveson intervened and said he would be happy to call Mills as a witness, to verify whether she had authorised Morgan to listen to the messages.

The CNN presenter was also asked about allegations of the practice of phone hacking being widespread amongst showbiz reporters at the Daily Mirror, according to the written statement of former reporter James Hipwell, who will give evidence tomorrow.

Hipwell claimed phone hacking was so frequent it seemed like "bog-standard journalistic tool for gathering info". Morgan denied knowledge of that.

Morgan said at the beginning of his evidence most editors only know about 5 per cent of what their reporters are up to.

He said "to the best of my recollection", he didn't believe phone hacking was taking place in the Daily Mirror before 2004 (when he was sacked from the paper).

He also said he took a "keen interest" on everything his reporters were doing.

Jay asked him about an array of practices in newspapers, including 'tipping'. He mentioned an episode of Morgan's career when he bought £67,000 in company shares in Viglen, one day before the story was published in the Daily Mirror.There was a complaint made to the PCC and it was claimed Trinity Mirror knew he had bought £20,000 in shares before story was published. Morgan said he did not know who gave the wrong information to the PCC.

Tomorrow Leveson LJ will hear from James Hipwell, Nick Flagge, Padraig Flanagan, and David Pilditch. It will be the last day of the Inquiry in 2011.

The brother of News of the World whistleblower Sean Hoare told the Leveson Inquiry phone hacking was allegedly routine at The Sun.

Stuart Hoare told Leveson LJ about conversations he had with his late brother, Sean, during and after his time as a News International employee about phone hacking allegedly being widespread in both newspapers.

Hoare and his brother Sean had email exchanges about the alleged practices in the Sun and NoW newspapers.

He told the inquiry how Sean had been off alcohol and drugs for about 8 months before he was interviewed by the New York Times in July 2010 about phone hacking and other practices such as 'pinging' (finding out the exact location of someone's phone) at the News of the World.

They also had alleged conversations about bullying - Sean told him about one reporter in particular who had issues at the NoW.Sean died in his house, in July, of consequences of alcohol abuse, according to a coroner.

Hoare said: "The main reason I'm here today is to represent my brother and let his voice still be heard."

The inquiry also heard from the deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday, James Hanning, who had a series of conversations with Sean Hoare in the summer of 2010.

He said Hoare told him a number of individuals at NoW, Hoare included, had hacked phones.

Hanning said he thought Hoare's motivation to speak out - the hard time he had in his last couple of years at the NoW - did not affect his reliability.

He also said: "I saw no evidence that he was in the state I'd heard he'd been in the past. He seemed to be operating very efficiently and impressively."

The inquiry will hear from former NoW reporter Matthew Driscoll, who won £800,000 in a bullying claim against the newspaper, in the afternoon.

As Corporal Jones might have said, they don't like it up 'em. The ruthless methods of mass circulation papers are being exposed at the Leveson inquiry as never before, so they are lashing out like cornered animals.

Their attacks on the Guardian this week in relation to last July's Milly Dowler story (see the Mail's headline: "The false allegation that 'led to 200 people losing their jobs'") reveal a self-delusion and a mood of furious denial that will only land them in worse trouble. The editors meet today (Thursday) to review their position; for their sakes and the sakes of their employees you have to hope they can talk sense into each other.

It was not the Guardian that got them into the mess they are now in. Nor was it the Milly Dowler story of last July. It was years of irresponsible, reckless, cruel behaviour that was perpetrated by a minority in their midst and was far too widely tolerated and excused in the industry. It was not voicemail hacking alone, but years of journalists not caring a damn for people they wrote about and not respecting the people they wrote for.

Suggesting that one article made all the difference is like saying that Gavrilo Princip, the Sarajevo assassin, was solely responsible for the First World War, or that a Wimbledon final is decided purely on the last point played. A mountain of straws broke this camel's back, not just one.

The implication of what they have been saying this week is this: they want to turn back the clock. They would like Rebekah Brooks back in charge at News International with her shabby cronies Colin Myler and Tom Crone by her side. They miss the days when Andy Coulson was in Downing Street, when Rupert Murdoch was pulling strings and when John Yates was a big wheel at Scotland Yard. They might just accept that a police investigation into phone hacking was necessary, providing it picked off only reporters and not executives like them.

Above all, they desperately want us to believe the discredited 'one rogue newspaper' scenario, the pretence that no paper but the News of the World had anything to answer for. In the teeth of all the evidence, they would like is to think that phone hacking existed in isolation and had no connection with the brutal, dishonest culture that monstered Christopher Jefferies, the McCanns, Robert Murat, Colin Stagg, Barry George and so many others. And of course they would like to turn back the clock to the days before July, when they still brazenly passed off the Press Complaints Commission as a paragon of rigour and rectitude.

This is delusional, but it is consistent with what has gone before. Remember, these newspapers collectively refused to report the unravelling hacking scandal for two years: so far as they possibly could, they hid it from their readers in a shameful abuse of power.

One of the purposes of the inquiry is to get at the truth. That takes time and for people who prefer the truth to be something you can throw together overnight this idea is clearly bewildering. Lord Justice Leveson hears witnesses and gathers evidence. He is hearing not only from victims of press abuse but from journalists; indeed he will hear from a parade of newspaper editors. At the end of this process Leveson will report, not only on the popular press, but, as he has made abundantly clear, also on the conduct of the Guardian. Good.

The editors, however, can't stand this because it means that for the duration they do not have exclusive control of the megaphone in the way that they are used to. It means that the public has been able to hear the voices and stories of press victims for the first time, and the public has seen that what appears in print sometimes comes at a horrible, unacceptable price. It means that the editors are exposed to scrutiny. This clearly makes them angry.

A former News of the World chief reporter has admitted a story about a former F1 boss' orgy was not in the public interest without a Nazi theme.

Neville Thurlbeck, who worked at the NoW for 21 years, admitted during his oral evidence to the Leveson Inquiry that the story about Max Mosley's S&M ‘party’ was not in the public interest with the Nazi theme removed from it.

Thurlbeck said he believed, however, that at the time there was a public interest in the story and it was the "suggestion of a Nazi theme that initially persuaded us that it was in the public interest".

When asked by Inquiry counsel, Robert Jay, if he was involved in discussions about whether to confront Mosley about the story, Thurlbeck said he was not part of the process.

He said he believed the editor thought "we had a perfectly legitimate story we need to run".

Thurlbeck said: "We had every justification in running it and the editor feared the story could be prevented from coming out by Mosley."

The former NoW chief reporter also admitted sending emails to the two anonymous women who had helped him get the video of the orgy.

He was trying to get them to agree to an interview, otherwise he would publish images of them without pixellation.

Thurlbeck said he was "happy to accept full responsibility for sending emails", but told Lord Justice Leveson the messages were drafted by his news editor, Ian Edmondson.

Earlier today, "Fake Sheikh" Mazher Mahmood, an investigative reporter who worked at the NoW for more than 20 years, also gave evidence.

He was asked about his stings and where the ethical boundaries were for reporters doing investigations into criminal behaviour.

Mahmood claimed his investigations have led to 261 successful criminal prosecutions to date.

Alan Rusbridger (Guardian editor):Thank you for this opportunity to address the inquiry at such an early stage. I wanted to add to some of the context which we hope this inquiry takes into account, as well as Guardian News and Media's main areas of concern.

Firstly, we hope that it's apparent to all that the events that led to this inquiry were shocking and immensely damaging. Damaging because they impacted on the trust in all journalists. Shocking, for what they revealed about one powerful and dominant company; about the responses of the police and the flawed nature of regulation; about the limitations of parliament and the initial unwillingness of much of the press to write about what had been going on at the News of the World.

There was, in short, a failure of the normal checks and balances in society to hold power to account.

The inquiry is being held, as you know, at a time of existential threat to the idea and sustainability of journalism itself.

Commercially, newspapers may struggle to survive in the form in which they currently exist. Digital media have sucked advertising out of the printed press. Circulations are declining at a rate of up to 10% a year. While digital audiences are growing fast and the possibilities are great, no digital revenue model yet offers certain hope of maintaining editorial endeavours at anything like their current levels.

Editorially, the notion of journalism itself is being transformed.

Until recently a newspaper was something produced by a relatively small number of people in the know for a large number of people who weren't in the know. Now virtually everyone has the capacity to publish and to inform themselves. The once-a-day deadline has been replaced by a 24-hour continuous news cycle. Newspapers are moving from text to a combination of video, audio and data as well as text.

There is a convergence of media which will have implications for readers and which may well have implications for regulation What was once a one-way publishing process is now more responsive.

Most editors are alive to the potential benefits of harnessing the ability of others to contribute. They are beginning to think: "If we add what you know to what we know, we may end up with a fuller, better picture."

We also live in a world in which every reader becomes a potential fact checker. Social media allows anyone to respond to, expose, highlight, add to, clarify or contradict what we write. We have the choice whether to pretend this world of response doesn't exist, or to incorporate it into what we do.

The more we incorporate it, the more journalism becomes, as it were, plastic. There will be less pretence that we are telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about a story, frozen at the moment it is published – what Walter Lippman in 1922 called the confusion between "news" and "truth". A journalist today lives with the knowledge that there will be an external reaction to much of what she or he writes within minutes of publication. Journalism today is often less a snapshot, more a moving picture.

Three more pieces of context, especially given the title of your first module.

First, readers are, as in the rest of their lives, consumers. They expect organisations, whether public or private, to be responsive and accountable. Newspapers have often been poor in responding to challenge.

Secondly, privacy is a not a fringe concern: it is mainstream.

Virtually every citizen is becoming attuned to what a significant factor privacy is in the modern world. Anyone who has a Facebook account; who uses Google; who is treated by the NHS; who talks to the police; who has an Oyster card; who drives too fast; who shops at Tesco; who has insurance; who puts their bins out on a Thursday night; who banks online; who has a mobile phone – everyone is more conscious about privacy and how organisations, public or private, handle it.

Thirdly we are, as citizens, more conscious of the idea of a rights-based society, with consequential responsibilities.

I hope this adds to the context.

Clearly, a major focus of your attention in Part Two will be phone-hacking itself. Equally important, in our view, in Part One is to look at the failures of the 18-month period once the "rotten apple" defence had been exploded by the Guardian – ie, from July 2009 to late January 2011.

These months are, it seems to us, worth examining because they show the dogs that didn't bark. Why didn't they? What accounts for the reluctance of the police to investigate phone hacking properly, even in July 2009? Why did it take four inquiries before they took it seriously? Why did senior officers make untruthful statements about what had happened? Were MPs intimidated or threatened? Why did the PCC fail so lamentably in its attempt to get at the truth? Why, initially, was there a widespread reluctance among other journalists to touch the story? Why did it take an American paper to see the significance of an issue to which many British journalists appeared blind?

To give one example, not yet raised, I believe, in the inquiry: no British news editor apparently considered it interesting that a former NoW journalist was, in November 2009, awarded the stunning sum of £800,000 for suffering what an Employment Tribunal regarded as a culture of bullying at the newspaper under its then editor, Andy Coulson.

This record pay-out and verdict against the man who was about to walk through the front door of Number 10 were not judged to be newsworthy. But a culture of bullying in any organisation is important: it may be a highly pertinent to ask whether journalists on the paper felt intimidated and did things they knew to be wrong.

I respectfully suggest that the inquiry might like to ask whether this was the case within the NoW – and, if so, what safeguards can be built into news organisations in future so that journalists, already working under ever-increasing pressure and in the context of financial insecurity, can exercise some moral choices about things they cant square with their consciences.

The answers to these questions about the response to the phone-hacking revelations are vital ones for anyone who cares about the health of a democracy. Did people, both internally and externally, feel a fear of News International? Was its influence across many aspects of British political and cultural life simply too dominant?

How did News Corp leverage its commercial, political, journalistic and (as we now know) outsourced criminal muscle?

The second issue relates to internal practices – in particular those which related to an honest recognition of what journalism is.

In my statement to your inquiry on press freedom last month I quoted David Broder, the former Washington Post commentator, and his definition of what a newspaper was – a "a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours ... distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you ... to read it in about an hour".

That passage, and exposure to the American tradition of public editors or ombudsmen, inspired me to appoint Britain's first Readers' Editor in 1997.

We note with encouragement that, since the start of your inquiry, two other newspaper groups have decided to publish regular corrections and clarifications columns on page 2. We would be happy to share with you our thinking and experience based on nearly 15 years of running truly independent columns, and the value they bring for the newspaper and for readers.

This very local, responsive form of regulation – what counsel to the inquiry termed, I believe, "internal regulation" – seems to us the cornerstone of responsible journalism and has a material impact on culture, practice and ethics.

Thirdly, we have already suggested that the industry might profitably learn from the thinking of others who face similar challenges in relation to ethical dilemmas. You are aware of, and counsel has noted, the questions which former GCHQ director Sir David Omand suggested any intelligence operation should consider in relation to intrusions into privacy – the harm test; the public good test; the proportionality; the need for due authorisation; the bar against fishing expeditions.

Should you find it helpful, we would like to explore this further – in particular, ways of demonstrating that proper questioning and authorisation had taken place before publication. It seems to us this is an extension of the sort of pre-publication consideration and precautions which many of our reporters already use under the so-called Reynolds doctrine in defamation.

Mention of defamation leads us respectfully to suggest that you consider the extent to which your own thinking in respect of regulation could be dovetailed with the current consultation on the Defamation Bill before parliament.

I recognise that both you and counsel have stated that the inquiry does not intend to look at the Defamation Bill. However, our defamation laws – widely considered to be slow, costly and illiberal – are often used as a sledgehammer to crack a nut which could equally well be solved by a properly-recognised system of mediation within a system of press regulation.

So, if you are minded to entertain thoughts of radical reform of the latter, it might be useful to canvas views on how you could come up with proposals which draw on an awful lot of recent and creative thinking about our libels laws. Indeed, your reference yesterday to mechanisms for dispute resolution, fair and cheap, I believe are at the heart of this.

We could stick an M (for mediation) in PCC. Maybe call it the Press Standards and Mediation Commission. It could then be a one-stop shop disputes resolution service so that people seldom had to go to law to resolve their differences with newspapers. It would be quick, responsive and cheap. We could even make this a carrot to tempt people into the fold of independent regulation – ie, newspapers that signed up to PSMC would have clear advantages to newspapers that didn't.

On regulation more broadly, it will come as no surprise that we were not impressed by the way the PCC handled phone hacking. We said in November 2009 that it was misleading to call the PCC a regulator, and we note that the incoming chair, Lord Hunt, has gone further: it is absolutely not a regulator in his view. So, it could be argued that, before we abolish self-regulation, we should first try it.

No-one has any quarrel with the job the PCC does in mediating complaints. Many people think its code is a good one, if a little too preoccupied with exposing iniquity, and that its adjudications form a coherent body of "case law." Against that, its governance looks opaque, even to people within the industry.

Its rules on so-called third party intervention are difficult to follow. If it were not merely a complaints-driven system but a more proactive regime which monitored, investigated and encouraged cultural change, it might make systemic abuse less likely to occur.

Its attitude towards privacy, including informal pre-publication advice, is not at all clear. It is a mystery as to why it launched an inquiry into something it was completely ill-equipped to investigate. It was clearly lied to by the industry's main player, yet appears to lack the powers or the will to do anything about it.

So, while we think there are useful things to build on, we don't agree with those who think that everything is currently broadly OK, subject to a touch on the tiller. A new regulator clearly has to have teeth – the power to intervene and investigate meaningfully and to impose significant sanctions.

I note that you have questioned the overly binary debate of statutory versus self regulation. We agree. If "statutory regulation" implies some form of state control, or licensing of journalists, we would oppose it. The crucial issues, it seems to us, are funding and cost; the expertise/independence of those who run it and serve on it; and that it regulates the whole market – subject, of course, to the definitional difficulties of describing what the "market" is, or will be.

If statute can help make independent self-regulation work well, then we would welcome suggested use of statute to be scrutinised properly against concerns of press freedom. For example, there may be carrots and sticks that, once recognised in law or by the courts, solve several of the challenges you have already spoken of in making non-statutory regulation work.

As discussed above, a PCC successor might offer a mediation and arbitration service covering on libel. It could deal with privacy.

Central to both would be a workable and agreed definition of the public interest that not only do we as an industry agree with, but should also be prepared to argue in any forum.

Privacy is more difficult than libel, in two senses. It challenges the industry with the degree to which they would tolerate prior restraint.

And, however little we like the developing jurisprudence of the courts, there is the problem that the further a regulator diverges from the remedies available in law, the less likely it is that claimants will use the services of the regulator.

Finally – and this speaks to all the modules – it seems to us that there is a pressing need to examine the plurality and competition framework. Only last month the tiny family-owned Kent Messenger group was prevented from taking over seven Northcliffe titles because of the distortion of the newspaper market in East Kent. Yet, until the post-Milly Dowler intervention of MPs, there appeared to be nothing anyone could do to prevent News Corp from effectively doubling its already-remarkable dominance of the British media market by acquiring the 61% of BSkyB it didn't already own.

If you come to the view that there was a genuine fear of News International in public life – partly, but only partly, on account of what private investigators and criminal figures were employed by them to dig up – then it is important, we submit, to recommend a regulatory and legal framework which prevents media companies in this country from acquiring too much dominance.

All journalists worry about any form of interference in freedom of expression and you will have picked up on a widespread anxiety about whether new forms of regulation might inhibit us. From one point of view no-one currently gains very much from regulation.

You might think the FT doesn't really need the PCC to make sure that it stays on the ethical straight and narrow. The Northern and Express titles showed just what they thought of the constant criticism by the PCC by walking out of it. Some regional and magazine editors see little gain and much expense.

The PCC, for all its failings, was born from the view that there was an overriding imperative to agree a common professional and ethical code to which we would not merely pay lip service, but which would actually inform everything we do. Only by acting together could we repel the people who really were looking for any excuse to tie our hands. And so we lashed ourselves together in order to be stronger.

I think the public has also gained from this. And, in the aftermath of an episode in which thousands of members of the public were illegally targeted by journalists, it's important that we keep them in front of mind.

The coming period of examination of the press will doubtless be an uncomfortable one in some respects. We're sure you will have in your mind the good things that journalists do which, more than ever, need protection as well as the work of the 99 per cent of British journalists who wouldn't have a clue how to hack a phone and who don't go to work to snoop into the private lives of others.

It's our hope that, with creative thinking, your and your team can find ways of bolstering all the good that flows from the best journalism while cutting out the worst.

ENDS(16 November 2011)

Michelle Stanistreet (NUJ General Secretary):Yours is an unprecedented inquiry into the press that could have far reaching implications for our industry, so we at the National Union of Journalists felt it was essential for the union that is the voice for journalists and journalism throughout the UK and Ireland to play a central role. We were therefore very grateful to you for recently granting to us Core Participant Status.

The NUJ is an independent trade union and has been representing journalists throughout the media industry for over 104 years. We are a democratic, lay-member led grass roots organisation – it is members in our workplace chapels and our branches who shape union policy and direct priorities.

We speak on behalf of our 38,000 members who work throughout the industry, as freelances and in staff roles in newspapers, news agencies, magazines, online, book publishing, in public relations and as photographers. The NUJ’s headquarters are in London and we also have offices in Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin.

We represent members collectively where we have collective bargaining rights and recognition, and individual representation also forms a large part of our work. As well as our bread and butter industrial work we campaign on issues ranging from quality journalism and defending public service broadcasting to fighting for protection of sources and press freedom.

I was elected General Secretary of the NUJ in April and took over the role in July. For the three previous years I was the elected Deputy General Secretary and had previously been the union’s lay vice president and president, after having served on the ruling National Executive Council for 8 years representing all members of the union working in Newspapers and Agencies. During this time, I was working fulltime as a journalist – I joined Express Newspapers in 1999, working on the Sunday Express. During my time I worked in the City Department as an interviewer and feature writer, then to the newsdesk where I worked as a feature writer and then Books editor until I was elected to the full-time role of Deputy General Secretary in the NUJ.

It was my experience as an NUJ chapel rep at the Express – where we operated a joint chapel between the Daily Express, Sunday Express and Daily Star titles – representing members individually and collectively in a range of issues, that galvanised my activism within the NUJ and gave me a deep insight into the issues facing journalists working in the press today. My team of officials represent and engage with journalists working in national and regional newspapers – tabloid and broadsheets alike – on a daily basis.

It is vital that, in an Inquiry reflecting on the problems and issues within our industry, that the concerns, experiences and insights of ordinary working journalists are heard. I know you are very much alive to this. They are the workers at the sharp end, who deal with the reality of life in a pressured, busy newsroom every single day.

Our members strive on a daily basis to serve the public – balancing the need to inform, educate and entertain with the need to serve the competing and sometimes conflicting demands of publishers and commercial interests. It is a daily challenge – it is frequently a battle.

The NUJ is making a good deal of effort to identify journalists to give evidence and to share their experiences with the Inquiry. However, the stark reality is that in many workplaces there is a genuine climate of fear about speaking out.

In order that it is not simply those who have retired, or who have been made redundant and left the industry, who feel able to make a contribution we are working with the Inquiry team to ensure that journalists who wish to contribute to the Inquiry can give their testimony in confidence, to afford them protection from retribution.

The fear is not of immediate punishment but of finding that a few months after your Inquiry ends a journalist who has spoken out may find herself on a list of redundancies. We support your draft protocol on anonymity and will discuss specific measures in relation to particular witnesses with the Inquiry team.

Of course, predictably, the newspaper owners are unhappy about this. The reality is that putting your head above the parapet and speaking out publicly is simply not an option for many journalists, who would fear losing their job or making themselves unemployable in the future.

In our experience, that fear has been a significant factor in inhibiting journalists from defending the principles of ethical journalism in the workplace – and in media organisations hostile to the concept of trade unions there is a particular problem.

There has already been discussion of the important role journalism plays. Journalism is a force for good, a vital part of any democratic society. People choosing to enter the industry don’t - believe me - do it for the money or the career prospects. They become journalists because they want to make a difference; they want to play their part in holding power to account, to shining a light in those dark recesses of society. They want to do their job well, professionally, and they want to keep their communities informed and expose wrongdoing.

And the reason why we’re all here today is because of excellent, dogged investigative journalism which brought this scandal to light.

Journalists do not, however, operate in a vacuum. It is important to place the examination of the industry’s culture and practices in the broader context of the current state of the industry. The newspaper industry, particularly in the local and regional press, has been in crisis over recent years. The scale of cutbacks, redundancies, casualisation and entire closure of titles has made it a very challenging and insecure time for journalists.

This has been the inevitable result of the entire economic model within the newspaper industry. Greedy employers have stripped profitable and once-proud newspaper titles of their assets. When the days of 25, 30 per cent profits ended, rather than settle for more modest profits that would do nicely most of our major blue-chips, the response of the major newspaper groups was to slash costs and cut the bottom line, sacrificing quality and content in the process. This is not a sustainable business model and we’re seeing the results of this bad management on a daily basis with ever more cutbacks and redundancies. These owners are playing fast and loose with our industry. You can’t do that without sacrificing quality journalism; you can’t do it without cheating readers of the newspapers they deserve; and you can’t do it without sounding the death knell of an industry that plays such a critical role in our society.

In this context, the more resource-intensive areas of journalism, such as specialist correspondents and investigative journalism have become something of an endangered species and a journalists’ ability to get out there and research and deliver work thoroughly has been diminished. Agency copy is topped and tailed, press releases are churned out as news. The pressure on journalists to deliver is relentless, often to unpredictable and unreasonable timescales, and without the resources to do the job well. Such pressures lead to short cuts and can result in the abandoning of fundamental principles.

That’s why it is important for your Inquiry to understand the reality of newsroom culture and the pressures that journalists in some workplaces have come under to deliver the goods, to write stories that are inaccurate or misleading. These practices are the product of the culture. You cannot separate the practice of journalism and the culture which underpins the industry. To paraphrase the Irish poet W B Yeats, you cannot separate the dancer from the dance.

It’s not journalists who develop and foster the culture in any one newspaper group. In any workplace, where does the power reside? Not at the bottom, where the majority work to get the job done. It’s at the top. In journalism, the reality is that there’s often a stark expectation from on high – Deliver the goods, get the job done, bring in the story, whatever the means. If you don’t, well the consequences are often simple and clinically brutal.

At the heart of any newspaper culture is the editor – what he or she says goes. For anyone who’s worked in a newsroom, the concept of an editor who didn’t know just what their troops were getting up to is laughable. Editors rule the roost. They set the tone – not just in the editorial line of their newspapers but in the way that the newsroom operates. What’s accepted, what’s not; the tone of an editorial conference; whether bullying – sadly commonplace - goes unchecked; the dispensing of praise or the nature of the inevitable roasting when the goods aren’t delivered. TheTo imagine editors as mere bystanders whose underling reporters run rings round them would be fanciful in the extreme. That’s why, to anyone with any journalistic nous, the peddling of the line that hacking was the action of a “single rogue reporter” operating in splendid isolation was as daft as it was unbelievable.

And that’s why it is vital, when considering the culture and the practices of the press, to examine the broader context of how that culture is forged and cultivated.

For NUJ members, a significant way in which they input collectively into that workplace culture is through their workplace NUJ group, the chapel as we call them. But that can only happen in places where there is a functioning organised chapel – this mainly happens in places where there is a legal recognition agreement in place and a collective bargaining agreement.

Mere membership is not enough – there are many newspapers where journalists feel very anxious about their employer knowing that they are members of the NUJ or that they are active in the union outside of work.

Nor is the limited right to representation in disciplinary or grievance proceedings enough. The only way a union is able to sufficiently and actively protect the interests of its members is by the establishment of genuine collective bargaining.

That process involves putting other issues central to a journalists’ work – whether that’s staffing resources, commercial pressures, bullying behaviour in the workplace, or ethics – squarely at the negotiating table. Believe me – senior executives in this industry only sit down with our workplace reps and with NUJ officials because they are obliged to, because we have recognition and an agreement on collective bargaining.

Whilst I’m sure there are many employers who would much rather not to have to bargain collectively with their workforce, there are many media employers who have a particularly intransigent view in this regard and indeed will go to great lengths to block the NUJ from its titles. Take Rupert Murdoch - he created and funded his own proxy union, the News International Staff Association, which was later refused a Certificate of Independence by the Certification Officer because of its lack of Independence from the employer. This was cynically established on the eve of the legislative changes being introduced that saw the restoration of trade union recognition rights. All to keep the NUJ and our sister unions out of Wapping.

Staff at News International, mostly on the News of the World, who have been dismissed or made redundant in the wake of the hacking scandal have learned in recent months to their cost the impact of not having strong and independent workplace representation. There cannot be a genuinely robust and confident representation from any organisation that is not independent – where by means of its funding and actual existence is effectively in the pocket of the company’s owner and senior executives.

A well-organised union provides a counterbalance to the power of the editors and proprietors, it can limit their excesses and gives journalists the confidence to raise their concerns. The collective can tackle stress and bullying and defend principles of journalistic ethics as well as dealing with the bread and butter industrial issues of pay and terms and conditions.

One of the many members to come to the NUJ in the wake of the closure of the News of the World was Derek Webb. He, as you may have seen, told his story to BBC’s Newsnight in some depth last week. Mr Webb was hired as a private detective by the News of the World and carried out surveillance for the company for many years. However, he alleges that in the wake of the arrest of the paper’s Royal Editor Clive Goodman, he was taken aside by a senior executive on the News of the World and told he had to “stop being a private detective and become a journalist.” The same senior executive also apparently told him that he must join the NUJ and acquire an NUJ press card. This he duly did. This is a breathtakingly cynical move on behalf of the News of the World but also an interesting perspective on an organisation that is so hostile to the NUJ. Clearly, in the minds of senior executives at News International, presumably a proper journalist is one who is a fully fledged NUJ member with a union press card rather than the ones News International dispenses to its staff.

You suggested earlier this week that the essential question in this Inquiry might well be “who guards the guardians”. The NUJ can help here. For one of the key ways of ensuring “systems within an organisation which promote or induce good behaviours and tend to expose bad behaviours”, to quote Mr Jay, is for journalists to have the protection of a trade union.

The establishment of collective bargaining as one vital means of preventing the unacceptable “culture, practices and ethics” under investigation in this Inquiry should not be seen as some form of special pleading on behalf of a vested interest group. For the right to collective bargaining is as fundamental as the right to privacy under Article 8 of the Convention and the right to freedom of expression under Article 10.

Article 11 protects everyone’s freedom of association and “the right to be a member of a trade union for the protection of his interests”.

In a unanimous Grand Chamber decision of Demir and Baykara v Turkey the European Court of Human Rights concluded:“the right to bargain collectively with the employer has, in principle, become one of the essential elements of the “right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of [one's] interests” set forth in Article 11 of the Convention… ”The interrelation between Article 11 and the right to collective bargaining had been earlier described in Wilson and others v UK, a case which arose out of the considerable steps Associated Newspapers took to de-recognise and disempower the NUJ in the 1980s.

In that case the Court (which included Lord Phillips, as he now is) held:“the essence of a voluntary system of collective bargaining is that it must be possible for a trade union which is not recognised by an employer to take steps including, if necessary, organising industrial action, with a view to persuading the employer to enter into collective bargaining with it on those issues which the union believes are important for its members' interests. Furthermore, it is of the essence of the right to join a trade union for the protection of their interests that employees should be free to instruct or permit the union to make representations to their employer or to take action in support of their interests on their behalf. If workers are prevented from so doing, their freedom to belong to a trade union, for the protection of their interests, becomes illusory. ”The Court held that the UK had a duty to protect that right. We don’t expect to persuade you to recommend legislation to protect collective bargaining for journalists. We will seek to persuade you to make recommendations which recognise the vital role the NUJ has in protecting journalists from (amongst other things) pressure to engage in unethical practices. We will produce a note on the legal matters referred to above which we hope you will find of value.

In case it might be thought that the empowerment of trade unions to protect the interests of their members at work is not the stuff of public Inquiries such as this, the NUJ would draw attention to the recognition given to the role of trade union representatives in the protection of the safety of employees by Lord Cullen in the Piper Alpha Inquiry Report, a role which finds statutory form in the Offshore Installations (Safety Representatives and Safety Committee) Regulations 1989.

We believe there is a clear link between a strong trade union presence in a workplace and a strong ethical awareness. Collective trade union representation is a moral, human right and journalists should not be denied this right in our newspapers.

I can speak from personal experience when I say that having the collective confidence of a robust union presence can make an enormous difference when individual journalists want to speak out on matters of journalistic ethics.

In September 2001, when I was one of three NUJ chapel reps at Express Newspapers, we took the unprecedented step of making a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the reporting of the Daily Express’ coverage of asylum seekers. Some journalists at the title, particularly those directly involved in the coverage, felt so upset and angry about the racist tone of the Express’ coverage, and so powerless to individually do anything about it, that they were considering leaving their jobs. The NUJ chapel met and issued a public statement about the “hate stirring” front page headlines – one of which was ASYLUM SEEKERS RUN FOR YOUR LIVES – and what we felt to be editorial interference from the proprietor.

It wasn’t the only public stance NUJ members felt impelled to take. In 2004 the chapel once again complained to the PCC over the inflammatory and blatantly inaccurate coverage of so-called Gypsies coming to the UK during the enlargement of the EU. In both cases, we believed the paper was guilty of breaking the PCC’s code of conduct on discrimination – which states: “The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to a person's race, colour, religion, sex or sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability." And in 2006 journalists on the Daily Star walked off the editorial floor to hold an urgent chapel meeting and demand that a “spoof” page, called the Daily Fatwah, whose only purpose was to mock Islam, was pulled. The management backed down and the page was indeed pulled that night – their collective intervention, on a matter of their journalistic ethics, made a difference.

In each of these cases, a common factor in the offending coverage was that editorial decisions on the content were being cynically made on the basis of the resulting spike in sales. It would be impossible for a single journalist to tackle this. Another common factor is that the PCC did absolutely nothing at all to help. In fact, our complaints merely warranted a short written reply from the then chair, Sir Christopher Meyer, saying he was satisfied that no journalists were being put under any pressure to write inaccurate or unethical material. Perhaps he got that impression from the paper’s then editor who sat with him on the PCC, but he certainly didn’t get it from any journalists at the Daily Express as no one from the PCC even contacted us to investigate.

The NUJ is a trade union which has its Code of Conduct at its heart. Established in 1936 it is embedded in our rule book and by signing our membership form, it is made clear to journalists that they are signing up to abide by the Code. The NUJ has an Ethics Council which is a key part of our union structures – we run an Ethics telephone Hotline, which journalists regularly access to gain advice and support.

And of course as part of that Code, we commit to robustly defending the public interest test and the ability of journalists to do their jobs freely and professionally. The NUJ would vigorously defend members using “other means”, sometimes of course unpalatable and unpopular, if it is in the pursuit of a story that is clearly in the overriding public interest. That is the duty of a journalist engaged in informing the public.

But our Code is also about public accountability. It commits journalists to do nothing that would intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest. It commits journalists to do their utmost to correct harmful inaccuracies. It commits them to obtaining material by honest, straightforward and open means, with the exception of investigations that are overwhelmingly in the public interest and where that evidence can’t be obtained by straightforward means.

Clearly the industrial scale of the use of hacking at News International and the breadth of the scope of the stories generated as a result, do not comply with the principles of the NUJ’s Code of Conduct.

It is in this context – of the cut and thrust business of journalistic ethics and the commercial and editorial pressures that our members can face – that we have been campaigning for some years now for a Conscience Clause in contracts of employment. So that when journalists stand up for a principle of journalistic ethics they have a contractual protection against being dismissed. And – crucially - so they have the confidence and the security to put their head above the parapet in the first place.

The idea of a Conscience Clause was raised by the NUJ when giving evidence to the commons select committee into privacy and media intrusion in 2003. The committee recommended such a clause but it was rejected by both the PCC – which has no say in industrial matters – and the Society of Editors, which does.

The text of our clause is: “A journalist has the right to refuse assignments or be identified as the creator of editorial which would break the letter of the spirit of the Code. No journalist should be disciplined or suffer detriment to their career for asserting his/her rights to act according to the Code.”

That is why the NUJ does put forward special pleading on the issue of a Conscience Clause. The introduction of such a contractually binding protection would be a great advance for journalists and for journalism in the UK.

We will come on to the detail of press regulation and any future model in the later part of this Inquiry. It is the view of the NUJ and its members that the PCC has failed, abysmally so. We would absolutely resist any changes that would lead to anything akin to the licensing of journalists or anything that would in the slightest dilute press freedom – that would not be a solution to the problems the industry finds itself in.

For years we have had the media bosses’ model of self- regulation. It is one that excludes both the producers and the consumers of the media output and represents only the owners. The general public and journalists themselves have had to contend with what has been little more than a self-serving gentleman’s club. And not even a club that all newspapers are obliged to join, as illustrated so finely when Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell walked out of the PCC. It’s a model that has failed – but there are plenty of other models of regulation out there – models that have teeth and provide more than a thin veneer of accountability on the owners’ part, models that actually hold newspapers to account and genuinely deliver when it comes to protecting the interests of the public and of journalism.

An interesting and relevant example is the establishment of the Press Council of Ireland in 2007.

The NUJ played a key role in the establishment of the Press Council of Ireland.

We are represented alongside editors and civic society nominees on the basis of full equality on the Press Council. The NUJ’s Irish Secretary Seamus Dooley sits on the Council’s Code Committee.

It is interesting to note that the very same newspaper groups, whose executives won’t sit down in the same room as the NUJ in the UK, manage to work quite happily and collaboratively across the water in Ireland as part of the Press Council of Ireland. Indeed just yesterday the Irish Secretary attended a meeting of the Finance and Administrative Committee of the PCI alongside a senior representative of News International.

Irish journalism – and Irish society, has benefitted from such enlightened co-operation in the public interest.

The increasing consolidation of media ownership and the disproportionate power and influence this brings with it also needs to be considered by this Inquiry. When newspaper titles are bought and sold, there should be a rigorous public interest test. The highest bidder shouldn’t be allowed to simply walk away with our national titles in their pocket and the accompanying power and influence that brings. Currently there’s a dearth of genuine scrutiny and most sales are usually completed on the basis of a secretive sealed bid where it’s only the money that talks.

It should not be possible for our titles – whether a national title or a local newspaper – to be bought and sold on the whim of one man, or corporation, or used as pawns to further an individual’s commercial or ideological interests. A media owner shouldn’t have our police and our politicians in a stranglehold for fear of their personal peccadillos being splashed over the front pages of a newspaper. No media group should be allowed to achieve such dominance.

I have given some examples today of how a robust, well organised NUJ presence can make a real difference and a positive contribution to the culture within a newspaper and to the broader industry. We are currently engaged in efforts to encourage our members to come forward and play their part and enable you and the Inquiry team to have as good an insight as possible into the reality of working life and newsroom culture for journalists working across the newspaper industry. This will provide examples from across the industry, including testimony from journalists who can shed real light on the culture within the News of the World, on cases of bullying at a senior level, all key factors we believe led to the scale of hacking within the newspaper. I hope to be able to submit more detailed written testimony arising from this work in the coming weeks.

This is an Inquiry that could shape the future of our industry and it is vital that the views of working journalists – and journalism - are heard and seriously considered. The NUJ will do all it can to assist and to ensure our members can concentrate on what they do best and what gets the vast majority of journalists out of bed each day - serving up quality journalism that informs and entertains.

Thank you.

ENDS(16 November 2011)

New information on the alleged scale of phone hacking by News International journalists has come to light at the first Leveson Inquiry hearing today.

Robert Jay QC, the Inquiry Counsel, told Lord Justice Leveson in court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice, that "the Sun" and "the Mirror" were 'corner names' (those commissioning hacking transactions, written in the corner of the notebook) in private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's notebooks.

He also revealed that at the time of the trial of Mr Mulcaire and NoW royal correspondent Clive Goodman in 2005/06, five other NI employees, referred to as A, B, C, D and I, commissioned information from Mr Mulcaire.

Mr Jay told the Inquiry there was evidence in Mulcaire's notebooks of 2266 'taskings', and about 28 legible ‘corner names’. He said four journalists accounted for 2,143 of those 'taskings'.According to the QC, when police raided Mr Mulcaire's offices in 2006, they also found 690 audio recordings along with notebooks. Thirty eight of those recordings are of Mr Mulcaire's 'blaggings'.In addition, Mr Jay said 586 voicemail messages, intended for 64 people were intercepted by Mr Mulcaire between 2004 and 2006, as well as 318 calls made to voicemail numbers.

Lord Justice Leveson, opening the proceedings, said the inquiry would be asking one simple question: "Who guards the guardians?"

Freedom of the press and freedom of expression must be exercised "with the rights of others in mind", he said.

The judge had previously asked newspaper editors to make suggestions of new approaches to press regulation.

He said: "Those ideas must reflect the fundamental freedoms to which I have referred."

He added: "But it must also recognise that 'guard the guardians' is not an optional add-on."

Neither is it good enough if it does not take account of the legitimate public concern, not only about phone hacking, but also other unethical behaviour not justified by what is truly in the public interest."