Press 'risks retribution over hacking'
Lionel Barber says most publishers failed to 'take the issue seriously' because their titles may also have been implicated
Read the full text of Lionel Barber's Hugh Cudlipp lecture
Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, tonight warned that the Britain's newspapers were now at risk of facing political "retribution" in the form of statutory regulation in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, as he gave the Hugh Cudlipp memorial lecture.
He accused Rupert Murdoch's News International publisher of the tabloid of failing to pursue a policy of "own up rather than cover up" to hacking, while criticising the bulk of the industry of failing to "take the issue seriously" because their titles may also have been implicated in the illegal practice.
In a trenchant speech, Barber went on to warn that worries about the scale of phone hacking meant that News Corporation's 8bn bid for BSkyB was "troublesome" because "promises about editorial independence for Sky should be judged in the light of repeated assurances that the phone hacking was the work of a lone actor at the News of the World".
He described the phone-hacking scandal as a "watershed not just for News International but also for tabloid journalism", arguing that a 2006 report by the Information Commissioner suggested that 305 journalists from a range of titles used the services of a private investigator.
Other newspapers, Barber said, "aside from the lead taken by the Guardian, which was followed by the FT, BBC and Independent", had taken "a pass on the News of the World phone-hacking story almost certainly because they too were involved in similar practices". It amounted to, he said, a "conspirac! y of sil ence [that] ruled Fleet Street".
The result he warned of a "failure to clean house at all news organisations" would be that the "mainstream media in Britain" would be "at risk of retribution in the form of statutory regulation", not least because many MPs are "itching to retaliate" in the wake of the expenses scandal.
Turning to Murdoch's News International in particular, Barber said that its management failed to follow the sort of advice their newspapers would have given in similar circumstances, namely to "own up rather than cover up, come clean rather than surreptitiously paying off aggrieved celebrities such as the publicist Max Clifford".
He added: "The suspicion must remain that News Corporation [the parent company of News International] assumed that it enjoyed enough power and influence in Britain to make the phone hacking controversy go away."
Barber also accused the Press Complaints Commission of being "supine at best" in its reaction to the hacking controversy, and said that the Metropolitan police faced "many questions" as to why it did not prosecute its original investigation into the News of the World with "sufficient rigour".
He also warned that politicians had become "a tad too respectful" towards broadcast and print media, highlighting the number of senior politicians who had previously worked in the industry, including David Cameron, a former director of communications with now defunct ITV company Carlton, through to former FT leader writer turned shadow chancellor, Ed Balls.
He added: "We have in recent years witnessed if not exactly a merger of the media and political class, certainly an increasingly intertwined relationship which, I suspect, does not necessarily serve the interest of either."
Criticism in the 5,000-word lecture was also briefly reserved for the Daily Telegraph for its decision to send two journalists posing as constituents to covertly record comments made by business secretary Vince Cable.
Barber said that the story di! d not me et "the public interest test", adding that it amounted to "nothing more than entrapment journalism".
There were also passages discussing the FT's online charging strategy, which has seen the newspaper win over 200,000 paid subscribers, although he conceded that the paper's approach "does not lend itself to being adopted by others" because the financial title was a "high-end niche product".
At one point Barber also conceded that the FT does not "always hit the ball out of the park", saying that the title, like many other news organisations, was slow to highlight the risk of the bursting of the credit bubble.
He said that his own career had progressed well, all be it in a "circumspect" fashion, after a bumpy start when "a young man called Mark Thompson turned down an article I proposed for Isis magazine" when the two were at Oxford. Thompson is now the BBC director general.
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