When I first joined Columbia Journalism School as a faculty member in the sweltering summer of 2010, the joke was that I had been recruited to help instill “the high ethical standards of British journalism” in the student body. I opened with this in my introductory lectures and it always raised a laugh.
Around that time, the Guardian was breaking story after story about news organizations, particularly the Murdoch-owned News of the World, hacking private phones to access information. The Guardian’s investigations often met a muted response from the rest of the British press, which felt that phone-hacking was a scandal “hidden in plain sight”; everyone was aware of tabloid tactics, if not directly using them.
British press ethics are again making their once-a-decade appearance in the US spotlight since Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, appointed former Daily Telegraph and Rupert Murdoch editor and executive Sir Will Lewis as the Post’s publisher and chief executive. Lewis, an entourage news manager who likes to bring a train of his own people with him, announced that the new top editor of the Post would be his former Daily Telegraph colleague Rob Winnett.
The cultural dissonance is as uncomfortable as a tweed jacket worn on seersucker day. Although Lewis started his journalism career at the Financial Times, that pantheon of propriety, and has a good reputation among those he has worked with, his proximity to the phone-hacking scandal triggered alarm. The Washington Post’s own newsroom has gone into existential overdrive to investigate the ethical records of Lewis and Winnett, with troubling results.
David Folkenflik over at NPR had first-hand experience of a distinctly British PR behavior. According to Folkenflik, both Lewis and then Lewis’s communications adviser offered him a better story in exchange for Folkenflik easing off on pursuing claims that Lewis had destroyed evidence in the phone-hacking case.
All this has sparked a welter of “tomayto-tomahto” think pieces on how US and British journalism are really different, and shouldn’t we just call this whole marriage off?
Some of the analysis is broadly correct: British journalism is faster, sloppier, wittier, less well-resourced and more venal, competitive, direct and blunt than much of the US oeuvre. British journalism looks at the myriad of rules it has to get through, and which ones it can happily break in the public interest, or, more likely, in the interest of its owners.
The art of publishing stories in Britain is traditionally more difficult than it is in the United States. There is more competition (and far more regulation) trying to stop the presses: super-injunctions, libel laws, contempt of court, Slapp suits and all manner of other expensive and off-putting impediments. The proverbial “ratlike cunning” said to distinguish British journalists is sharpened in these circumstances.
Some of the practices that the Washington Post has balked at most – like paying sources for stories – have not always been considered unethical in the UK, either. Like everything else in journalism, the practices are heavily context-dependent. Sir Harry Evans, Britain’s greatest postwar editor, broke one of the most important stories of the past century – the 1960s Thalidomide scandal, about a medication that caused birth defects – partly by paying a source £8,000 for documents after deciding there was no other way to advance the story. Sir Harry’s Insight investigative unit at the Sunday Times formed the blueprint for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, and for most other investigative campaigning journalism.
In 2009, Will Lewis paid for a story about expenses of members of parliament that had been hawked around a number of places. The story itself was of huge public interest, garnered awards for Lewis, Winnett and the team at the Telegraph, and saw the removal of a number of politicians from their posts.
Of course, cherry-picking the highlights of British journalism’s greatest hits, some from half a century ago, does not cover up for the fact that “ethics” did not appear as a core training module in the National Council for Training Journalists certification courses until a very tardy 2012. Conversely, US journalism and journalists are occasionally characterized in Britain as slow, ponderous and self-important. On more than one occasion, British editors have told me about their astonishment that newsrooms with such high levels of resources as the national US one “take so bloody long to publish a story”.
Jeff Bezos’s decision to pick Will Lewis makes sense in at least one dimension. Lewis combines two qualities that Bezos will need if he is going to either turn around or offload the Post. One is that Lewis, like many British editors and executives, is used to pacifying billionaire owners. Working for the mercurial Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph, and Rupert Murdoch is good training. Lewis joined Murdoch’s News UK (or News Corp, as it was then) back in 2011, as part of the clean-up operation for the hacking scandal. Although the grubbiness of that task and its extensive fallout are still following him, he spent a decade at the helm of Dow Jones in New York, where he worked with the US editor Matt Murray, who is also now at the Washington Post.
In the UK, Rupert Murdoch’s decades-long domination of media ownership came from ruthless competitiveness and a seemingly near total disregard for ethical practices. He successfully leveraged the influence of his news assets to co-opt, envelop and choke governments, growing like bindweed on a gatepost. Alignment of power in the UK between the press, business people and government is common. Former prime minister Boris Johnson worked for the Telegraph before and after his disastrous stint in government, and the craven nature of the Telegraph’s coverage of Johnson’s Conservative party was evidence it was working for him throughout. Will Lewis snagged his knighthood in Johnson’s honors list, which controversially awarded a number of cronies and friends.
Not that partisanship is unknown to US journalism. The Murdoch news organization that brought us phone hacking in the UK is the same corporate DNA that broadcast lies about election integrity in the US on Fox News to better align with its audience, and its political allies.
In as much as differences exist between models of US and UK journalism, these may come partly from different market circumstances. British print journalism is dominated by a handful of newspapers based in London fighting for real estate. The result is a British preoccupation with “scooping” rivals, and an almost tribal hostility between some senior editorial teams, unlike anything in the US press market outside the New York tabloids. British newspapers’ ideological arrangement along a continuum that places the Guardian on the left and the Daily Mail on the right is another facet of the UK market. Meanwhile, the UK broadcast market is dominated by regulations and is studiedly “objective”, with the 800lb gorilla of the BBC sitting squarely in the middle, listing either slightly right or left according to the government pressure of the day.
In contrast, in the US, market structure has traditionally meant that the opposite is true: cable channels are loud and partisan, while metro daily papers have been geographically protected, and aim for maximum reach through “neutrality” of position. But like Tom Wolfe, Sir Harry Evans and even phone hacking, these are artifacts now of a bygone era.
Jeff Bezos’s curt note to staff at the Washington Post is a clear signal that he is for the moment backing Will Lewis. Bezos’s priority is a more sustainable model for the Post; eleven years into his ownership, he is probably losing patience with his asset. He can invest in the Post (and pay the salaries of journalists during spectacular losses) because of his success with Amazon, where he is proven to be more interested in market domination than he is in labor rights, paying taxes or income inequality. An appeal to ethical standards alone is unlikely to be successful.
The most obvious place where traditional standards are likely to be breached is in the separation between commercial and editorial functions. Lewis is a journalist with management experience, and the imperative will be to bring the business side and editorial side of the business much closer together, just as this was Mark Thompson’s brief as the incoming, also British-born, CEO of the New York Times in 2012.
The number of newsrooms in the US is contracting, and healthy plurality is giving way to a winner-takes-all market. Up the Acela corridor from Washington DC, the New York Times is busy building an Amazon for news, a one-stop shop with far greater size and reach than the Washington Post. Where it can build new audiences away from daily news, it has done just that, with cooking and puzzles. Where it can’t build, it has bought: Wirecutter for product reviews and affiliate links, the Athletic for younger male audiences outside the New York Times’ usual reach and political orientation. Bezos, of all people, will recognize a monopoly play when he sees one.
Press ownership, news markets and journalism, like many things, are ever more part of a global digital market, successfully destabilized by a handful of tech companies stationed on the US’s west coast, whose influence is doing far more to reshape journalism in Britain and the US than moves on a management chess board. The cultural specificity of journalism is unfortunately difficult to protect in an economically hostile environment. But this is where we have to hope that Bezos has got his sums wrong, or that Lewis and company will be as flexible in their cultural values as they have proven so far in their careers.
As the model for news falls back on persuading citizens to pay more than has previously been the case, editorial values and story-getting do in fact matter more than at any time in the past. Proving the value of human-involved, high-quality journalism is going to be the minimum standard for survival. That means wearing your values, editorial processes and ethical standards on your rolled-up sleeves.
For all the thousands of words expended in the past weeks on the “differences between the UK and America” in the newsroom, the alarming truth for US and British journalists is that we are increasingly the same.
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Emily Bell is the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a non-executive director at Guardian News and Media
